Wheat Disease Spreads from Africa to Middle East
January 19, 2007
News reports indicated this week that Ug99, a relatively new form of stem rust, has jumped from eastern Africa and is now infecting wheat in Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula.
Researchers with the Global Rust Initiative (GRI) and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have confirmed the existence of the disease in Yemen. There is also evidence that the disease has spread into Sudan. Until this discovery, Ug99 had only been seen in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.
Geographic information systems specialists working at CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) have plotted the probable trajectory of the fungus, whose spores can travel large distances by wind. The wind models predicted that if the fungus crossed from eastern Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, it could easily spread to the vast wheat-growing areas of North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and India.
A virulent strain of another wheat disease, yellow rust, which emerged in eastern Africa in the late 1980s, took just four years to reach wheat fields in South Asia, causing major wheat losses in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, exceeding $1 billion in value, along the way.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), countries in the predicted, immediate pathway of Ug99 grow more than 65 million hectares of wheat, accounting for 25 percent of the global wheat harvest.
Experiments conducted over the past two years by international researchers at in the GRI in Kenya and Ethiopia demonstrate clearly that most of the world's wheat varieties are susceptible to the new Ug99 strain of stem rust.
The last major epidemic of stem rust occurred in North America in the early 1950s, when a strain destroyed as much as 40 percent of the continent's spring wheat crop.
http://www.wheatworld.org/html/news.cfm?ID=1131
January 19, 2007
News reports indicated this week that Ug99, a relatively new form of stem rust, has jumped from eastern Africa and is now infecting wheat in Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula.
Researchers with the Global Rust Initiative (GRI) and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have confirmed the existence of the disease in Yemen. There is also evidence that the disease has spread into Sudan. Until this discovery, Ug99 had only been seen in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.
Geographic information systems specialists working at CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) have plotted the probable trajectory of the fungus, whose spores can travel large distances by wind. The wind models predicted that if the fungus crossed from eastern Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, it could easily spread to the vast wheat-growing areas of North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and India.
A virulent strain of another wheat disease, yellow rust, which emerged in eastern Africa in the late 1980s, took just four years to reach wheat fields in South Asia, causing major wheat losses in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, exceeding $1 billion in value, along the way.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), countries in the predicted, immediate pathway of Ug99 grow more than 65 million hectares of wheat, accounting for 25 percent of the global wheat harvest.
Experiments conducted over the past two years by international researchers at in the GRI in Kenya and Ethiopia demonstrate clearly that most of the world's wheat varieties are susceptible to the new Ug99 strain of stem rust.
The last major epidemic of stem rust occurred in North America in the early 1950s, when a strain destroyed as much as 40 percent of the continent's spring wheat crop.
http://www.wheatworld.org/html/news.cfm?ID=1131
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