If you like eating, buy flour while you still can.

Rust to fertilize food price surge
By F William Engdahl
A deadly fungus, known as Ug99, which kills wheat, has likely spread to Pakistan from Africa, according to reports in the British New Scientist. If true, that threatens the vital Asian bread basket, including the Punjab region.

The spread of the deadly virus, stem rust, against which an effective fungicide does not exist, comes as world grain stocks reach the lowest in four decades and government subsidized bio-ethanol production, especially in the United States, Brazil and the European Union, are taking land out of food production at alarming rates.

Stem rust is the worst of three rusts that afflict wheat plants. The fungus grows primarily in the stems, plugging the vascular system so carbohydrates can't get from the leaves to the grain, which shrivels. Ug99 is a race of stem rust that blocks the vascular tissues in cereal grains including wheat, oats and barley. Unlike other rusts that may reduce crop yields, Ug99-infected plants may suffer up to 100% loss. During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union stockpiled stem rust spores as a biological weapon.

In the 1950s, the last major outbreak of stem rust destroyed 40% of the spring wheat crop in North America. At that time governments started a major effort to breed resistant wheat plants, led by Norman Borlaug of the Rockefeller Foundation.

After the 1954 epidemic, Borlaug began work in Mexico developing wheat that resisted stem rust. The project became the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (in Spanish, CIMMYT). The rust-resistant, high-yield wheat it developed ended stem rust outbreaks, led to the Green Revolution, and won Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. It also resulted today in there being far fewer varieties of wheat that might resist a new fungus outbreak.

When Ug99 turned up in Kenya in 2002, Borlaug, now 93, sounded the alarm. "Too many years had gone by and no one was taking Ug99 seriously," he says. He blames complacency and the dismantling of training and wheat testing programs after 40 years without outbreaks, according to the New Scientist report.

The first strains of Ug99 were detected in 1999 in Uganda. It spread to Kenya by 2001, to Ethiopia by 2003 and to Yemen when the cyclone Gonu spread its spores in 2007. Now the deadly fungus has been found in Iran and according to British scientists may already be as far east as Pakistan.

Pakistan and India account for 20% of the annual world wheat production. It is possible as the fungus spreads that large movements could take place almost overnight if certain wind conditions prevail at the right time.

In 2007, a three-day "wind event" recorded by Mexico's CIMMYT had strong currents moving from Yemen, where Ug99 is present, across Pakistan and India, going all the way to China. CIMMYT estimates that from two-thirds to three-quarters of the wheat now planted in India and Pakistan are highly susceptible to this new strain of stem rust. One billion people who live in this region and they are highly dependent on wheat for their food supply.

These are all areas where the agricultural infrastructure to contain such problems is either extremely weak or non-existent. It threatens to spread into other wheat producing regions of Asia and eventually the entire world if not checked.

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