Wheat Super-Blight
May 4th, 2007Keep the “glorified bread-and-water diet” quote from the bee dieoff story in mind as you read this one.
Via: New Scientist:
“This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction.” Startling words – but spoken by the father of the Green Revolution, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, they are not easily dismissed.
An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn’t going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn’t interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren’t prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.
The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it.
The strain has spread slowly across east Africa, but in January this year spores blew across to Yemen, and north into Sudan (see Map). Scientists who have tracked similar airborne spores in this part of the world say it will now blow into Egypt, Turkey and the Middle East, and on to India, lands where a billion people depend on wheat.
There is hope: this week scientists are assessing the first Ug99-resistant varieties of wheat that might be used for crops. However, it will take another five to eight years to breed up enough seed to plant all our wheat fields.
i really can’t help but stop and take note how many things seemed timed to come together at once a few years from now. sayyyyy……..2012 or so….just interesting that.
“A quart of wheat for a day’s pay and three quarts of barley for a day’s pay…”
Dr. Borlaug was instrumental in developing the resistant gene in the wheat that led to the worldwide eradication of wheat rust in the 1950’s. Since that time, wheat rust has been essentially non-existant in the world.
In early 1999, in the highlands of Uganda, experimental wheat was being grown by the Uganda partner of a Mexico City based group, International Maize Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) funded by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
In early 1999, Dr. William Wagoire of the Uganda National Agricultural Research Program (the local CIMMYT partner) took a sample of that experimental wheat from the field and sent it to CIMMYT labs in the U.S. and Europe for analysis. It was confirmed by the labs that the wheat rust mutated and the resistant gene developed by Dr. Borlaug had given way to a new bio-type and hence the new rust disease managed to infect the experimental wheat.
Also of note: 1) Dr. Singh of CIMMYT is quoted as commenting on the flow of information in 1999 that “It seems incredible that we were able to detect and confirm the resurgance of this disease in a wheat crop that’s still in the field” and 2) Syngenta Corp. is a major financial contributor to CGIAR the money source for CIMMYT and they sell Seed Treatments and Fungicides.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_rust
Complicated life cycle, dependant on another species for propagation.
“In extreme cases may cause plant death.”
Sounds like scaremongering in order to sell a few new seeds (patented no doubt)
Snooze
It is scary how much of what appears to be happening is eerily similar to Revelation
# Dennis Says:
May 4th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
“A quart of wheat for a day’s pay and three quarts of barley for a day’s pay…â€
That was the third seal
Here’s the 4th:
When he opened the fourth seal.. .there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him. They were given authority to kill with sword, and famine, with pestilence and by the wild animals of the earth.
The Bible is one of the most badly translated hodgepodge-piece of literature on this planet.
Good thing I don’t take it seriously.