Microsoft’s Gates pledges $306 million for farming as Doomsday seed vault opens

Microsoft’s Bill Gates today said he would invest $306 million in grants to develop farming in poor countries.

The move is the first foray into agriculture by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which as focused on health and poverty programs. 

Announcing the grants at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates, co-chair of the foundation, said that support for agriculture in the developing world had been relatively neglected in recent decades, but was a critical tool to drive development in rural areas, where the vast majority of the world's poorest people still live, Gates’ foundation said in a release.  

The grants nearly double the foundation's investments in agriculture since the launch of its Agricultural Development initiative, part of the foundation's Global Development Program, in mid-2006. The foundation believes that with strong partnerships and a redoubled commitment to agricultural development by donor and developing country governments, philanthropy, and the private sector, hundreds of millions of small farmers will be able to boost their yields and incomes and lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. To that end, the foundation plans to invest a total of $900 million through 2008, Gates stated. 

The largest grant in the package is $164.5 million to AGRA to establish a Soil Health Program that will complement its existing Seeds Program and help small-scale farmers make full use of new high-yielding varieties of Africa's staple food crops. The Rockefeller Foundation will contribute an additional $15 million. 

The Gates news comes on the heals of the announcement that by the end of the month, seeds representing more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East will be shipped to and stored in a Norwegian storage facility dubbed the “Doomsday vault” capable of keeping them safe for thousands of years. 

The vault, which sits at the end of a 400 foot tunnel bored into the side of a Norwegian mountain,  will store to 4.5 million seed samples at about 0F degrees, according to the international agricultural research group Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, or CGIAR. 

 Most of the seeds are drawn from CGIAR’s vast seed collections.  The vault will eventually house virtually every variety of almost every important food crop in the world. The vast collection is intended as a hedge against disaster so that food production can be restarted anywhere on the planet should it be threatened by a regional or global catastrophe, CGIAR stated. It is critical that the vault have the technical capability to keep seeds cool and viable for a long period of time. 

The cornucopia of rice, wheat, beans, sorghum, sweet potatoes, lentils, chick peas and a host of other food, forage and agroforestry plants is to be safeguarded in the facility, the group said. For example, after the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004, the CGIAR-supported International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) used its collections to provide farmers with rice varieties suitable for growing in fields that had been inundated with salt water. The genebank at the CGIAR-supported International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Palmira, Colombia was instrumental in providing bean varieties to farmers in Honduras and Nicaragua in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in 1998.   

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