Rust threat to food security
From the March 2007 edition of Agriculture Today.
New rust could cause world food shortage
A new rust disease that is infecting wheat crops in the Arabian peninsula has the potential to cause worldwide food shortages, an international symposium was told in Sydney this week.
Chronic food shortages caused by cereal rusts have happened in the past, and today international agricultural agencies are on the alert again.
The new rust, known as Ug99, was first reported in east Africa. It was found last month in Yemen.
“Countries in the predicted pathway of Ug99 grow more than 65 million hectares of wheat a year,” NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) principal research scientist, Dr Colin Wellings said.
This is about 25 per cent of the world’s wheat crop.
“There is international concern that this new stem rust could destroy vast quantities of wheat and threaten food security at a time when world wheat stocks are at a historic low,” Dr Wellings said.
“The potential for the disease to move into Central Asia is enormous and alarming,” he said.
The last major epidemic of stem rust occurred in North America in the early 1950s, when a strain destroyed up to 40 per cent of that continent’s spring wheat crop.
In 2005, in response to recurring epidemics of Ug99 in Kenya and Ethiopia, the Global Rust Initiative (GRI) was formed to try to prevent a pandemic.
The GRI’s facilitator, Dr Richard Ward, from the international wheat breeding centre CIMMYT in Mexico, was a key speaker at a symposium on rust diseases held this week at the Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute, Camden.
Organised by the NSW Centre for Animal and Plant Biosecurity, the symposium was titled, Rust Diseases: Threats to Global Food Security in the Context of Climate Change.
The Centre is an alliance between DPI and the University of Sydney.
Dr Ward believes there is potential for a serious international epidemic of stem rust based on Ug99.
“This has galvanised considerable global concern to secure wheat yield protection through breeding for rust resistance.”
Dr Wellings said that for nearly a century, DPI and University of Sydney scientists have been working to find new genes which confer resistance and breed them into Australian cereal varieties.
He said in 1973 a stem rust outbreak caused “historic and massive losses” in crops in northern NSW and Queensland.
“This galvanised government and industry to take a national approach to work towards being prepared for new incursions.”
The symposium program is at www.agric.usyd.edu.au/news/index.shtml
Contact Dr Colin Wellings, Menangle (02) 9351 8826.
