World’s leading food security think-tank and research centres have recommended Bangladesh to ensure transportation of food from rural to urban areas and the flow of crucial inputs to farmers through market systems so that risk to food system during Covid-19 pandemic can be averted.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views or position of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
Daily life as we know it has grinded to a halt and crop scientists are pondering next steps in face of the global COVID-19 crisis. Hans Braun, Director of the Global Wheat Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat, joins us for a virtual chat to discuss the need for increased investment in crop disease research as the world risks a food security crisis.
What have you learned from your work on contagious wheat diseases that we can take away during this time?
Wheat epidemics go back to biblical times. Wheat scientists now believe Egypt’s “seven bad years” of harvest referenced in the Bible were due to a stem rust outbreak.
So, we know what happens when we have a crop epidemic: diseases can completely wipe out a harvest. I have seen subsistence farmers stand in front of their swaying, golden wheat fields, but there is not a single grain inside the spikes. All because of wheat blast.
There are a lot of parallel issues that I see with COVID-19.
The epidemiology models for humans which we see now have a lot in common with plant epidemiology. For example, if you take a wheat field sown with a variety which is rust-resistant and then you get a spore which mutates and overcomes the resistance — like COVID-19 overcomes the human immune system — it then takes about two weeks for it to sporulate again and produce millions of these mutated spores. They sporulate once more and then you have billions and trillions of spores — then the wheat fields at the local, national and, in the worst case, regional level are severely damaged and in worst case are going to die.
The problem is that since we cannot quarantine wheat, if the weather is favorable these spores will fly everywhere and — just like with COVID-19 — they don’t need a passport to travel.
Could you elaborate on that? How can wheat diseases go global?
Usually it takes around 5 years, sometimes less, until a mutation in a rust spore can overcome the resistance of a wheat variety. Every so often, we see rust epidemics which cover an entire region. To monitor this movement, the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative of Cornell University and CIMMYT, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and DFID, established a global rust monitoring system that provides live data on spore movements.
For example, if you have a new race of stem rust in Yemen — and in Yemen wheat matures early — and then farmers burn the straw, their action “pushes” the spores up into the air, thus allowing them to enter the jet stream and cover 2,000 to 5,000 kilometers in a short period of time. Spores can also be carried on clothes or shoes by people who walked into an infected wheat field. Take Australia, for example, which has very strict quarantine laws. It is surrounded by sea and still eventually they get the new rust races which fly around or come with travelers. One just cannot prevent it.
Stem rust resistant (left) and susceptible (right) wheat plants at the stem rust phenotyping facility in Njoro, Nakuru County in Kenya. (Photo: Joshua Masinde/CIMMYT)
Could climate change exacerbate the spreading of crop diseases?
Yes, the climate and its variability have a lot to do with it. For example, in the case of yellow rust, what’s extremely important is the time it takes from sporulation to sporulation. Take a rust spore. It germinates, then it grows, it multiplies and then once it is ready it will disperse and infect wheat plants. From one dispersal to the next it takes about two weeks.
In the last decades, in particular for yellow rust, new races are better adapted to high temperature and are multiplying faster. In a Nature paper, we showed that 30 years ago yellow rust was not present in the Great Plains in the US. Today, it is the most important wheat disease there. So there really is something going on and changing and that’s why we are so concerned about new wheat disease races when they come up.
What could an epidemiologist specialized in human viruses take from this?
Well, I think human epidemiologists know very well what happens in a case like COVID-19. Ordinary citizens now also start to understand what a pandemic is and what its related exponential growth means.
Maybe you should ask what policymakers can learn from COVID-19 in order to prevent plant epidemics. When it comes to epidemics, what applies to humans applies to plants. If there is a new race of a given crop disease, in that moment, the plant does not have a defense mechanism, like humans in the case of COVID-19, because we haven’t developed any immunity. While in developed countries farmers can use chemicals to control plant diseases, resource-poor farmers do not have this option, due to lack to access or if the plant protective has not been registered in their country.
In addition to this, our lines of work share a sense of urgency. If “doomsday” happens, it will be too late to react. At present, with a human pandemic, people are worried about the supply chain from food processing to the supermarket. But if we have an epidemic in plants, then we do not have the supply chain from the field to the food processing industry. And if people have nothing to eat, they will go to the streets and we will see violence. We simply cannot put this aside.
What other lessons can policymakers and other stakeholders take away from the current crisis?
The world needs to learn that we cannot use economics as the basis for disease research. We need to better foresee what could happen.
Let’s take the example of wheat blast, a devastating disease that can destroy the wheat spike and was initially confined to South America. The disease arrived in Bangladesh in 2016 and caused small economic damage, maybe 30,000 tons loss in a small geographic area — a small fraction of the national production but a disaster for the smallholder farmer, who thus would have lost her entire wheat harvest. The disease is now controlled with chemicals. But what if chemical resistance is developed and the disease spreads to the 10 million hectares in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India and the south of Pakistan. Unlikely? But what if it happens?
