Smart Seeds, Smart Crops

New drug- and drought-tolerant crops could mitigate the growing food crisis, according to Syngenta CEO Mike Mack.

Almost a decade ago, there was a meeting of world leaders who agreed to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, which called for, among other things, halving world hunger between 1990 and 2015. The percentage of the world living in hunger had been in decline, but with attention now focused on the global financial crisis and food prices much higher than in the past, achieving that goal appears unlikely.

A number of companies--such as Basel, Switzerland-based Syngenta (nyse: SYT - news - people ); St. Louis-based Monsanto (nyse: MON - news - people ); Indianapolis-based Dow Agrosciences, a division of Dow Chemical (nyse: DOW - news - people ); and Ludwigshafen, Germany-based BASF (nyse: BF - news - people )--are trying to do something about this. These companies have been developing innovative new technologies to enhance food production

We spoke with the chief executive officer of Syngenta, Mike Mack, to find out exactly what his company is doing--and whether companies like his can help to make progress against rising world hunger.

Forbes: Syngenta is playing a critical role in enhancing food production. What kinds of innovative new technologies are you developing and how will they contribute to alleviating world hunger?

Mack: World hunger is a serious problem, especially when you consider it from the vantage point of limited land availability. When you look at land already under cultivation, there are about 150 million additional hectares of land that could be brought under cultivation. But that alone is not a good idea from a sustainability point of view. Instead, we need to look at enhancing a plant's potential life. We see limitless potential for crops and for all kinds of vegetable seeds to create more food, more fuel and more fiber. There is lots of innovation taking place here, but it is still an area that needs to be more fully explored.

So what are some of the innovations under way right now that could help to alleviate this pending food shortage crisis?

In the area of seed development, our ability to understand the genome of the crops gets better all the time, and so the pace of innovation is speeding up a great deal. We are increasing our knowledge of the plant so that we can understand how gene reactions occur and incorporate that information into seeds to come up with new varieties.