October 30, 2009
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in a speech today at the World Food Prize symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, urged a renewal of the Green Revolution to help solve world hunger and help farmers in the poorest nations.
Gates is putting some of his fortune toward solving a problem that has confounded scientists and governments for decades—reducing global hunger.
During the past three years, his foundation has committed $1.4 billion toward agricultural development—funding projects ranging from plant breeding research for higher yields to helping African farmers find new markets for their crops and assisting farmers in India to manage soil and water resources better.
In another significant announcement, the Gates Foundation is requiring independent analyses of the projects being funded to verify which ones work and which ones do not. The overall approach the foundation is taking is that investments in agriculture need to be across the entire agricultural value chain. Speaking at the 2009 World Food Prize symposium in Des Moines, Bill Gates told the audience about the need to help the world's impoverished people through agriculture. "Three quarters of the world's poorest people get their food and income by farming small plots of land," he says. "If we can make those small farmers more productive and have more profit, we can make a dramatic positive impact on hunger, nutrition and poverty."
Calls for a new version of the "Green Revolution"
Gates points out that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently estimated that developing countries will need $83 billion in agricultural investment to ensure there are sufficient global food supplies by the middle of this century. Today, one sixth of the world's children go to bed hungry every night. "That shouldn't be happening in the world today," he says.
Gates' talk in Des Moines was his first major speech on agriculture, and it was his first appearance before the annual World Food Prize event, a gathering of over 700 people, mostly food and agricultural scientists, economists and policy makers from all over the world in Des Moines. The World Food Prize Foundation is headquartered in Des Moines.
After his speech, Gates was joined on the stage by the 2009 World Food Prize laureate, Dr. Gebisa Ejeta, a renowned Ethiopian sorghum researcher now at Purdue University who was honored for his work to develop hybrids resistant to drought and the Striga weed—advances credited with increasing food security for hundreds of millions of Africans.
Gates is calling for scientists, governments, foundations, farmer groups, environmentalists and others to set aside old divisions and join forces to help millions of the world's poorest farming families boost their yields and incomes so they can lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. Gates says the effort must be guided by the farmers themselves, adapted to local circumstances, and be sustainable for the economy and the environment.
New Green Revolution must be "greener than the first one"