Agriculture accounts for 30% of the global GDP and the research money [going to agriculture] in comparison to other areas is small. Globally only 5% of R&D is invested in research for development related to agriculture. Such a discrepancy! A million U.S. dollars invested in wheat blast research goes a long way and if you don’t do it, you risk a disaster.
If there is any flip side to the COVID-19 disaster, it is that hopefully our governments realize that they have to play a much more serious role in many areas, in particular public health and disease control in humans but also in plants.
A Lloyd’s report concluded that a global food crisis could be caused by governments taking isolating actions to protect their own countries in response to a breadbasket failure elsewhere. I’m concerned that as the COVID-19 crisis continues, governments will stop exports as some did during the 2008 food price crisis, and then, even if there is enough food around, the 2008 scenario might happen again and food prices will go through the roof, with disastrous impact on the lives of the poorest.
Cover photo: Hans Braun, Director of the Global Wheat Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), inspects wheat plants in the greenhouses. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
Global schemes to fight climate change may miss their mark by ignoring the “fundamental connections” in how food is produced, supplied and consumed, say scientists in a new paper published in the journal Nature Food. Global bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), handle the different components of the food system separately. This includes crop and livestock production; food processing, storage and transport; and food consumption. Scientists argue this disjointed approach may harm strategies to reduce food emissions and safeguard food from climate impacts, and that a “comprehensive” and “unified” approach is needed.
Food and climate change are deeply interlinked, but food emissions need to be tracked beyond the “farm gate,” that is, beyond the emissions arising from growing crops or raising livestock. Researchers are uncovering new insights on how the different subcomponents of the food system contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. They argue that we must understand how these components work together — or clash in some cases — in order to effectively address agriculture in a changing climate.
How can we ensure we have enough food to meet the demand by 2030? First, we need to understand food consumption patterns and how they are influenced by variables such as urbanization, population and economic growth, income, beliefs and more.
Agricultural economist Khondoker Mottaleb is working on a project to examine food demand by 2030, considering these factors. Watch him share preliminary results — in just one minute.
Global schemes to fight climate change may miss their mark by ignoring the fundamental connections in how food is produced, supplied and consumed, scientists say in a new paper published in the journal Nature Food.
Society faces enormous challenges in the transition to sustainable rural development. We are unlikely to make this transition unless we move away from the 20th-century paradigm that sees the world as a logical, linear system focused on “scaling up” the use of technologies to reach hundreds of millions of smallholders.
In a new article published this week on NextBillion, Lennart Woltering of CIMMYT contends that “farming communities are unlikely to continue using a new practice or technology if the surrounding system remains unchanged, since it is this very system that shaped their conventional way of farming.”
Woltering calls on the research for development community to work towards producing deeper system change and offers some key considerations for moving in the right direction.
CIMMYT researcher Bram Govaerts participates in the World Food Prize and Borlaug Dialogue.
Expertise, multiple achievements and a significant contribution to sustainable agri-food systems in Mexico and globally, have merited Bram Govaerts, director of the Integrated Development Program and regional representative for the Americas at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Cornell University’s appointment as Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large. This is a distinction granted to individuals whose work in science, education, social sciences, literature and creative arts has had great impact and international visibility.
Cornell University launched the Professors-at-Large program to commemorate its centenary and to honor its first president, Andrew D. White. The program secures a connection between the university and its faculty with the world, global issues, great thinkers and outstanding intellectuals. Since then, personalities such as philosopher Jacques Derrida, writer and poet Octavio Paz, geneticist M. S. Swaminathan, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Norman Borlaug have received this distinction.
“I was honored to learn about my nomination and glad to be interviewed, but I was happily surprised and humbled to learn that I had been chosen to join this group of distinguished thinkers and artists, which has welcomed such outstanding members as Norman Borlaug and Octavio Paz,” said Govaerts.
Professors-at-Large take the responsibility to participate, over a six-year period, in several activities that strengthen the international academic community and are, afterwards, considered distinguished and lifetime members of the university.
Govaerts takes inspiration from the “take it to the farmer” vision, and has been instrumental to the development of CIMMYT’s project portfolio, which integrates innovations in maize and wheat production systems by minimizing their environmental impact.
Govaerts shares this acknowledgement with his team and collaborators who have joined efforts to achieve the objectives set in Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mexico and many other countries that have taken the decision to make a difference.
In 2014, Bram Govaerts received from the World Food Prize Foundation the Norman E. Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation, for leading the MasAgro project and finding innovative ways of applying science to improve the productivity and resilience of small and medium-sized maize and wheat farmers in Mexico.
