o the fruit fly,” he said.
“At one project in North Vietnam, 10 to 15 years ago we came across young children who had never eaten fruit before,” he said. “Now, as a result of what we did, kids were tasting fruit for the first time.”
His work has helped changed subsistence farming to small commercial farming where growers are selling their excess produce to fund equipment purchases.
“It’s helped some farmers buy motorbikes, even a house,” Professor Drew said.
The beauty of his Queensland fruit fly knockout is that it can be replicated for other types of fruit flies.
“The colour will change. We’ve already done that work for most pest species in Australia,” said one of the world’s foremost experts in fruit flies.. “We just have to work it out for South East Asia and the Pacific and that’s fairly simple.”
Already, a number of countries have sought his expertise to tailor his unique lure and bait system to further combat the damage caused by fruit flies.
That’s a knockout for Professor Drew, courtesy of a cunning fruit punch.