Diversify Wheat Crops to Prevent Fungus-induced Global Harvest Collapse (discussion)
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Related subjects: Africa, Americas, Asia / Pacific, Discussion Forum, Economy, Environment & Ecology, Europe, Food Security: Africa, Harvest & Food Supply, Health Science, Humanitarian Crisis, Middle East, Sustainable Development, TheHotSpring.net, U.S. Environment, U.S. news Comments (1)
The Hot Spring Network has opened a discussion, in collaboration with Café Sentido, on the need to diversify the global wheat crop in order to prevent an evolved crop fungus, Ug99, from destroying as much as 80% of the global wheat harvest.
The discussion forum is oriented toward collecting and analyzing long-tested and/or cutting-edge solutions for avoiding dangerous homogenization of crop varieties, and expanding inborn resistance to crop diseases like stem rust.
A crop-borne fungus that targets wheat, named Ug99 because it was first identified in Uganda in 1999, has become one of the primary threats to global food security. Newfound virulence in the evolving stem-rust strain suggests the fungus could destroy as much as 80% of the world’s most widely grown crop: wheat.
Jim Peterson, who is professor of wheat breeding and genetics at Oregon State University in Corvallis, has called Ug99 a “time bomb” for the world wheat harvest. Ug99 has already “jumped the Red Sea” and has reached as far as Iran. Concern is spreading it will soon reach the Asian breadbasket of Pakistan, India and China, and will at some point spread to North America. It’s just a matter of when.
Methods to diversify the varieties of wheat planted for food harvest around the world need to be implemented, in an accelerated fashion, to push back hard against the threat of an evolved, more virulent strain of Ug99 stem rust.
Monoculture, or the widespread planting of only one crop variety, has significant inherent perils for crop resilience and even ecosystem elasticity, and can lead to famine (as seen in the 19th century Irish potato famine, for instance), economic collapse, mass migration and the spread of disease in an undernourished human population.
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