Egypt, the world's top wheat importer, is introducing new wheat varieties resistant to a mutant form of stem rust, an airborne fungus with the ability to annihilate entire crops.

'We have already started using these seeds and 40 tonnes are now being planted in the Nile Delta,' Ayman Abouhadid, president of the country's Agricultural Research Centre, told Reuters in an interview.

The fungus, which has plagued wheat since biblical times, was largely controlled in the 1950s when scientists passed out seeds with a gene to block the disease.

But a destructive new strain reappeared in Uganda in the late 1990s, once more posing a potentially serious threat to 80 per cent of the world's wheat supplies.
   
Experts have said the only way to overcome the new fungus would be to replace the bulk of the world's commercial wheat with new seeds bred to fight it.

Egypt, which cultivates around 3 million feddans (1.26 million hectares) of wheat per year, has reacted fast in developing the new strains.

'We have two wheat varieties, Misr 1 and Misr 2, which we developed and are resistant to this new form of stem rust,' Abouhadid said.

The new stem rust, termed Ug99, has travelled from Uganda to Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen and subsequently went on to affect crops as far away as Iran and Afghanistan in less than a decade.

Abouhadid said if the Ug99 strain becomes widespread in Central Asia it will almost certainly reach Egypt.

Since Egypt gets winds from the North it is now very likely it will spread to Egypt,' Abouhadid said.

The fungus spreads in mostly hot and humid weather, according to Abouhadid, and so it will potentially stay within the realm of the Mediterranean basin and not travel higher up into colder areas of Europe.

Egypt has been working with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico to stop the spread of Ug99 into its borders.

But the most populous Arab country, which depends heavily on subsidised bread to feed its poor, is not waiting until the disease affects its own crop to take action.
   
Around 1.5 tonnes of the Misr 1 variety were exported earlier this year to Afghanistan to prevent the rust from spreading further into the region.

'We are protecting the region from the spread of the fungus and so we are protecting ourselves from outside our borders,' Abouhadid said.

Egypt has one of the highest rates of wheat consumption per capita in the world at around 120 kg per person per year.

The North African country consumes around 14 million tonnes of wheat annually, and imports around 6 million tonnes of that from abroad.-Reuters