Experts fear deadly fungus in south Asia wheatfields

Yahoo News 12 Mar 08;

A wheat-killing fungus has spread from Africa to Iran and may already be in Pakistan, which depends crucially on wheat to feed its population, New Scientist magazine says.

The killer pathogen, known as Ug99, emerged in Uganda in 1999, spread to Kenya in 2001, to Ethiopia in 2003 and then leapt to Yemen, its spores blown by Cyclone Gonu in June 2007.

The fungus has now been found in Iran "and may already be in Pakistan," the British weekly says in next Saturday's issue.

"If so, this is extremely bad news, as Pakistan is not only critically reliant on its wheat crop, it is also the gateway to the Asian breadbasket, including the vital Punjab region."

Experts have been meeting in Syria this week to decide emergency measures to track the progress of Ug99 and to try to brake its progress, such as by spraying fungicide or stopping farmers from planting wheat in the spores' path.

Canada and the United States, worried that Ug99 could hit their own breadbaskets, are pumping money into breeding programmes that will boost Ug99-resistant genes in wheat.

However, such programmes usually take at least five years to come up with disease-resistant strains which are crossed with wheat varieties that can adapt to local climate conditions, and then grow enough seeds to replant fields threatened by the fungus, the report said.

"People will start starving if Ug99 cuts harvests enough to push up grain prices," the report quoted Rick Ward of CIMMYT, the corn and wheat breeding institute in Mexico that played a key role in the Green Revolution, as saying.