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A Green Revolution for Africa?

from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)

“When we started,” Rajiv Shah recalled over a late-evening coffee at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, “developing-world agriculture seemed very much out of fashion.” That was before the food riots and rice tariffs and dire predictions of mass starvation that accompanied the global rise in food prices last spring.

And it was before the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for which Shah has worked since 2001, made agriculture, particularly African agriculture, a top priority. Agriculture may have been unfashionable four years ago, when Shah and others on the foundation’s “strategic opportunities” team began discussing an agriculture initiative, but it is fashionable now.

This is partly a result of market forces leading to the prospect of severe food shortages; but it is also partly because of the market-making power of the Gates Foundation itself. Bill Gates began this year with a promise to nearly double the foundation’s commitment to agricultural development with $306 million in additional grants.