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Klobuchar Supports Lab That Protects World's Grain Crops

Despite new dangers to grain crops, lab is threatened with budget cuts

May 28, 2008

Saint Paul, MN -- Fighting threatened budget cuts, U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar met with scientists at the Cereal Research Laboratory to tour their facilities and discuss their efforts to protect the world’s grain crops from devastating diseases that could drive up food prices and leave millions of people facing starvation.

The University of Minnesota’s Saint Paul campus is home to the lab, which is considered the grain equivalent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Lab is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service and is operated in cooperation with the University of Minnesota.

“With food prices already climbing higher, we can’t afford to put our major crops at risk,” said Klobuchar, who serves on the Senate Agriculture Committee.  “Healthy wheat and other cereal crops are essential to meeting the world’s food needs, keeping food prices affordable and maintaining a strong agricultural economy.”

For more than 80 years, the Cereal Research Lab has served as an early warning system for detecting and stopping the spread of diseases that can devastate cereal crops like wheat, oats and barley.  Wheat alone represents nearly one third of the world’s grain-crop production and provides about 20 percent of the world’s food calories.

Of particular concern is a dangerous new strain of black stem rust, called Ug99 for its 1999 discovery in Uganda, which has spread to Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Iran. Most commercial wheat has no resistance to the disease. The threat comes at a time when wheat stockpiles have shrunk because of bad weather and strong demand for wheat-based foods.

A report this spring by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said that Ug99 is spreading and could affect one-quarter of the world’s wheat crop.

President Bush’s 2009 budget threatens to cut more than $300,000 in federal funding for the Cereal Research Lab.  This and other proposed cuts in agricultural research have been criticized as “shocking short-sightedness” by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, a University of Minnesota graduate who is known as the father of the “Green Revolution” which has dramatically increased agricultural production worldwide since the 1940s.

Klobuchar said she will work to restore the Lab’s funding in the agricultural appropriations bill.

“The United States needs to be on the front lines of this vital research to protect our food supply,” said Klobuchar.  “It is a clear case of misplaced priorities for the administration to cut support for this research at a time when food prices are going up and our food supplies are threatened.”


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