Will Wheat-Killer Fungus be used to spread GMO wheat? 

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, March 30, 2008
A deadly fungus, known as Ug99, which kills wheat, has likely spread to 
Pakistan from Africa according to reports in the British New Scientist 
magazine. 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 USA, Brazil and EU are taking land out of food production at 
alarming rates. The deadly fungus is being used by Monsanto and the US 
Government to spread patented GMO seeds. 

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. In the 1950s, the last 
major outbreak 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. That was the misnamed Green 
Revolution. The result today is far fewer varieties of wheat that might resist 
such a new fungus outbreak.

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 as Pakistan. 

Pakistan and India account for 20 percent 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 (International Maize and 
Wheat Improvement Center), had strong wind 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.

FAO World Grain Forecast 

The 2007 World Agriculture Forecast of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture 
Organization (FAO) in Rome, projects an alarming trend in world food supply in 
the absence of any devastation from Ug99. The report states, “countries in the 
non-OECD 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.” (my emphasis—w.e.). 

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.

Ironically, the current bio-ethanol industry is being driven by US government 
subsidies and a scientifically false argument in the EU and USA that 
bio-ethanol is less harmful to the environment than petroleum fuels and can 
reduce CO2 emissions. The arguments have been demonstrated in every respect to 
be false. The huge expansion of global acreage now planted to produce bio-fuels 
is creating ecological problems and demanding use of far heavier pesticide 
spraying while use of bio-fuels in autos releases even deadlier emissions than 
imagined. The political effect, however, has been a catastrophic shift in world 
grain stocks at the same time the EU and USA have enacted policies which 
drastically cut traditional emergency grain reserves. In short, it is a 
scenario pre-programmed for catastrophe, one which has been clear to 
policymakers in the EU and USA for several years. That can only suggest that 
such a dramatic crisis in global food supply is intentional.

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 percent loss.

A plan to spread GMO? 

One of the consequences of the spread of Ug99 is a campaign by Monsanto 
Corporation and other major producers of genetically manipulated plant seeds to 
promote wholesale introduction of 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 to patent such strains. 

Norman Borlaug, the former Rockefeller Foundation head of the Green Revolution 
is active in funding the 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 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 was ready to be released today it would take 
two or three years' seed increase in order to have just enough wheat seed for 
20 percent of the acres planted to wheat in the world. 

Work is also being done by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the 
same agency which co-developed Monsanto’s Terminator seed technology. In my 
book, Seeds of Destruction I document the insidious role of Borlaug and the 
Rockefeller Foundation in promoting patents on food seeds to reduce global 
population. The spreading alarm over the Ug99 fungus is being used by Monsanto 
and other GMO agribusiness companies to demand that the current ban on GMO 
wheat be lifted to allow spread of GMO patented wheat seeds on the argument 
they are Ug99 stem rust resistant.

F. William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on 
Globalization and the  author of Seeds of Destruction: the Hidden Agenda of 
Genetic Manipulation  published by Global Research 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. 

Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8483

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