May 29, 2008

 

US wheat research faces budget cuts despite grave disease threat

   

  

The US is cutting budgets for US research into wheat diseases at a time when new and more potent strains of fungus are spreading in Africa and the Middle East.

 

The Associated Press reported that budgets for such research is being diverted by Congress to "pet projects" at a time when high food prices makes the prospect of widespread crop epidemic even more unthinkable.

 

"Earmarking has been going up, and our discretionary funds have been going down," said Henrietta Fore, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, which has long provided much of the money for international agriculture research labs.

 

Part of it may have been attributed to a short memory - most Congressmen were not around in the 1950s to witness the wheat stem rust disease's devastating impact on the US crop when nearly half the crop was lost in parts of the upper Midwest. Plant scientists responded by developing new wheat varieties with genes that made them immune to the fungus.

 

That worked for more than four decades, but now the new strain of the disease has surfaced. The Ug99, named for where and when it was discovered - Uganda in 1999.

The disease is evolving and infecting even wheat strains that had been thought to be resistant. The wheat threat comes with world stockpiles already at a 30-year low.

 

Research work for wheat diseases has been cut by 20 percent in part because money has been drained off by Congress' pet projects.

 

Meanwhile, plant scientists have watched in alarm as spores carried by the wind have spread a new strain of fungus from Africa across the Red Sea to infect wheat fields in Yemen and Iran and may spread to South Asia.

 

At the same time, money for international research centers that Jin works closely with, including a wheat laboratory in Mexico, saw their US funding cut from US$25 million to US$7 million.

 

The cut is a fraction of the cuts made to the US spending on global agricultural development conducted by international labs. The budget, which used to stand at US$1 billion, has shrunk by two-thirds in the past 8 years.

 

The international labs, part of a consortium called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, have for years been financed in part by the Agency for International Development. However, AID found it had little to give this year because Congress had specified that nearly all overseas development aid go to other priorities such as education, water projects, combating AIDS and malaria.

 

The AID also chose to shield country-specific aids from cuts so as to improve US foreign relations, leaving international agricultural research to suffer the cuts. These research also lost out the more connected US universities who are more politically connected.