I9DT News - "A Measure of Wheat for a Penny"

[Narrator]

Fears Grow as East Asian Rice Crop is Stricken by Blight

Pressure is mounting on the governments of several Pacific Rim countries to stop the continued spead of a blight attacking the region's major staple crop. The blight, believed to be the same disease that has attacked wheat in Europe and the Near East, as well as the millet crop in India, has now spread from Indonesia to Vietnam and China.

The origin of the disease is still a mystery, and experts who have studied it claim that they have never seen anything like it before. Upon infection, it quickly withers a plant before reducing it to little more than dust or ash. It also spreads rapidly from one plant to the next until, for some unknown reason, the process abruptly ends, leaving nothing but bare earth in its wake.

As the blight spreads, multinational organizations are now trying to address the problem on a broader scale, but so far, both the cause and the cure have remained elusive.

-BBC World Service