Gates swinging in new direction?

Worldwatch gets $1.3 million Gates grant to look at sustainable ag in Africa 3

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been roundly criticized in sustainable-ag circles for throwing its considerable girth behind a “New Green Revolution for Africa.”

According to critics (including me), the “green revolution” approach promotes high-tech, expensive solutions to Africa’s agriculture woes—ones more suited to the interests of a few agribusiness giants than millions of smallholder African farmers.

In a move that may be a response to such criticisms, the Gates Foundation recently announced it was awarding a $1.3 million, two-year grant to Worldwatch to look at low-cost, low-tech techniques for improving ag productivity in Africa. From the press release:

• Adding nitrogen-fixing plants into crop rotations as a low-cost solution for enriching soils and breaking weed and pest cycles;
• Overcoming freshwater shortages with rain harvesting, efficient irrigation, micro dams, and cover cropping;
• Strengthening local breeding capacity, including the use of farmer-run seed banks and genetic markers of important crop traits;
• Tapping international carbon-credit markets to reward farmers for enriching their soils and planting carbon-sequestering tree crops;
• Involving women farmers in decision-making at all levels.

Before we celebrate a new direction for the foundation, it should be noted that $1.3 million is a relatively miniscule sum for the nation’s biggest philanthropy. By contrast, the Gates Foundation (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) awarded $164 million to the Alliance for a New Green Revolution for Africa. (That discrepency reflects the ratio of the research cash the USDA plows into organic ag vs. industrial ag.)

Next week, I’ll be talking to people from Gates and Worldwatch to learn more about the new program.

 

Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow my Twitter feed; contact me at tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org.

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  1. AndyO Posted 9:43 am
    13 Jul 2009

    Thanks for covering this promising development. However, it does present an opportunity to flag a serious problem with the Indirect Land Use Costs theory that you support.Those who believe indirect land use from biofuels production is real, significant, measurable and a top problem in our climate debate make the claim, either overtly or by implication, that we must keep international commodity prices low to avoid deforestation.This policy advice, besides feeding agricultural opposition to climate action, is also directly at odds with international efforts to fight hunger. For years, dumping of cheap food commodities on world markets has been at odds with efforts to develop local food production in developing worlds and get away from the reliance on food imports.So, if most environmentailsts (count me out) want to keep commodity prices low, then you're working at odds with the goals of good hunger policy.This is just one of a long list of problems I see with ILUC theory. But it's one worth addressing. If low commodity prices are part of your global warming solution, then aren't you thereby supporting dumping policies with their impacts for local food production globally?  

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  2. Erik Hoffner's avatar

    Erik Hoffner Posted 11:13 am
    13 Jul 2009

    Holy mackerel, 164 to 1. Yikes. But agro-ecological approaches will prove out in the long run over GMOs and chemicals, so good luck to WW, truth is on your side.Erik, Orion Grassroots Network

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  3. x99x's avatar

    x99x Posted 12:23 am
    15 Jul 2009

    If you haven't already seen it, you should read Let Them Eat Cash. I really think you will not want to have missed it.

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