Amid the global food crisis, there is finally some good news. Scientists meeting in Ciudad Obregon, Mexico, this week say they have developed new varieties of wheat resistant to the Uggg strain of stem rust fungus that is threatening the world's food supplies. The race is now on to get the wheat into the world's breadbaskets before Uggg spreads further.rnStem rust, one of the deadliest wheat diseases, has not been a global problem since the 1960s, when three genes for rust resistance were bred into high-yielding wheat varieties by scientists at CIMMYT, a laboratory of the green revolution in Mexico that now belongs to the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research. Virtually all of the world's wheat, which supplies some 20 per cent of humanity's calories, now depends on these genes.
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