Rust to fertilize food price
surge By F William Engdahl
A deadly fungus, known as Ug99, which
kills wheat, has likely spread to Pakistan from
Africa, according to reports in the British New
Scientist. If true, that threatens the vital Asian
bread basket, including the Punjab region.
The spread of the deadly virus, stem rust,
against which an effective fungicide does not
exist, comes as world grain stocks reach the
lowest in four decades and government subsidized
bio-ethanol production, especially in the United
States, Brazil and the European Union, are taking
land out of food production at alarming rates.
Stem rust is the worst of three rusts that
afflict wheat plants. The fungus grows primarily
in the stems, plugging the vascular system so
carbohydrates can't get from the leaves to the
grain, which
shrivels. Ug99 is a race
of stem rust that blocks the vascular tissues in
cereal grains including wheat, oats and barley.
Unlike other rusts that may reduce crop yields,
Ug99-infected plants may suffer up to 100% loss.
During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet
Union stockpiled stem rust spores as a biological
weapon.
In the 1950s, the last major
outbreak of stem rust destroyed 40% of the spring
wheat crop in North America. At that time
governments started a major effort to breed
resistant wheat plants, led by Norman Borlaug of
the Rockefeller Foundation.
After the 1954
epidemic, Borlaug began work in Mexico developing
wheat that resisted stem rust. The project became
the International Maize and Wheat Improvement
Center (in Spanish, CIMMYT). The rust-resistant,
high-yield wheat it developed ended stem rust
outbreaks, led to the Green Revolution, and won
Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. It also
resulted today in there being far fewer varieties
of wheat that might resist a new fungus outbreak.
When Ug99 turned up in Kenya in 2002,
Borlaug, now 93, sounded the alarm. "Too many
years had gone by and no one was taking Ug99
seriously," he says. He blames complacency and the
dismantling of training and wheat testing programs
after 40 years without outbreaks, according to the
New Scientist report.
The first strains of
Ug99 were detected in 1999 in Uganda. It spread to
Kenya by 2001, to Ethiopia by 2003 and to Yemen
when the cyclone Gonu spread its spores in 2007.
Now the deadly fungus has been found in Iran and
according to British scientists may already be as
far east as Pakistan.
Pakistan and India
account for 20% of the annual world wheat
production. It is possible as the fungus spreads
that large movements could take place almost
overnight if certain wind conditions prevail at
the right time.
In 2007, a three-day "wind
event" recorded by Mexico's CIMMYT had strong
currents moving from Yemen, where Ug99 is present,
across Pakistan and India, going all the way to
China. CIMMYT estimates that from two-thirds to
three-quarters of the wheat now planted in India
and Pakistan are highly susceptible to this new
strain of stem rust. One billion people who live
in this region and they are highly dependent on
wheat for their food supply.
These are all
areas where the agricultural infrastructure to
contain such problems is either extremely weak or
non-existent. It threatens to spread into other
wheat producing regions of Asia and eventually the
entire world if not checked.
Alarming
world grain forecast The 2007 World
Agriculture Forecast of the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, just
released, projects an alarming trend in world food
supply even in the absence of any devastation from
Ug99. The report states:
Countries in the non-OECD
[Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development] region are expected to continue to
experience a much stronger increase in
consumption of agricultural products than
countries in the OECD area. This trend is driven
by population and, above all, income growth -
underpinned by rural migration to higher income
urban areas ... OECD countries as a group are
projected to lose production and export shares
in many commodities. Growth in the use of
agricultural commodities as feedstock to a
rapidly increasing biofuel industry is one of
the main drivers in the outlook and one of the
reasons for international commodity prices to
attain a significantly higher plateau over the
outlook period than has been reported in the
previous reports.
The FAO warns that
the explosive growth in acreage used to grow fuels
and not food in the past three years is
dramatically changing the outlook for food supply
globally, and forcing food prices sharply higher
for all foods from cereals to sugar to meat and
dairy products. The use of cereals, sugar,
oilseeds and vegetable oils to satisfy the needs
of a rapidly increasing bio-fuel industry, is one
of the main drivers, most especially the large
volumes of maize in the US, wheat and rapeseed in
the EU and sugar in Brazil for ethanol and
bio-diesel production.
This is already
causing dramatically higher crop prices, higher
feed costs and sharply higher prices for livestock
products. In the US this year according to the
United States Department of Agriculture, some 25%
of the corn crop will go to bio-ethanol.
Ironically, the current bio-ethanol
industry is being driven by US government
subsidies and a scientifically false belief in the
European Union and US that bio-ethanol is less
harmful to the environment than petroleum fuels
and can reduce CO-2 emissions. In a Swiss NZZ
newspaper interview on March 23, Nestle's chief
executive Peter Brabeck warned that the dramatic
conversion of agriculture acreage to bio-fuels in
the recent period was "political madness". He
pointed out that its impact would be seen not only
in exploding world wheat prices.
