Wheat Crop Failures Could be Total, Experts Warn

[tygerkittn]

"David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, said the deadly fungus, Puccinia graminis, is now spreading through some areas of the globe where "crop losses are expected to reach 100 percent.”
Losses in Africa are already at 70 percent of the crop, Kotok said."




http://moneynews.com/money/archives/st/2008/4/24/100454.cfm?s=st

OK, I'm getting kind of desensitized now. What's next, the twinkie crop? Are they blowing this out of proportion or could it really be this bad? :idunno

[Heartstorm]

:panic Nooo never the twinkie crop !!!! Wonder if I can can twinkies !! and Fritos too !!!

[BeNotAfraid]

I really want to see a picture of this fungus.

Edit**Found one! Pretty scary stuff.

[deanne53]

Wheat is very easy in getting fungus or molds.

[Jubilee21]

"David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, said the deadly fungus, Puccinia graminis, is now spreading through some areas of the globe where "crop losses are expected to reach 100 percent.”
Losses in Africa are already at 70 percent of the crop, Kotok said."




http://moneynews.com/money/archives/st/2008/4/24/100454.cfm?s=st

OK, I'm getting kind of desensitized now. What's next, the twinkie crop? Are they blowing this out of proportion or could it really be this bad? :idunno

This one is not being blown out of proportion ,its the real deal from many of the missionary families I have spoken to who have spent time in these countries and aware of this for some time..

This has been a concern for a while now..sort of like the pandemic bird flu of wheat, worst case scenario showing up as it has been explained to me.

The tin hat side of me finds it very suspicious that this transpired as it did in regard to how Monsanto has shown up with their genetically modified versions of things and poised to save the day..for every crisis any of our food is just coincidently having a problem with but then again knowing Christ is the bread of life, I would expect Satan to be the death of bread.:twitch

I wouldn't say I am becoming desensitized, if anything more profoundly convicted.. the problems are real enough, but I am finding it almost impossible to call much of this 'coincidence' knowing what the bible has to say about such things.

Sounds very much like famine and pestilence on a biblical scale to me..:idunno

[tygerkittn]

Yes, it's just more than I can process, all this stuff coming at once. It would be nice if it was all media hype, but I guess that's my wishful thinking.

[Theresa]

Canning twinkies! :aha

[Jubilee21]

Yes, it's just more than I can process, all this stuff coming at once. It would be nice if it was all media hype, but I guess that's my wishful thinking.

:hug Try not to let it bug ya..its easy to get overwhelmed and sometimes best to walk away and let the news alone if it gets to you..enjoy a walk, play in the garden for fun..an icecream cone never hurts from Dairy Queen!!

I have a giant bottle of bubbles for those days I am feeling a bit overwhelmed..I go sit out on my rocker , put my feet up on the rail and just blow away to my little hearts content..my neighbors just laugh anymore, and seem to have gotten over their concerns I am nuts!

Just remember its never about telling yourself how big the problems are..just tell those problems how big your God is!!:)

I had this article from one of my friends about this from last year..if you are interested..like I said its not a new problem but they were real worried when they realized what they were looking at..obvious reasons too!

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19425983.700-billions-at-risk-from-wheat-superblight.html

Black stem rust itself is nothing new. It has been a major blight on wheat production since the rise of agriculture, and the Romans even prayed to a stem rust god, Robigus. It can reduce a field of ripening grain to a dead, tangled mass, and vast outbreaks regularly used to rip through wheat regions. The last to hit the North American breadbasket, in 1954, wiped out 40 per cent of the crop. In the cold war both the US and the Soviet Union stockpiled stem rust spores as a biological weapon.

After the 1954 epidemic, Borlaug began work in Mexico on developing wheat that resisted stem rust. The project grew into the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT. The rust-resistant, high-yielding wheat it developed banished chronic hunger in much of the world, ended stem rust outbreaks, and won Borlaug the Nobel peace prize in 1970.

Yet once again Borlaug - now 93 and fighting cancer - is leading the charge against his old enemy. When Ug99 turned up in Kenya in 2002, he sounded the alarm. "Too many years had gone by and no one was taking Ug99 seriously," he says. He blames complacency, and the dismantling of training and wheat testing programmes, after 40 years without outbreaks.

Now a Global Rust Initiative (GRI) is under way at CIMMYT. It's head, Rick Ward, blames the delay on cuts, starting in the 1980s, in CIMMYT's funding for routine monitoring and maintenance of crops and pests.

"CIMMYT was slow to detect the extent of susceptibility to Ug99 [because] it didn't have the scientific eyes and ears on the ground any more," says Chris Dowswell of CIMMYT. "Once it did, it had to start a laborious fund-raising campaign to respond."

Ward is now being promised adequate support as fears grow in rich wheat-growing countries, but meanwhile Ug99 has got worse. It was first noticed because it started appearing on wheat previously protected by a gene complex called Sr31, the backbone of stem rust resistance in most wheat farmed worldwide. Then last year it acquired the ability to defeat another widely used complex, Sr24. "Of the 50 genes we know for resistance to stem rust, only 10 work even partially against Ug99," says Ward. Those are present in less than 1 per cent of the crop.

The first line of defence is fungicide, but the poor farmers who stand to lose most from the blight generally cannot afford it, or don't have the equipment or know-how to apply it. CIMMYT is considering "fire brigade" spray teams armed with cheap, generic fungicides in poor areas. However, they will be competing with the rich for fungicide, and depending on where Ug99 strikes, stocks could be limited.

Even rich countries face problems. The US has been fighting soybean rust with fungicide ever since spores blew in on hurricane Ivan in 2004. If Ug99 arrives as well, the US could be in trouble because it doesn't make enough fungicide for both crops. Kitty Cardwell of the US Department of Agriculture says there might be enough if the US fights Ug99 the same way as it is tackling soya rust: spotting outbreaks with a fast DNA-based field test and posting the results on an interactive website (www.sbrusa.net), so farmers spray only when danger looms. Ultimately, says Ward, the only real answer "is to get new, resistant varieties out there".

[BeNotAfraid]

tygerkitten--I was just telling my husband tonight how it used to be that things would happen of possible prophetic significance and we would be like WOW and then talk it to death for weeks. Now, things are happening so quickly, often multiple things at the same time--it is so hard to keep up and process it all! The magnitude of it all can be a little overwhelming at times. At least we know where we are going--I can't imagine what nonbelievers are going to feel like during the tribulation. They're going to be assaulted with all this prophecy and be powerless to stop it.

[tygerkittn]

tygerkitten--I was just telling my husband tonight how it used to be that things would happen of possible prophetic significance and we would be like WOW and then talk it to death for weeks. Now, things are happening so quickly, often multiple things at the same time--it is so hard to keep up and process it all! The magnitude of it all can be a little overwhelming at times. At least we know where we are going--I can't imagine what nonbelievers are going to feel like during the tribulation. They're going to be assaulted with all this prophecy and be powerless to stop it.

That's true, we have HOPE, they must be scared to death! It's a good time to spread the Word, if I actually get to talk to anyone. (We don't go out much!)