EAST LANSING (AP) — Michigan State University will lead a
$25 million collaborative effort to get more nutritious food to the
world’s poor, financed by a foundation set up by Microsoft
Corp. Chairman Bill Gates.

EAST LANSING (AP) — Michigan State University will lead a
$25 million collaborative effort to get more nutritious food to the
world’s poor, financed by a foundation set up by Microsoft
Corp. Chairman Bill Gates.

HarvestPlus, an alliance of research institutions and agencies,
will use the money for a four-year project on biofortification,
which crossbreeds crops with high nutritional value and those that
are high-yielding and disease resistant, says organization Director
Howarth Bouis.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced the grant last
month, saying the goal is to provide people in poor and developing
countries with food already fortified with vitamins and mineral
nutrients.

Worldwide, “half the instances of death among children
have malnutrition as important contributory causes,” said
David Fleming, director of the foundation’s global health
program.

HarvestPlus offers a strategic approach that would address the
problem of malnutrition, he said.

Michigan State is the coordinating institution of a team of
three that make up the Nutritional Genomics team of
HarvestPlus.

“The project seeks to bring the full potential of
agricultural science, genetics, molecular biology and genomics to
bear on the persistent problem of micronutrient malnutrition in the
developing world,” Michigan State said in a news release.

“Micronutrient malnutrition affects more than half of the
world’s population, especially women and children,”
said Dean DellaPenna, a Michigan State professor of biochemistry
and molecular biology.

“The costs of these deficiencies in terms of lives lost,
forgone economic growth and poor quality of life are
staggering.”

Michigan State said that until now, plant science in agriculture
has had to focus on increasing yield and resistance to pests and
pathogens to feed the growing world population.

While this has been successful, it has given rise to an
increasing reliance on a limited number of staple crops, DellaPenna
said. As a result, diets across the world have less variety, such
that even when caloric needs are met, many essential micronutrients
are lacking.

The developed world addressed this issue in the early 1930s and
’40s by fortifying foods with the essential vitamins and
minerals, such as iodine in salt and vitamins and minerals in
cereal, milk and flour, for example.

Yet reaching the necessary populations in most developing
countries with fortification is difficult or impossible, Michigan
State said.

It said creating staple crops with more and balanced
micronutrients provides the opportunity for many people in
developing countries to have better daily nutrition and better
health.

The programs hopes to get improved varieties of crops to the
world’s farmers within a decade, Bouis said.

Michigan State began concentrating on biotechnology began in
1998, when it recruited top academics and graduate students in the
field. Since then, federal agency grants alone have almost doubled,
to $196 million a year.

“We must be aggressive. We want to be leaders,” Ian
Gray, director of the school’s Michigan Agricultural
Experiment Station, told The Detroit News.