"Just as
serious," he added, bio-fuel production "threatens
our water supply. In order to produce one liter
bio-ethanol we need 4,000 liters water. And water
is a more serious problem than CO-2 emissions."
The huge expansion of global acreage now
planted to produce bio-fuels is creating other
ecological problems and demanding far more use of
pesticide spraying, while use of bio-fuels in
autos releases even deadlier emissions than
imagined. Bio-ethanol has little if any effect on
exhaust-pipe emissions in current car models. But
it gives significant emission of some toxins
including formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, a
suspected neurotoxin that has been banned as
carcinogenic in California.
The most
alarming effect of the recent bio-fuels boom,
however, has been a catastrophic shift down in
world grain stocks at the same time that the EU
and US have enacted policies that drastically cut
traditional emergency grain reserves.
For
the past several years, both the EU and US have
passed legislation dramatically reducing reserve
stocks of cereals. In the EU this has been through
reform of the grain price supports of the Common
Agriculture Program and in the US through a
similar policy via the FAIR act (Federal
Agriculture Improvement Program) to remove or
greatly reduce price supports for cereals.
Combined with severe drought in the past
two to three years in major growing areas from the
US to Australia and parts of Asia, as well as the
expanding acreage competition from bio-fuel
plantings in especially the US, Brazil and the EU
in the past three years, world cereal stocks,
including wheat, have hit lows not seen in
decades.
In the enlarged EU of 27 members,
a lower than expected harvest in 2006, 265.5
million tonnes, led to tightening supplies at the
end of marketing year 2006/2007 and to
historically high prices. Intervention stocks have
shrunk to around 1 million tonnes now from 14
million tonnes at the beginning of 2006/2007.
In short, with severely low grain stocks
worldwide, expanding acreage set aside to grow
grains for burning as fuel not food, spread of a
deadly wheat fungus is a scenario pre-programmed
for catastrophe. Given the fact that the scale of
the growing US biofuel industry is well known,
some suggest that the Washington Administration
has other priorities than abating world hunger. It
is certainly clear that we face a crisis of
serious proportions even absent a new deadly wheat
fungus threat.
One of the consequences of
the spread of Ug99 is a new effort by Monsanto
Corporation, the Swiss agrichemical concern
Syngenta and other major producers of genetically
manipulated plant seeds to promote introduction of
genetically modified organism (GMO) wheat
varieties said to be resistant to the Ug99 fungus.
Biologists at Monsanto and at the various GMO
laboratories around the world are working hard to
patent such Ug99 resistant varieties.
In
2004, Roundup-ready wheat, poised to be the first
biotech trait in wheat released to growers, was
mothballed by Monsanto. The company cited strong
resistance from US and Canadian wheat growers who
feared losing export markets if US wheat was known
to be GMO.
That GMO technology would have
allowed farmers to apply Monsanto's Roundup
herbicide, glyphosate, over a growing crop to kill
weeds. Were Monsanto now to unveil a patented Ug99
resistant wheat variety, large new seed markets
formerly hostile to genetically engineered wheat
would open. Syngenta, which has developed a
biotech trait that provides resistance to fusarium
head blight or scab, is also seeking regulatory
approval. Now their attention is turned to Ug99.
Borlaug, the former Rockefeller Foundation
head of the Green Revolution, is active in funding
research to develop a fungus resistant variety
against Ug99, working with his former center in
Mexico, the CIMMYT and ICARDA in Kenya, where the
pathogen is now endemic. So far, about 90% of the
12,000 lines tested are susceptible to Ug99. That
includes all the major wheat cultivars of the
Middle East and west Asia. At least 80% of the 200
varieties sent to CIMMYT from the United States
can't cope with infection. The situation is even
more dire for Egypt, Iran, and other countries in
immediate peril.
Even if a new resistant
variety were ready to be released today it would
take two or three years' seed increase in order to
have just enough wheat seed for 20% of the acres
planted to wheat in the world, CIMMYT agronomists
estimate.
Work is also being done by the
USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the
same agency that co-developed Monsanto's
Terminator seed technology. The spreading alarm
over the Ug99 fungus is encouraging Monsanto and
other GMO agribusiness companies to demand that
the current voluntary ban on GMO wheat be lifted
to allow spread of GMO patented wheat seeds with
the argument they are Ug99 stem rust resistant.
The influential USA National Association
of Wheat Growers reportedly is softening its
opposition as fears of the deadly Ug99 spreading
to North American wheat increase.
F
William Engdahl is a geopolitical risk
consultant and the author of Seeds of
Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic
Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca) and A
Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and
the New World Order (Pluto Press). He may be
contacted at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
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