06 March 2009

Foundation Grant Helps Advance Fight Against Wheat Disease

Threat to agriculture concerns many countries

Norman Borlaug, center, began to raise alarm about wheat rust after this 2005 visit to Kenya where he consulted with other researchers.

By Kathryn McConnell
Staff Writer

Washington — A $27 million grant is boosting international efforts to address a major threat to agriculture in many countries.

Cornell University in New York is using the funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to coordinate a global response to a virulent wheat rust disease that has devastated crops in east Africa and is threatening other parts of the world. The rust also affects barley.

With the funding granted in 2008, Cornell is subcontracting with 16 international agricultural research institutions to develop a new generation of rust-resistant wheat varieties.

U.S. partners in the effort, called the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat Project, are the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the University of Minnesota and the University of California.

The rust, a fungus known as Ug99, was first reported in Uganda in 1999 and later found in Kenya and Ethiopia. In 2007, the wind-borne disease spread to Yemen and Sudan and a year later moved to major wheat-producing areas in Iran.

Ug99 now threatens to spread to the subcontinent of Asia, which has the world’s largest concentrations of wheat farming and population, and to central Asia and China, Cornell plant breeder Ronnie Coffman told America.gov.

Agronomist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug began to raise world alarm about the rust after observing it during a 2005 visit to Kenya.

The Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Agency for International Development moved quickly to mobilize both U.S. and international scientific and financial resources to combat the threat, according to Rob Bertram, a U.S. aid official.

The Borlaug Global Wheat Rust Initiative was launched to coordinate the program and tapped Cornell to manage the effort, Coffman said. The Gates Foundation came in as a major supporter.

In March, Borlaug is bringing together in Mexico an estimated 300 international experts to share the latest information about their collaborations and about signs that the disease may be spreading, said Cornell’s Rick Ward.

In this photo from Cornell University, rust covers wheat stalks in a research plot in Mexico.

Borlaug says widespread failures in global wheat production stemming from the disease would lead to higher food prices.

Borlaug is credited with launching the Green Revolution — the increase in agricultural yields that resulted from development of new grain varieties — that saved more than 1 billion people from starvation in Asia in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the United States, the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is leading efforts to protect domestic wheat crops from the deadly rust should it spread to North America, Kay Simmons, ARS plant genetics program leader, told America.gov.

The Agriculture Department, working with university researchers, is tracking wheat rust pathogens, exploring whether rice offers any immunity to rust that might be transferred to wheat and researching sources of rust resistance in wild wheat and wild barley.

Nearly all spring wheat and barley varieties grown in the United States are susceptible to Ug99, Simmons said.

The Agriculture Department considers Ug99 research a priority, she said. In the spending bill now being considered by Congress, the Obama administration is seeking $1.1 billion for agricultural research for the current fiscal year.

Although stem rust epidemics have occurred since 1955, they were relatively localized.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported earlier in 2009 that a major outbreak of the rust disease could be more disastrous than previous incidents. An estimated 80 percent of the wheat varieties in Africa and Asia are susceptible to Ug99, according to the agency.

The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute and the Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research serve as key research sites of the Cornell project.

Having the use of the sites provides a way for U.S. researchers to learn which of the wheat and barley varieties grown in the United States might stand up to the rust without bringing the pathogen into the country, Simmons said.

Cornell’s other international research partners include the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas in Syria and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. The Food and Agriculture Organization and research laboratories in Canada, China, Australia and South Africa also collaborate on the project.

More information on the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat Project is available on a Cornell University Web site.