Why the heck isn't this bigger news??

[dianeduane]

It's not quite like finding yourself stuck in the plot of No Blade of Grass. But bad enough.

Billions at risk from wheat super-blight

An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn't going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn't interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren't prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.

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.

...Argh.

Comments

[hrrunka]

I fear a large part of the reason it's not bigger news is that it's primarily affecting sub-Saharan Africa at present...

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Dammit, here we go again. Because it's in the African nations, we're supposed to be trained to believe it irrelevant until it's crossed the oceanic threshold.

No thanks to that demand for stupidity.