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Norman Borlaug is a hero. Like the warrior Beowulf, subject of the Old English epic poem, Borlaug slew a monster, saved his world and lived to a ripe old age. Like Beowulf, this old warrior of science has had to climb back into armour to battle the rise of a new monster. And once again, the world is looking to him for salvation.

In 1970, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for saving hundreds of millions of people from starvation. The monster he slew was stem rust: a devastating fungus that has plagued the world's wheat fields since Roman times. He did it by breeding a slew of powerful new varieties of wheat that could defend themselves against the scourge.

Yields doubled and tripled, ushering the Green Revolution across Asia and Latin America and averting the impending starvation of millions. Suddenly, food was bountiful. That victory was achieved 50 years ago in Mexico. The wheats he bred protected much of the world from the rust monster.

But now stem rust has awoken from a long sleep and is again threatening the world's food supplies: a virulent new strain appeared in Uganda in 1999, and it is on the march across the planet. While humanity rested on its laurels, the fungus spread to Kenya, Ethiopia and Sudan, then jumped the Red Sea to Yemen. In 2007 it reached Iran. Now, like a cobra, it is poised to strike the major breadbasket of Asia – the Punjabi plains of Pakistan and India.

If it strikes, crop yields will crash and millions will go hungry. It could not come at a worse time: the world's food reserves are running low. Granary stocks worldwide once held enough to last 100 days; due to a combination of climate change hammering yields and the growing competition from biofuels, the global granary is now down to 30 days. It's part of the reason why grain prices spiked in early 2008, triggering food riots from Haiti to Bangladesh.

"It's a train wreck," says Thomas Lumpkin, the director-general of CIMMYT, or Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre) in Mexico. Now add stem rust to this picture and it's not a slow-motion train wreck, but a nuclear bomb ticking in the background. A major outbreak in Asia could empty global granaries overnight.

WHEAT SUFFERS FROM many diseases, but stem rust is the most ruthless – it gorges on the sugars bound to the grain and then erupts on the stem in rusty pustules. These then explode into vast red spore clouds that spread their destructive force across continents and oceans. In the 1950s, stem rust halved wheat yields in many U.S. states. In the 1970s, it crossed the Indian Ocean from Africa to wipe A$300 million off Australia's wheat harvests.

But fundamentally it's back to the old Malthusian problem, first outlined in 1798 by the English scholar Thomas Robert Malthus: booming populations eventually overwhelm their food supplies and face starvation. Today, the rate of global population growth is rising faster than our ability to produce food. Take a look at wheat: the average annual yield increase is less than 1% but, according to Lumpkin, the world needs a 1.5% increase each year just to keep up with consumption.

We have been slowly descending again into the Malthusian scenario faced by India and Pakistan in the 1960s – so you would think the world would be rallying to the emergency. They haven't. Political leaders have forgotten the wisdom of Socrates: "No man qualifies as a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat."

When the stem rust monster awoke in Africa in 1999, few had any memory of its menace. Those who could battle the threat – the world's international agricultural research centres – are these days run by an army of threadbare foot soldiers relying on scatty intelligence and carrying minimal clout.

Their political masters and the global financers who trade in food had grown complacent in the years of plenty. Lumpkin told me, "As an agronomy professor at Washington State University, I taught about the glories of CIMMYT [where Borlaug fomented the Green Revolution]. When I arrived, I found ceilings that hadn't been changed for 50 years and broken-down equipment."

The warning cries of the world's agricultural scientists were ignored. So in 2005, Borlaug, the old knight, trumpeted the alarm and again rode into battle. He was 91 when he convened the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, a gathering of the world's leading wheat experts from 40 countries, which met in Kenya.

There, he galvanised the disparate national and global agencies into a coalition of the willing. And he attracted US$26 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to begin the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat initiative – a global project co-ordinated by Cornell University in New York State to speed up the breeding of new resistant wheat varieties.

Borlaug is revered for many things: his skill as a wheat breeder, his pragmatic humanism, his unwavering focus on feeding the world, his internationalism. But not for his saintly disposition. A college wrestling champion, Borlaug is tough. His success in fomenting the Green Revolution was as much due to bull-headed determination as to his skills as a breeder. And he is fearless about wading into policy and politics. Which is just what this global battle needed.

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