$26.8 million to lead global fight against deadly wheat plague

Black stem rust fungus, Puccinia graminis.

Gates Foundation awards Cornell $26.8 million
to lead global fight against deadly wheat plague

By Linda McCandless

Cornell has been awarded a $26.8 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to launch a broad-based global partnership to combat stem rust, a deadly wheat disease that poses a serious threat to global food security.

Wheat, which is one of the world's primary food staples, accounts for about 30 percent of the world's production of grain crops. Scientists estimate that 90 percent of all wheat varieties planted around the globe are susceptible to the virulent new wheat stem rust type, known as Ug99. More than 50 million small-scale farmers in India rely on wheat for their food and income; other vulnerable regions include Pakistan, East Africa, China, the Middle East and North Africa.

The Gates Foundation-funded partnership, the new Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project, will bring together 15 institutions to combat the emergence of deadly new variants of stem rust that can spread quickly, reducing healthy wheat to broken, shriveled stems. The partners will focus on developing improved rust-resistant wheat varieties to protect resource-poor farmers as well as consumers from catastrophic crop losses.

Ronnie Coffman, a Cornell professor of plant breeding who is director of international programs at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, announced the grant at a meeting at wheat research facilities in northwest Mexico used by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). Coffman will direct the consortium of global partners while Rick Ward, previously a wheat breeder with CIMMYT and Michigan State University, has been hired by Cornell as the project coordinator.

"The rust pathogens recognize no political boundaries, and their spores need no passport to travel thousands of miles in the jet streams. Containing these deadly enemies of the wheat crop requires alert and active scientists, strong international research networks and effective seed supply programs," said Nobel laureate Norman E. Borlaug, who developed the "green revolution" wheats beginning in the 1940s and is credited with bringing radical change to world agriculture and saving hundreds of millions of lives.