Ithaca, New York
April 2, 2008
Cornell University has been
awarded a $26.8 million grant from the
Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation to launch a broad-based global partnership to
combat stem rust, a deadly wheat disease that poses a serious
threat to global food security.
Wheat, which is one of the world's primary food staples,
accounts for about 30 percent of the world's production of grain
crops. Scientists estimate that 90 percent of all wheat
varieties planted around the globe are susceptible to the
virulent new wheat stem rust type, known as Ug99. More than 50
million small-scale farmers in India rely on wheat for their
food and income; other vulnerable regions include Pakistan, East
Africa, China, the Middle East and North Africa.
The Gates Foundation-funded partnership, the new Durable Rust
Resistance in Wheat project, will bring together 15 institutions
to combat the emergence of deadly new variants of stem rust that
can spread quickly, reducing healthy wheat to broken, shriveled
stems.
The partners will focus on developing improved rust-resistant
wheat varieties to protect resource-poor farmers as well as
consumers from catastrophic crop losses.
Ronnie
Coffman (photo), a Cornell professor of plant breeding who is
director of international programs at Cornell's College of
Agriculture and Life Sciences, announced the grant at a meeting
at wheat research facilities in northwest Mexico used by the
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
Coffman will direct the consortium of global partners while Rick
Ward, previously a wheat breeder with CIMMYT and Michigan State
University, has been hired by Cornell as the project
coordinator.
"The rust pathogens recognize no political boundaries, and their
spores need no passport to travel thousands of miles in the jet
streams. Containing these deadly enemies of the wheat crop
requires alert and active scientists, strong international
research networks and effective seed supply programs," said
Nobel laureate Norman E. Borlaug, who developed the "green
revolution" wheats beginning in the 1940s and is credited with
bringing radical change to world agriculture and saving hundreds
of millions of lives.
Borlaug, who was in Mexico for the grant announcement,
continued, "The new wheat project is a critical component in
building an effective research and development response to the
current stem rust threat, and can help avert a global rust
pandemic that can rob tens of millions of tons from production."
World
awareness of the highly feared wheat disease is largely due to
Borlaug's advocacy, most recently through the Borlaug Global
Rust Initiative, which will work closely with the new wheat
project.
The program will enlist the Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural
Research and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute to be key
research sites to develop new resistant varieties, in
collaboration with scientists at CIMMYT, the International
Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Area in Syria and
the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization and advanced
research laboratories in the United States, Canada, China,
Australia and South Africa will also collaborate on the project.
"Resource-poor farmers are particularly vulnerable to wheat stem
disease, which has the potential to wipe out entire crops," said
Rajiv Shah, director of agricultural development for the Gates
Foundation's Global Development Program. "We're excited about
the potential of this partnership to catalyze the increased
global investments necessary to fight this powerful disease."
"Farmers need access to wheat varieties that can resist the new
type of wheat stem rust, especially in developing nations where
reliance on wheat is high and budgets for fungicides almost
nonexistent," said Coffman.
The Gates Foundation has to date committed more than $700
million in grants as part of a broad agricultural development
strategy aimed at providing millions of small farmers in the
developing world with tools and opportunities to boost their
productivity, increase their incomes and build better lives.
For more information about the new project, see <http://www.wheatrust.cornell.edu>.
Protecting
wheat farmers with rust-resistant varieties is
primary goal of Cornell-based project |
By Krishna Ramanujan
As part of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat
project, based at Cornell, an international team of
researchers has undertaken a set of objectives to
deal with the enormous task of breeding new
rust-resistant wheat varieties and protecting
resource-poor farmers in developing countries from
losing crops to the virulent fungus that has
recently reared its ugly head.
The wheat project is a partnership of 16
institutions in 13 countries and is funded by a
three-year, $28.6 million grant from the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation.
Some of its other main objectives include:
- Planning how
to deal with the long-term threat of emerging
varieties of rust by addressing how to
disseminate resistant seeds in vulnerable areas,
diagnose pathogens and recruit global partners;
- Fostering
global awareness, cooperation and support to
combat the threat of emerging wheat rust
diseases, including a catalog of known rust
research activities;
- Tracking the
global spread of wheat rust pathogens;
- Screening
wheat rust at national research facilities in
Kenya and Ethiopia to allow breeders from around
the world to test whether new wheat varieties
are resistant to UG99 and other types of stem
rust;
- Developing
genetic markers, or known DNA sequences on or
near genes, to locate or identify major and
minor genes that play a role in protecting
plants against rust;
- Reducing a
phenomenon known as "linkage drag," where a
rust-resistant gene may have other genes linked
to it that produce undesirable traits in a new
wheat variety. By reducing linkage drag,
breeders may limit negative side effects of a
rust-resistant gene;
- Discovering
new sources of rust resistance in other species
related to wheat, such as wild wheat and wild
barley; and
- Exploring why
rice is immune to rust diseases and use that
knowledge to devise new strategies for
controlling rust in wheat and other cereal
crops.
|
By Linda McCandless
Other news
from the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation |
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