American academics seek to boost crop productivity to help poor farmers stave off famine

Can a wasp feed the world? It can help.

If its larvae are nurtured near millet fields where a devastating moth steals harvests from the field, they can grow to become predators that destroy the pests and save the crop. And that might put more food in more mouths and earn money for struggling farmers in the world's poorest countries.

"The science, how to increase crop productivity, is the easier part," said Gary Pierzynski, a Kansas State University researcher. "The challenge is how to get the people from these developing countries to do it."

His work to that end, and that of others on the Kansas State campus, has brought US$100 million in federal grants to the university to explore the varied and complicated questions of how to feed the world's fast-growing population amid quickening climate change.

It is an initiative to attack world hunger with better crops, smarter tactics to fight off pests and disease and more efficient distribution of harvests -all in ways that can turn profits for small-scale farmers in the poorest parts of the world. This time of year, Kansas State's wheat fields are "just mounds of dirt", said Jesse Poland, 33, director of the school's Feed the Future Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics.

In greenhouses and in his lab - amid test tubes, beakers and thousands of dollars worth of the latest equipment - Poland and his graduate students try to create bigger and more resilient offspring.