Fight to save wheat falters

Budget cuts threaten battle against mutant fungus

ST. PAUL, MINN. -- In the face of a devastating new plant disease that threatens the world's wheat crops, the U.S. government has cut the budget for research that might head off the infestation.

Dr. Yue Jin, a kind-faced man in a blue lab coat, is the only federal scientist whose main mission is protecting the $17 billion U.S. wheat crop from annihilation.

But his budget is being slashed -- in part because money has been drained off by Congress' pet projects.

Jin and other plant scientists have watched in alarm as mutant 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, following a path predicted to lead to the rich wheat-growing areas of South Asia.

Most of the wheat varieties grown worldwide -- including the vast bulk of those planted in the United States -- are vulnerable. The threat of an epidemic only adds to a global food crisis brought on by drought, floods, high food and fuel prices and a surge in demand.

But despite the emergency, Associated Press interviews and a review of budget and research documents show that spending for Jin's laboratory and others where breeders develop disease-resistant wheat plants is being reduced this year. The money is being diverted to other programs and earmarked for special causes of members of Congress.

Caught in a squeeze

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

Most policymakers weren't around the last time wheat stem rust disease attacked the U.S. crop. It was in the early 1950s, and nearly half the crop was lost in parts of the upper Midwest as wheat plants developed brown patches that choked off their water and nutrients. 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. It's known as Ug99, named for where (Uganda) and when (1999) it was discovered.

There's an even more frightening development: The disease is evolving and infecting even wheat strains that had been thought to be resistant. It's much like what is happening in hospitals, where doctors are running out of options to treat infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The wheat threat comes with world stockpiles already at a 30-year low.

Jin works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the University of Minnesota, in greenhouses where he examines wheat samples infested with the telltale lesions of stem rust and seeks to identify plants whose genes resist the disease. His lab was hit by a $300,000 cut this year, 20 percent of its overall budget. The Bush administration made that reduction in a quest for budget savings.

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

The threat to wheat, which provides 20 percent of the calories for the world's population, is but one facet of a food crisis that has sneaked up on policymakers. Overall U.S. spending for agricultural development around the world has dropped from more than $1 billion a year in the 1980s to less than one-third of that since 2000. "This amounts to neglect," says Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.