According to Sun News Bill Gates is granting millions to Africa and India for farming. Well maybe he can throw Detroit in that pool also considering close to half the city is unoccupied and the only hope of reviving the city is adapting the urban farming concept.
Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates on Thursday announced 120 million dollars in grants to help small-scale farmers in Africa and India improve their lives through sustainable agriculture.
The grants, announced on the eve of World Food Day, are from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic organization co-chaired by Gates and his wife.
“Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people get their food and income by farming small plots of land,” Gates said as he announced grants to nine projects, mostly in Africa, during a speech to the World Food Prize Symposium in Iowa.
“So if we can make small-holder farming more productive and more profitable, we can have a massive impact on hunger and nutrition and poverty.” Gates also paid tribute to the late Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who is often called the father of the Green Revolution and who has been credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives by developing disease-resistant wheat.
The Green Revolution “was one of the great achievements of the 20th century, but it didn’t go far enough,” said Gates. “It didn’t go to Africa,” where the bulk of the grant money announced by Gates on Thursday will go.
In keeping with the Gates Foundation’s approach to promoting development, which Gates described as “investing across the value chain in ways that will benefit small farmers and their communities,” the grants will help “bring the technology that has transformed farming in other parts of the world” to Africa and India.
Funds will be used to promote the development of crops which can help the environment such as legumes, which are a natural fertilizer or improve health, such as a new variety of sweet potato enriched in Vitamin A, which is often missing from the diets of children in the developing world.
