The Wall Street Journal-20080125-Gates Expands Farm Grants- Foundation Plans --36-900 Million Aid With Local Focus
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Gates Expands Farm Grants; Foundation Plans $900 Million Aid With Local Focus
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $306 million to six farming programs as part of a broader expansion by the charity into agricultural development.
The grants, into projects for creating higher quality coffee, rice and better irrigation technologies as well as other projects, will nearly double the amount to date that the Gates Foundation has given to agricultural projects.
By the end of 2008, the charity plans to invest a total of $900 million in agricultural-related projects.
The foundation's expansion into agriculture is being closely watched because of the mixed success of past international efforts to boost farm productivity in developing countries.
One pillar of the foundation's nascent program was inspired by the Green Revolution, a decades-long program to raise food production in Latin America, Africa and Asia. While the program achieved its goal of relieving famine, it has been widely criticized for its heavy use of fertilizers, pesticides and lack of biodiversity.
The foundation is trying to avoid those pitfalls in part by staying more focused on local conditions -- of soil and people -- than the Green Revolution did, said Rajiv Shah, director of the foundation's agricultural development program.
The current round of grants include $19.8 million to the International Rice Research Institute, which is developing a strain of "stress tolerant" rice, and $27 million to International Development Enterprises, which is working on low-cost irrigation equipment.
The largest grant, $164.5 million over five years, will go to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a project to help small- scale farms in Africa that the Gates charity runs with the Rockefeller Foundation.
Mr. Shah said that the programs focus on women, who he says run the majority of small farms in the countries targeted. Each program has set goals that will be used to judge their progress. For instance, changes in household income will be used as a metric for five of the projects, he said.
Mr. Gates spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, yesterday, offering his vision for a new kind of capitalism that benefits the poor as well as the rich.
As an example, Mr. Gates announced that Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., has teamed with Dell Inc., the Round Rock, Texas, maker of personal computers, to sell a RED-branded PC. The RED brand includes products sold by American Express Co., Apple Inc., Motorola Inc., and other companies that give a slice of the revenue to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
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Associated Press contributed to this article.
