26 Feb 2010 | Great Wired Magazine story on Borlaug Global Rust Initiative

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Read this Wired Magazine story Red Menace: Stop the Ug99 Fungus Before Its Spores Bring Starvation on the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative's leadership in a global collaborative effort to combat a critical threat to the world's food supply. Fighting Ug99 wheat rust requires a global response bringing together a diverse community in the US, Africa, Europe and Asia, including plant biologists, plant breeders, field agents, molecular biologists, NGO's, and BGRI sponsors. We're happy and proud that that BGRI is a Traction® Software customer, and that BGRI's globalrust.org site is powered by Traction® TeamPage, used as a hub for both public information on Ug99 wheat rust and for global collaborative scientific research.

... 90 percent of the world’s wheat has little or no protection against the Ug99 race of P. graminis. If nothing is done to slow the pathogen, famines could soon become the norm — from the Red Sea to the Mongolian steppe — as Ug99 annihilates a crop that provides a third of our calories. China and India, the world’s biggest wheat consumers, will once again face the threat of mass starvation, especially among their rural poor. The situation will be particularly grim in Pakistan and Afghanistan, two nations that rely heavily on wheat for sustenance and are in no position to bear added woe. Their fragile governments may not be able to survive the onslaught of Ug99 and its attendant turmoil.

The pathogen has already been detected in Iran and may now be headed for South Asia’s most important breadbasket, the Punjab, which nourishes hundreds of millions of Indians and Pakistanis. What’s more, Ug99 could easily make the transoceanic leap to the United States. All it would take is for a single spore, barely bigger than a red blood cell, to latch onto the shirt of an oblivious traveler. The toll from that would be ruinous; the US Department of Agriculture estimates that more than 40 million acres of wheat would be at serious risk if Ug99 came to these shores, where the grain is the third most valuable crop, trailing only corn and soybeans. The economic loss might easily exceed $10 billion; a simple loaf of bread could become a luxury. “If this stuff gets into the Western Hemisphere,” Steffenson says, “God help us.” - Brendan I. Koerner, Wired Feb 22 2010.

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