Gates at Davos: farming's new age

Bill Gates is making a pitch to participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, today, urging them to transform their approach to serious challenges facing developing countries.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will follow up his speech with serious money — about $306 million in grants to help poor agriculture producers in Africa and South Asia improve their operations with on-the-ground research, educational outreach to farmers and capital investments to improve product quality and market access. The grants build on the foundation's previous agriculture investments in the regions to foment something of a modern Green Revolution, which boosted agriculture development in South Asia and Mexico and saved people from starvation beginning 60 years ago.

The foundation's approach is less about imposing a template of agriculture technology created elsewhere — as critics allege — and more about tailoring research and market-access programs in partnership with producers, among them coffee growers in East Africa, and dairy farmers and rice growers in Africa and South Asia.

The largest of the new grants is aimed at restoration of a major piece of African infrastructure — its soil. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which the foundation helped create in 2006 with a grant, will receive $164.5 million to restore depleted soils that are an obstacle to healthy crops.

This will dovetail with the foundation's earlier seed program in 16 countries.

Other grants for dairy producers, who are mostly women, will help them find ways to increase milk production, store it safely and access more markets. Another grant will help disseminate an affordable foot-driven irrigation system that costs a fraction of what is available now.

The Gates Foundation's generous donations, which are luring other resources as well, are shrewd investments that will go a long way to improving the prospects of millions of people in Africa and South Asia. They give the producers a better chance to help themselves.