The fungal diseases called wheat rust “have the capacity to turn a healthy-looking crop, only weeks away from harvest, into nothing more than a tangle of yellow leaves or black stems and shriveled grains at harvest,” says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The ongoing spread of wheat rust is a rising concern in central Asia and the Middle East, prompting closer international collaboration to detect and prevent their spread and into research to defeat them, said FAO. Farmers can lose 80 percent or more of their wheat to the rust fungus. Rust is “posing a threat not just in central Asia and the Middle East but in the world’s major wheat producing areas as well,” said FAO.
The best-known of the rusts is Ug99, a fungal discovered in Uganda and now detected in 13 countries in Africa and the Middle East. A new strain of yellow rust, called Warrior, has spread from northern Europe to Turkey. FAO, three agricultural research centers and the University of Aarhus, home to a rust reference center, will hold a 10-day workshop to train officials from nine nations affected with rust on how to look for the disease and how to manage it. Rust can be contained with the planting of disease-resistant wheat varieties or by spraying the fields with fungicides. A researcher at CIMMYT recently spoke with Ag Insider about how rust disease was spreading.