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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Indian echo in Gates thrust by Meghdeep Bhattacharyya

Indian echo in Gates thrust by Meghdeep Bhattacharyya

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published Published on Feb 25, 2012   modified Modified on Feb 25, 2012

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has criticised UN agencies like the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) for not doing enough to fight hunger and poverty.

“Countries, food agencies and donors aren’t working together in a focused and co-ordinated way to provide the help small farmers need, when they need it,” Gates told the governing council of the IFAD in the Italian capital yesterday.

“The international agriculture community needs to be more innovative, co-ordinated, and focused to help poor farmers grow more. If we can do that, we can dramatically reduce suffering and build self-sufficiency,” added the co-chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropic outfit run by the couple.

As he announced a $200 million (over Rs 1,000 crore) grant to fund agricultural development across the world, including in India, the foundation’s commitment to small farmers crossed $2 billion (over Rs 10,000 crore) that the philanthropic body has offered for agriculture programmes in six years.

Among the projects receiving funding from Gates is one to monitor the effects of agricultural productivity on a region’s population and environment. Other grants will build on existing projects, including the release of 34 new varieties of drought-tolerant maize and delivering vaccines to livestock.

The man behind one of the most successful IT companies in the world took care to explain the problems facing agriculture in the world. Although he was talking from a global perspective, the problems that Gates mentioned in his speech were relevant in the Indian context.

“A decline of public investment in agriculture, a drag on farm output from climate change and other problems have resulted in a fall in productivity growth…. Prices of basic foodstuffs have soared, global food stocks are low and millions of people have been pushed into food insecurity,” said Gates.

The points raised by the millionaire philanthropist may endear him to the Left parties in India as they highlight issues such as fall in public investment in agriculture and supply side bottlenecks that have pushed up prices of food items and contributed to poverty. These are points the communists have often raised.

Gates, however, felt that there was hope and said that the foundation estimated that small farmers in South Asia, with focussed and timely assistance, had the capacity to double their yields in the next two decades.

The impact of such productivity increases would translate into 400 million (40 crore) people lifting themselves out of poverty, he said.

Gates called on the UN agencies to create a “global productivity target” for small farmers and to make public scorecards to measure how governments, agencies and donors were contributing to reduce poverty.

“When Melinda and I started our foundation more than a decade ago, we initially focused on inequities in global health. But as we spent more time learning about the diseases of poverty, we realised that many of the poorest people in the world were small farmers…. The conclusion was obvious. They could lift their families up by growing more food,” he added.

The Telegraph, 25 February, 2012, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120225/jsp/nation/story_15177529.jsp


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