

Future world wheat crops threatened by Ug99 stem rust - Alex3917
http://www.farmandranchguide.com/articles/2008/03/13/ag_news/production_news/pro10.txt

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Alex3917
The way scientists currently combat rusts is they go down to northern Mexico
each winter to survey the new strains each year so they can try to create
pesticides and resistant wheat strains accordingly. The reason they go to
Mexico is that the wheat grows there first, and then in Texas and the other
border states when it gets a little warmer, and then finally you get the wheat
crop in midwest and Canada. The spores are produced first in Mexico and then
blow northwards and infect the new wheat in each climate region as it begins
to grow. However, Ug99 is able to completely destroy 99% of the world's wheat
population. If someone were to bring a single teaspoon of this stuff back from
the middle east and put it in just the right field in northern Mexico then the
potential exists to destroy a very large percentage of the north american
wheat crop. Really scary stuff. It's been in the news this week because the
Gates foundation just gave Cornell a 26 million dollar grant to work on the
problem:

[http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/April08/wheat.rust.lm.ht...](http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/April08/wheat.rust.lm.html)

