Global Wheat Crop Threatened by Fungus: A Q&A with Han Joachim Braun

In 1999 agricultural researchers discovered in Uganda a new variety of stem rust--a fungus that infects wheat plants and wiped out 40 percent of U.S. wheat harvests in the 1950s. Millions of spores have spread from Uganda to neighboring Kenya and beyond to Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen, wiping out as much as 80 percent of a country's harvest. In fact, the only thing that has stopped the rust from devastating the breadbaskets of China, India and Ukraine has been several years of drought in Iran. [More]

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