ISLAMABAD, March 9: The Pakistan Agriculture Research Council (Parc) has said that the stem rust strain found in the wheat crop in Sindh is a local strain and not UG99 which has wreaked havoc in Africa and is now damaging crops in Iran.

The council, however, has called for a national policy to import UG99-resistant wheat seed to protect the next wheat crop as winds can blow the rust from Iran into Balochistan anytime.

“We can’t be complacent. We can’t say that UG99 will not hit Pakistan because we can’t ignore the FAO warnings in this regard,” Dr Mujeeb Qazi, who works with the National Wheat Programme of Parc, told Dawn on Sunday.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has already warned Pakistan against the rust attack.

Dr Qazi said that Pakistan’s current wheat crop would not be attacked by UG99 because it was not in the country’s terrain. Experimental tests of the local stem rust strain found in Sindh was not UG99 as this local race had not attacked a wheat test variety unequivocally susceptible to UG99 in field and un controlled environmental testing conditions.

However, he said, gauging the swift move of the pathogen into Yemen and now into Iran within just one year had sent alarm bells and now Pakistani researchers would have to expedite efforts to protect wheat productivity over the next crop cycle (2008-09) by introducing wheat seed locally that is immune to UG99.

Dr Qazi said the stem rust on wheat had caused international concerns due to its occurrence, damage potential and systematic spread across wheat growing areas in several countries, coupled with the threat it posed to Pakistan and other countries.

The race UG99 from Uganda spread to Kenya and Ethiopia and then crossed into Yemen and has recently been reported in Iran. This proximity presence and its wind-borne spore spreading nature threaten Pakistan’s wheat areas, particularly where stem rust is to be a problem (Sindh and lower Punjab).

Dr Qazi said the situation was more acute as Pakistani wheat germplasm (almost all of the major varieties currently sown across the country) tested in Kenya over the past few years did not give encouraging signs that Pakistan’s varieties possessed adequate resistance levels to combat the race posing the threat.

“Currently we are more prone to be affected with this danger at our footsteps than what colleagues had advocated in the mid-2005. Thus volatile efforts need to be in place to address the perplexing situation,” he added.

He said that Parc and the National Agricultural Research Council and the National Wheat Programme were working on three scenarios to stop the rust attack. The first was via introduction, adaptation and release of high-yielding germplasm selected from the elite screening nursery provided to Pakistan by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), Mexico. These have resistance to UG99 based upon testing by CIMMYT scientists and their colleagues in Africa’s hot spots.

The second tier of lines, Dr Qazi said, were those that were present in the international stem rust screening nursery which were excellent candidates to be used in any national wheat programme that targeted on recombination breeding around efficient breeding strategies for swift outputs.The third route was to exploit the identified genes for resistance reported by the CIMMYT and collaborators aided by marked and linked genes via efficient breeding technology.

The additional latent phase was a programme that could harness unique resistance diversity of wheat relative species through international testing in UG99 hot spots and then exploiting this diversity in national recombination programmes, he added.

Dr Qazi said Pakistani researchers were actively engaged in integrated activities to combat the pathogen.