Fungi that attack wheat are growing as a threat to the hungry inhabitants of poor countries. At a conference this week in Aleppo, Syria, scientists will be planning a counteroffensive.
The unusual venue was chosen both because Syria has been hit hard by “yellow rust” fungus and because Aleppo is home to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. The center was built in 1977 because the area has the right climate for research and because Aleppo is in the heart of the so-called Fertile Crescent, where agriculture began 10,000 years ago.
The fungi have damaged wheat grown in a broad ribbon of dry climate from Morocco to northern India, where as much as 60 percent of the crop has been lost, said Mahmoud Solh, the center’s director. The prevailing theory is that wetter winters caused by climate change are helping the fungi persist until new crops are planted.
Rich countries can afford fungicides and new resistant varieties of wheat; poor ones cannot. Food prices are being driven up by other factors, including summer fires and farmers growing crops for ethanol instead of food.
Before his death in 2009, Norman E. Borlaug, the plant biologist who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize partly for his role in creating more vigorous varieties of wheat, called one particular fungus — known as Ug99 for its 1999 discovery in Uganda — “a looming catastrophe,” even more dangerous than the strain that destroyed 20 percent of American wheat in the 1950s. Since then, Ug99 has been joined by other fungal strains, like stem rust, above.
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