An internationally recognized crop scientist and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug has expressed hope that poor wheat crop performance occasioned by a virus could be reversed and avoided in the near future if experts worked jointly to unveil new resistant varieties.
Dr Borlaug who was in Kenya to take stock of the effects of an emerging wheat stem rust strain known as Ug99, was addressing other visiting scientists, members of the press and staff of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) Njoro centre. He said that although many of the 6,000 varieties under trial at the Njoro farms were infested with the Ug99 pathogen, a few varieties showing minimal resistance could be used to develop varieties resistant to the new rust strain.
Borlaug who has a long experience on wheat varieties improvement and who steered the search for an intervention during an onslaught on wheat farms by stem rust in the 1950s, told the gathering after a tour of the fields that work being done at Njoro will serve bigger purposes in future to ensure plant health and improved food security.
“This collaborative effort is vital for breeders of future generations since they will pick the parent plants genes for future breeding. The implication of nurseries is very broader than just this particular rust initiative,” Borlaug said.
The manifestation of Ug99 across the 6,000 lines under trial at the Njoro research center shows its ability to affect global wheat production in just a few years.
Out of the entire field, just a few lines have shown minimal resistance to Ug99.
But the revelation and re-awakening to the new wheat crop enemy was a great excitement to visiting plant pathologists and other crop scientists who struggled to establish the effects of the disease on certain species.
Among the varieties cultivated on the trial plots is a Pakistani variety which has been overwhelmed by the effect of the Ug99 attack.
The scientists observed that with the Pakistani variety response to the Ug99, the entire 6,000 hectares under wheat in the country would be affected. And since wheat is a common staple food in Pakistan, the Ug99 effect would impact badly on food security.
KARI Deputy Director Dr Ephraim Mukisira noted that the visit to Njoro has become a wake-up call to world scientists especially those from abroad who saw and appreciated how their local varieties were responding to Ug99 attack.
The director of the Njoro centre, Dr Miriam Kinyua, said that following the exposure of the varieties sampled from 10 different countries to Ug99, the research team will now move into fusion of genes from the resistant varieties with others to find a better yielding variety that resists Ug99 infestation.
She said that 1,000 of the lines at the trial are local varieties while the other 5,000 are imported from other countries of the world among them Australia, Mexico, Egypt, Ethiopia and Turkey.
She explained that due to the uniformity of the wheat growing seasons in the region, Kenya quickly found the weed in its fields and so did Ethiopia.
She now fears that Ug99 could soon invade other wheat farms in the region and eventually spread into other fields in the continent and overseas.
In Kenya, Dr Kinyua pointed, the Ug99 has invaded virtually all farms with Narok being most affected. Similarly, Njoro and Timau wheat growing areas are also affected by the dangerous wheat pathogen.
He disclosed that so far, a local variety of wheat, fahari has exhibited greater resistance to Ug99 but due to its low yields, it is not the best variety recommended for farmers.
Popo, another variety, is high yielding but very tall and is also greatly susceptible to Ug99 attack. Other local varieties affected by the disease are kwale, njoro 2 and Kenya yombi.
Speaking at the Njoro centre, the Director of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), Dr Masa Iwanaga pointed out that political will was essential to ensure Ug99 was contained before it affects global production of wheat being the most traded cereal.
Iwanaga also called for global cooperation between research centers, governments, non governmental organizations and other individual scientists to stop the tide of destruction the disease could pose to farmer’s livelihoods especially small-scale farmers whose capacity to afford chemicals is very low.
He said that after calling on President Mwai Kibaki on arrival to the country, he got the assurance that the government would enhance its extension wing in the Ministry of Agriculture to help educate farmers about the wheat rust, its effects and to distribute new resistant and high yielding varieties that would be developed from ongoing studies.
He noted that Kenya is a net importer of wheat to realize its annual consumption of 720,000 metric tones. At present, the country produces just 300,000 metric tones and it so requires outsourcing 420,000 metric tones.
Showing a greater optimism to the finding of better varieties that are resistant to Ug99, Iwanaga said after three to five years, new varieties would have been developed but the challenge facing the world would be how fast to multiply the resistant varieties and get them to the farmers.
He said that other than Kenya, the other affected countries in the region, Uganda and Ethiopia have research going on to contain this new disease.
The Director General of the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Organization (EARO), Dr Tsedeke Abate said the coming together of scientists to tackle the new wheat disease is an excellent opportunity to address food insecurity that is crippling the African continent, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
Tsedeke said the project must now be aimed at developing new resistant varieties and addressing problems of specific regions or countries with solutions tailored to local ecological conditions.
A Kenyan commercial wheat farmer who joined the scientists on the tour of the fields, John Rose of the Rose Brothers Company, said he was glad that some varieties had shown signs of resistance to the new rust strain.