Can Bill Gates Help Africa Feed Itself?By VIVIENNE WALT / PARIS
The global economy might be reeling from the shakeout on Wall Street, but two of the world's richest businessmen are vowing to spend tens of millions of dollars more - not on bolstering their own companies, but in helping the world's poorest. With Congress locked in talks over a mammoth bailout package, Bill Gates and Howard Buffett (Warren's oldest son) announced at the United Nations on Wednesday that their private foundations will plow more than $75 million into helping small farmers in Africa and Latin America to sell their crops as food aid - a move which could potentially overhaul the decades-old - and often criticized - global food aid system.
Under a five-year pilot project called Purchase for Progress, the foundations will help 350,000 or so small farmers in 21 countries, most of them in Africa, to grow food for the U.N.'s World Food Program, the biggest food aid distributor in Africa. Rather than simply buying the farmers' crops outright, much of the money will go to teaching better farming methods, and to helping them store their crops in warehouses, plant higher-yield seeds, and transport their produce to customers. Those are all serious obstacles for poor farmers, many of whom find it almost impossible to eke out more than a bare-bones existence from their plots.
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