Blogging Biodiversity

There’s a couple of stories from last week about a new strain of black stem rust fungus that is threatening the world’s wheat crops. The stories are from New Scientist and Science (although you’ll need a subscription to access the Science article except for the synopsis on Scidev.net.)

New Scientist describes the situation as follows:

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 … . 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.

Apparently, though, because of cutbacks in international agricultural research, we’re not prepared for this new strain and scientists are now racing to catch up:

… meanwhile Ug99 has got worse. It was first noticed because it started appearing on wheat previously protected by a gene complex called Sr31, the backbone of stem rust resistance in most wheat farmed worldwide. Then last year it acquired the ability to defeat another widely used complex, Sr24. “Of the 50 genes we know for resistance to stem rust, only 10 work even partially against Ug99,” says Ward [Rick Ward, head of the Global Rust Initiative at CIMMYT]. Those are present in less than 1 per cent of the crop.

Farmers in developing countries are particularly vulnerable as they often can’t afford the fungicide that would kill Ug99 or the equipment to spray it.

To meet the challenge, CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre), is crossing top-yielding wheat varieties from different countries with wheat from its seed collections that does resist Ug99. The crosses are field tested, assessed for other qualities and sent out for even more testing.

Stories like this raise a whole number of issues. They point out the inter-connectedness of agriculture both in terms of the spread of the fungus - spores of Ug99 are spreading on wind currents - and in terms of breeding activities - breeding work to find resistance to Ug99 is an international project and resistant genes might come from almost anywhere. They also point out things that a lot of us (certainly most in developed countries) take for granted until they go wrong. For most people in my part of the world, wheat is not part of their daily consciousness and they would only likely notice something if the price of bread went up. The problem with this is that when things are going right, as they have been for most of the past 40 years, it allows our governments to decrease funding to international public agricultural research leaving us vulnerable and ill-prepared when the next blight hits - and there will always be a next blight.

Perhaps most significantly for my blog, this story just serves to emphasize the importance of biodiversity. We need different kinds of wheat so that we have plants that can provide resistance to the fungus. If we all grow just a few kinds of wheat, we’ll all be vulnerable to catastrophic crop failures (and the food shortages that would result) and we’d have few sources of genetic diversity that could provide the necessary resistance.

Will we ever learn these lessons?

One thing that I didn’t see in these pieces was any mention of the role of either intellectual property rights in breeding efforts or the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. I’d be interested in knowing if intellectual property rights are at all hindering the ability of the researchers to conduct their breeding work by limiting their access to some varieties. I’d also be interested in knowing if they intend to seek any sort of intellectual property protection for the varieties they develop as a result of the breeding work. Seeing as it’s CIMMYT that’s conducting the research, I would guess not but you can’t be too sure.

Related to these points, wheat is one of the species included in the multilateral system (MLS) of access and benefit-sharing created by the FAO IT. The challenge of Ug99 could be a good opportunity to see the IT in action and whether the MLS can serve to facilitate access to different wheat varieties. The MLS also, of course, impacts the ability to seek intellectual property rights over material accessed from the system. This breeding work could help to define some of the grey areas that still exist on this point.

Posted on April 9th, 2007 under ABS, FAO, Intellectual property •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback