Gates Foundation to Fund Experimental Food Aid Program

from the Washington Post

By Philip Rucker

UNITED NATIONS, - The world's largest philanthropy on Wednesday announced an initiative to transform the way the U.N. World Food Program purchases food by helping poor, small-scale farmers in undernourished countries of Africa and Latin America sell their surplus crops at competitive prices.

The Purchase for Progress program is designed to help combat hunger and poverty in the developing world by giving farmers, many of them women with little or no access to commercial markets, opportunities to reach reliable buyers, including the World Food Program. In a five-year pilot period, the $76 million program hopes to increase the incomes of 350,000 such farmers in 21 countries, including 15 in sub-Saharan Africa.

The program, to be administered by the World Food Program, is being funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's biggest grantmaker, and also is being supported by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the government of Belgium. It is the latest initiative focusing on small farmers for the Gates Foundation, which has committed more than $900 million to its agricultural development programs.

Purchase for Progress is one of several public-private hunger initiatives expected to be announced this week in New York, as world leaders converge at the U.N. General Assembly to draw attention to efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals, a series of benchmarks aimed at slashing the poverty levels in the world's poorest countries by 2015.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and co-chair of his foundation, said in a statement that the Purchase for Progress program is "a major step toward sustainable change that could eventually benefit millions of poor rural households in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions."

"This is exactly the kind of innovative public-private partnership we need to advance the Millennium Development Goals and address extreme hunger and poverty around the world," said Gates, who will address a special session of the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday.

The World Food Program, a humanitarian aid branch of the United Nations, feeds about 90 million people worldwide who do not have enough food. David Stevenson, the agency's director of policy, planning and strategy, said the new initiative will allow the agency to purchase more locally-raised food.

"Purchase for Progress is not about charity," Stevenson said. "In fact, far from it. It's about rewarding small-scale farmers, hard-working farmers, the majority of whom are women who are out every day working from sunrise, planting their fields in very difficult circumstances."

Hunger around the world is so chronic it far outstrips the financial resources committed to fight it, some scholars said. The World Food Program has warned of a surge in hunger that could plunge more than 100 million of the world's poorest people deeper into poverty.

The problem could grow more perilous against the backdrop of a food price shock that has been roiling world markets and igniting street riots. Over the past three years, world food prices were estimated to have surged by 80 percent -- outpacing even the 78 percent jump during the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75.

"There's a need for a much larger international response," said Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist and founder of the Millennium Promise Alliance, an anti-poverty nonprofit organization. "The Gates Foundation is playing an important role in helping people become aware of this, but in this case no single action is going to be decisive and what's really important is a scaling up of overall financing and support."

About 1.1 billion people live on $1 a day or less, and more than seven in 10 people around the world depend on work in agriculture for food and income, said Rajiv Shah, agriculture development director of the Gates Foundation.

"In order to help farmers and small farmers in part move out of poverty, you need to help them improve productivity," Shah said. "But you also need to improve access to markets and create the financial and commercial incentives so that farmers are rewarded for their additional efforts."

Shah said a preliminary test of the Purchase for Progress program in Uganda last year had "dramatic" results.

"For the first time, they had the incentive and the reward for participating in a formal and commercial market and that was transforming the way they thought about farming and agriculture and their ability to invest in their children," Shah said.

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