MALNUTRITION: Funding of agricultural development

International agricultural development acquired a significant new player last December when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — the biggest private foundation in the world, with US$37 billion under its control — announced that it was joining the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
When the Gates Foundation launched its own agricultural programmes a few years ago its goal was hugely ambitious, namely to develop and introduce 400 new and improved crop varieties to help eliminate hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, while also bringing some 15 million people out of poverty.
At the time, Bill Gates said: "No major region around the world has been able to make sustained economic gains without first making significant improvements in agricultural productivity".
The Gates Foundation's arrival on the CGIAR scene has provided a financial boost to the consultative group — an international network of governments and organisations that funds 15 renowned agricultural research centres, together credited with spearheading major improvements in crop productivity, such as those responsible for the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s.
The foundation's engagement may also have shored up elaborate and controversial reforms to the way that the CGIAR operates that were agreed at a CGIAR business meeting in December in Washington DC, and might otherwise have been in danger of collapsing (See Gates Foundation joins global crop research network).
But with money comes clout. Many are now wondering what degree of influence the foundation will have over the way that the CGIAR operates and spends its money, and what the net impact of this will be on strategies for using agricultural research to meet the world's need for food.
Undue influence?
Bill Gates' impact on agricultural research through the foundation set up by him and his wife, which describes its first guiding principle as being "driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family", has had a meteoric rise.
Even before the December announcement, the foundation had channelled around US$260–270 million through the CGIAR system, in particular through grants to centres such as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico. A further US$1.1 billion has gone through separate channels into agriculture in developing countries.
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