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This article was originally commissioned for Is Greater Than. It follows a wheat plant disease, Ug99, through the constellation of human and non-human actors that have turned a decades-old and once-regional fungus into a major threat to global wheat production.

The place that most people in the West think of when they think of Egypt—the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the builders of the pyramids and the grand temples—was a place of great mystery and even greater power, both political and spiritual. Much of its political power owed to the agricultural wealth produced on the banks of the Nile and in its Delta, and much of its mystery and spiritual power came from that same source: a fickle river whose catastrophic floods could destroy tens of villages or entire cities and whose inadequate flow could spell years of famine. And Ancient Egyptian mythology was always a line of communication between those two axes of power, a constantly-evolving method of translating the whims of the natural world into political certainties, and vice versa, the whims of political rulers into natural expressions of divine will.

The dynamic is of course not particular to Ancient Egypt. In the first two parts of this series, I drew attention to the latter part of the dynamic in modern Egypt: the way in which political and economic policies are often made to appear as if they are natural phenomena, void of human agency. But the distinction between a natural world and a civilized world becomes even less tenable in the face of global climate change brought about by human activity.

To put this all back into the focus on the Egyptian bread crisis, let’s consider first of all a nasty fungus, introduced in my last piece, which was first discovered in its present incarnation in Uganda in 1999, hence its official name, Ug99. Ug99 is a particularly pernicious “race” (the word used by some biologists) of wheat stem rust for which there are currently no resistant varieties of wheat. Unlike most such fungal infections which have varying effects on the yield of the crop, Ug99 typically destroys the majority of the yield, and as much as 100% of it. This fact has apparently warranted Ug99’s induction into the pantheon of apocalyptic super-baddies, following after “super-germs”, “super-viruses”, “super-pests”, “super-bugs” and other superlatively bad things. The New Scientist has dubbed it a “super-blight.”

So it seems only fitting that part of what has made it such a grave threat to human life on the planet is its unexpected spread across the Red Sea to Yemen on the winds of a “super-cyclone“. Judging from the movement of previous such plant diseases, scientists expected Ug99 to spread slowly through Sudan and Egypt and perhaps later on into the Levant and beyond to Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and India. But in June of 2007, Cyclone Gonu sent Ug99 spores straight over to Yemen.

Cyclone Gonu is the first cyclone ever to have entered the Gulf of Oman and the strongest storm to have struck the Arabian Peninsula since record-keeping began in 1945, leading many to link the storm to global climate change, along with Hurricane Katrina and, most recently, Cyclone Nargis which has so far killed tens of thousands in Burma.

In March, Ug99 was discovered in Iran and from there, it is just a hop, skip and a jump away from the Central Asian bread basket, representing the strategic agricultural product of six nations, spread over 161 million acres of wheat, accounting for 25 percent of the global wheat harvest and a source of food for billions of people. What’s more, while the rust has been reproducing asexually on wheat stems, making exact copies of itself, in Iran it will have the opportunity on the leaves of its other host, the barberry bush (Berberis vulgaris), to produce sexually, potentially mixing genes with other stem rusts. This will make it more difficult for researchers to develop wheat strains resistant to the rust.

One of the primary organizations tackling this research effort is the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BRGI), named after and founded by Norman Borlaug, “the grandfather of the Green Revolution”. Borlaug, with the assistance of the the Rockefeller Foundation, cut his teeth as a plant breeder working on wheat varieties resistant to rust in Mexico. Decades of work with the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in Mexico, India and elsewhere led to widespread changes in agricultural technologies that USAID director William Gaud came to dub the “Green Revolution”. These technologies have since been criticized for destroying crop diversity through extensive mono-cropping (growing one crop in row after row in immense fields) and causing environmental damage due to input-intensive techniques (the application of large amounts of chemical pesticides and fertilizers).

Food security activists blame the spread of Ug99 in part on this reduction in the number of different varieties of wheat planted around the world, in combination with reduced funding for research, particularly in Africa in the lean years after post-colonial independence.

So, to perhaps oversimplify a very complex set of interactions and interrelationships: a plant disease that has existed in some form for many decades, but was largely restricted to central Africa, has hence become a major global threat because of a virulence encouraged by the introduction Green Revolution technologies—many of which were originally implemented to combat nearly the same disease—together with global climate change induced by human activity and the economic evisceration of former colonies in Africa.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, in the midst of a crisis over the availability of subsidized bread due in part to high global wheat prices, the government has said nothing about the imminent threat to its wheat fields from the south (the Egyptian government is not usually shy about identifying threats from Sub-Saharan Africa). Instead, President Mubarak focused on calling for the expansion of wheat production in newly-reclaimed deserts lands while Magdy Madkour of the Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute (AGERI, a part of the state’s Agricultural Research Center) declares that Egypt can reach self-sufficiency in wheat production in two years with the adoption of genetically modified wheat varieties.

Both of these are impractical propositions. Even if all of the lands in the East Oweinat and Toshka reclamation projects Mubarak mentions, together with the arable land of the North Coast advocated by Madkour were put into wheat production, this would provide less than half of what Egypt would need to be self-sufficient, given current yields, which are optimistic in the mineral- and water-poor desert. And even if the increased yields from transgenic wheat species could be sustained as advertised over time (by no means a given), these species were designed for the climate of the North Coast region, a thin strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea, comprising a tiny fraction of Egypt’s potentially arable land, where desertified land competes for space with expanding tourism and millions of unexploded WWII-era landmines.

Aside from this, with the introduction of market reforms, the President has little say in what gets produced on the large agri-business farms in East Oweinat and Toshka. As Richard Tutwiler, Director of American University in Cairo’s Desert Development Center says,

it’s not a command economy anymore, so it’s not easy for the government to say, ‘stop growing this, start growing that.’ Wheat and legumes were never intended to be the principal crops grown in those areas. What was intended to grow there were horticultural crops for export, not field crops for subsistence. One could expect the private sector to respond to the market [by planting wheat], but that means they’re going to respond to high [wheat] prices, and that’s exactly what the president is trying to avoid.

Furthermore, the fostering of enormous mono-cropped wheat fields and transgenic varieties tolerant to drought and stress will do nothing to repel the advance of Ug99 into Egypt. They are, rather, practices of the decades-old “Green Revolution” that have made the disease so dangerous in the first place.

It is tempting—with this constellation of global climate change, super-threats to life on Earth, the philanthropic organs of captains of industry, old and new (Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have joined Ford and Rockefeller in the fray lately), life-sciences corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, their partners in the public sector (like Egypt’s AGERI) and recycled Green Revolutionaries—to wax conspiratorial and identify Ug99 as a bio-warfare tool of US corporate interests against Iran and other members of the “Axis of Evil”. Such theories are lent credence by the knowledge that both the US and the USSR maintained stockpiles of wheat rust for just this reason during the cold war.

But Ug99 is not so easily manipulated. It is not a villain in a grand conspiracy, much less—as some millenarian Christian groups suggest—one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It is a bit player in the world theater, acting amongst and acted upon by various other agents, climactic, economic, political, biological and social, none of these divorced from the influence—some times more direct than others—of human beings. This realization may make it harder to understand than the relatively simple story peddled by competing mythologies, but it also gives us a greater capacity to intervene, at least collectively, to create a different destiny for ourselves.