BILL GATES GIVES MILLIONS TO HELP SMALL FARMERS

       Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates on Thursday announced US$120 million (Bt40 billion) in grants to help small-scale farmers in Africa and indian mprove their lives through sustainable agriculture.
       The grants, announced on the eve of World Food Day, are from the Bill and Milinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic organisation 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 smallholder 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 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 fertiliser - 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.
       Crops will also be developed with the possible ravages of climate change in mind, said Gates.
       He cited a study conducted by reseacrchers at Stanford University in California which showed that if farmers in southern Africa are planting the same variety of maize, the staple food of many Africans, in 2030 as today, "the harsher conditions from climate change will reduce productivity by more than 25 per cent.
       "Declining yields at a time of rising population in a region with millions of poor people means starvation," said Gates. "We have to develop crops that can grow in a drought; that can survive in a flood; that canresist pests and diseas.