- A deadly fungus, known as Ug99, which kills wheat, has
likely spread to Pakistan from Africa according to reports. If true, that
threatens the vital Asian Bread Basket including the Punjab region. The
spread of the deadly virus, stem rust, against which an effective fungicide
does not exist, comes as world grain stocks reach the lowest in four decades
and government subsidized bio-ethanol production, especially in the USA,
Brazil and EU are taking land out of food production at alarming rates.
The deadly fungus is being used by Monsanto and the US Government to spread
patented GMO seeds.
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- Stem rust is the worst of three rusts that afflict wheat
plants. The fungus grows primarily in the stems, plugging the vascular
system so carbohydrates can't get from the leaves to the grain, which shrivels.
Ug99 is a race of stem rust that blocks the vascular tissues in cereal
grains including wheat, oats and barley. Unlike other rusts that may reduce
crop yields, Ug99-infected plants may suffer up to 100 percent loss.
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- In the 1950s, the last major outbreak destroyed 40% of
the spring wheat crop in North America. At that time governments started
a major effort to breed resistant wheat plants, led by Norman Borlaug of
the Rockefeller Foundation. That was the misnamed Green Revolution. The
result today is far fewer varieties of wheat that might resist such a new
fungus outbreak.
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- The first strains of Ug99 were detected in 1999 in Uganda.
It spread to Kenya by 2001, to Ethiopia by 2003 and to Yemen when the cyclone
Gonu spread its spores in 2007. Now the deadly fungus has been found in
Iran and according to British scientists may already be as far as Pakistan.
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- Pakistan and India account for 20 percent of the annual
world wheat production. It is possible as the fungus spreads that large
movements could take place almost overnight if certain wind conditions
prevail at the right time. In 2007 a three-day wind event recorded by Mexico's
CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), had strong
wind currents moving from Yemen, where Ug99 is present, across Pakistan
and India, going all the way to China. CIMMYT estimates that from two-thirds
to three-quarters of the wheat now planted in India and Pakistan are highly
susceptible to this new strain of stem rust. One billion people who live
in this region and they are highly dependent on wheat for their food supply.
-
- These are all areas where the agricultural infrastructure
to contain such problems is either extremely weak or non-existent. It threatens
to spread into other wheat producing regions of Asia and eventually the
entire world if not checked.
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- FAO World Grain Forecast
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- The 2007 World Agriculture Forecast of the United Nations'
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, projects an alarming trend
in world food supply even in the absence of any devastation from Ug99.
The report states, "countries in the non-OECD region are expected
to continue to experience a much stronger increase in consumption of agricultural
products than countries in the OECD area. This trend is driven by population
and, above all, income growth underpinned by rural migration to higher
income urban areas...OECD countries as a group are projected to lose production
and export shares in many commoditiesGrowth in the use of agricultural
commodities as feedstock to a rapidly increasing biofuel industry is one
of the main drivers in the outlook and one of the reasons for international
commodity prices to attain a significantly higher plateau over the outlook
period than has been reported in the previous reports." (my
emphasis-w.e.).
-
- The FAO warns that the explosive growth in acreage used
to grow fuels and not food in the past three years is dramatically changing
the outlook for food supply globally and forcing food prices sharply higher
for all foods from cereals to sugar to meat and dairy products. The use
of cereals, sugar, oilseeds and vegetable oils to satisfy the needs of
a rapidly
- increasing bio-fuel industry, is one of the main drivers,
most especially the large volumes of maize in the US, wheat and rapeseed
in the EU and sugar in Brazil for ethanol and bio-diesel production. This
is already causing dramatically higher crop prices, higher feed costs and
sharply higher prices for livestock products.
-
- Ironically, the current bio-ethanol industry is being
driven by US government subsidies and a scientifically false argument in
the EU and USA that bio-ethanol is less harmful to the environment than
petroleum fuels and can reduce CO2 emissions. The arguments have been demonstrated
in every respect to be false. The huge expansion of global acreage now
planted to produce bio-fuels is creating ecological problems and demanding
use of far heavier pesticide spraying while use of bio-fuels in autos releases
even deadlier emissions than imagined. The political effect, however, has
been a catastrophic shift down in world grain stocks at the same time the
EU and USA have enacted policies which drastically cut traditional emergency
grain reserves. In short, it is a scenario pre-programmed for catastrophe,
one which has been clear to policymakers in the EU and USA for several
years. That can only suggest that such a dramatic crisis in global food
supply is intentional.
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- A plan to spread GMO?
-
- One of the consequences of the spread of Ug99 is a campaign
by Monsanto Corporation and other major producers of genetically manipulated
plant seeds to promote wholesale introduction of GMO wheat varieties said
to be resistant to the Ug99 fungus. Biologists at Monsanto and at the various
GMO laboratories around the world are working to patent such strains.
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- Norman Borlaug, the former Rockefeller Foundation head
of the Green Revolution is active in funding the research to develop a
fungus resistant variety against Ug99 working with his former center in
Mexico, the CIMMYT and ICARDA in Kenya, where the pathogen is now endemic.
So far, about 90% of the 12,000 lines tested are susceptible to Ug99. That
includes all the major wheat cultivars of the Middle East and west Asia.
At least 80% of the 200 varieties sent from the United States can't cope
with infection. The situation is even more dire for Egypt, Iran, and other
countries in immediate peril.
-
- Even if a new resistant variety was ready to be released
today it would take two or three years' seed increase in order to have
just enough wheat seed for 20 percent of the acres planted to wheat in
the world.
-
- Work is also being done by the USDA's Agricultural Research
Service (ARS), the same agency which co-developed Monsanto's Terminator
seed technology. In my book, Seeds of Destruction I document the insidious
role of Borlaug and the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting the misnamed
Green Revolution as well as patents on food seeds to ultimately control
food supplies as a potential political lever. The spreading alarm over
the Ug99 fungus is being used by Monsanto and other GMO agribusiness companies
to demand that the current ban on GMO wheat be lifted to allow spread of
GMO patented wheat seeds on the argument they are Ug99 stem rust resistant.
-
- * F. William Engdahl is a geopolitical risk consultant
and the author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
( HYPERLINK "<http://www.globalresearch.ca>http://www.globalresearch.ca"
www.globalresearch.ca) and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics
and the New World Order (Pluto Press). He may be contacted at HYPERLINK
"<http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net>http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net"
www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
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