The mushroom crisis is growing! It threatens the global food supply, according to experts

Stating that the rapidly increasing fungal attacks on the world’s most important products threaten the future food supply of the planet, scientists warned that failure to combat fungal pathogens could lead to a “global health disaster”.

Fungi are already by far the biggest destroyers of crops. Mushrooms are quite resilient and can travel long distances with the wind. They are also highly adaptable and reportedly many have developed resistance to common fungicides.

The impact of fungal diseases is expected to worsen as the climate crisis causes temperatures to rise and fungal infections increasingly move towards the poles, the researchers say. Fungal pathogens have been moving to higher latitudes at a rate of about 7 km per year since the 1990s. Wheat straw infections, normally seen in the tropics, have even begun to be reported in the UK and Ireland. Experts state that there is a risk of transmission of fungal pathogens, which adapt to increasing temperatures, to humans.

We won’t be zombies, but we can starve!

The scientists say that higher temperatures are causing new variants of fungal pathogens to emerge, while more extreme storms can spread fungal spores farther. Prof Sarah Gurr of the University of Exeter, co-author of the study on the subject, said that the fungi had recently drawn public attention through the popular TV series The Last of Us, in which fungi infect human brains: “While this story is science fiction, the rapid global spread of fungal infections “We are warning that we may face a global health catastrophe that it will cause. The imminent threat here is not about zombies, it is about global hunger.”

The warning, in an article published in the science journal Nature, stated that growers have already lost between 10 percent and 23 percent of their crops to fungal disease. Infections in the five most important crops—rice, wheat, corn, soybeans and potatoes—are causing annual losses that could feed hundreds of millions of people.

Medicines are not enough

Fungicides are widely used, but fungi are rapidly developing resistance to these pesticides. So scientists think the solution lies in planting mixtures of seeds that carry a set of genes that are resistant to fungal infection. In 2022, about a quarter of the wheat in Denmark was grown this way. According to scientists, technology can also help; drones and artificial intelligence can enable earlier detection and control of outbreaks.

Thanks to compounds recently discovered by a team at the University of Exeter, chemicals are being developed that target various biological processes in fungi, making resistance development much more difficult. However, the scientists underline that fungal pathogen research is seriously underfunded.