But all these threats pale almost into insignificance by comparison with the confirmation by the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) that an organism with the ugly name of Ug99 has crossed the Red Sea.

Ug99 threatens global famine.

It is the name for a variant of stem rust, a form of wheat disease, which was first identified in Uganda in 1999, hence its name. It is devastatingly damaging to wheat, and so far agricultural scientists have not been able to find an effective defense against it. Ug99 has defeated the two main gene complexes, Sr 31 and Sr 24, which protect most wheat strains from stem rust. It appears to resist most fungicides.

Of the 50 genes we know for resistance to stem rust, only 10 work even partially against Ug99, warns Rock Ward, leading the fight against it at the international Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. Less than 1 percent of the world's wheat crops contain these genes.

After being restricted to East Africa, Ug99 has now been identified in Yemen, and the FAO now reports that it (or something very like it) has also been spotted in Iran. Spread by the wind, it is not easy to stop or to control, and the prospect that it almost inevitably spreads east into the Indian sub-continent and north in Russia and then to Europe is nothing short of nightmarish.

The FAO says that some 65 million hectares of wheat, which produce about a quarter of the global wheat harvest, are now directly under threat. It gets worse. Over two-thirds of the wheat strains in North America are vulnerable to this disease.

And this comes at a time when world wheat reserves are at their lowest level since records were first kept, and when there are global shortages of other staple foods like rice.

This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction," says Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, now 93 and known as the father of the Green Revolution in agriculture.

"We know what to do and how to do it. All we need are the financial resources, scientific cooperation and political will to contain this threat to world food security," Borlaug adds.

Forget about Israel and Palestine, about Muslims and Christians. The human race could be facing mass famine. The sooner we take Borlaug's advice with a global crash program against Ug99, the better.