At the Seattle Asian Art Museum on a Saturday morning, traditional culture meets modern fitness -- a group of people splayed out on the marble floor practice yoga in a gallery surrounded by statues of Indian gods.

COURTESY OF RDI

Attorney Renee Giovarelli works to improve rights of women in Kyrgyzstan through the Rural Development Institute.

Later they gather inside the auditorium to hear Seattle attorney Renee Giovarelli describe the status of women's property rights in various parts of Asia, and its connection to hunger and poverty.

The scene represents the kind of engaging community salon that the "Saturday University" aims to create. Local universities, nonprofits and other institutions have deep expertise in Asia, but they don't always have a way to share it with the public.

"It should be a sense of pride for Seattle that those organizations are here," said former Seattle Art Museum director Mimi Gardner Gates, who conceived the series. Through the Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas, she hopes to introduce topics related to Asia, encourage community discussion and do it in a way that is fun.

GREG GILBERT/SEATTLE TIMES

Mimi Gardner Gates returns to her roots in Chinese art with a center focused on Asia at SAAM.

Continuing this month, the lectures explore "Health, Sex and Women's Rights in Contemporary Asia," accompanied by a series of films that were hits in their home countries but relatively unknown outside.

The series, "Guilty Pleasures," includes popular films from India, Japan, the Philippines and China. Each one is introduced by a film expert from the University of Washington.

Tomorrow speakers from the Gates Foundation and PATH will talk about Asia as a frontier in the battle for health equity. Each of the Saturday programs, which are co-sponsored by the World Affairs Council, starts with an optional yoga session by 8 Limbs Yoga.

In the spring, the Saturday University will explore the ways Asian religions are expressed in contemporary society, politics and the arts.

While the programs are held in the museum, the approach "appeals to people who aren't necessarily the art crowd," Gates said. "I love the idea of it being a center for people who are curious about Asia."

Coca-Cola is easily one of the most recognized brands in the world. Could linking some of the most impoverished people in Africa to the corporate giant's supply chain be a win-win for both?

The Gates Foundation is funding a project to help farmers in Kenya and Uganda produce fruit for Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola says the farmers can help it meet a critical need to increase production as global and local demand for fruit juice grows.

ELLEN CREAGER/MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

The ubiquitous Coca-Cola brand reaches every corner of the world.

The $7.5 million Gates grant will go to TechnoServe, a U.S.-based nonprofit, to train mango and passion-fruit farmers to improve their quality and increase production, and to provide the farmers with credit.

TechnoServe works with large corporations like Coca-Cola, using a private sector approach to align corporate interests with those of small enterprises in developing countries, and increase profits for both.

The project aims to bring 50,000 farmers into Coca-Cola's supply chain for the first time and to double their incomes by 2014.

For some perspective on this new partnership, I asked Chris MacDonald, a business ethics expert who teaches at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada and is a Senior Fellow at Duke University. He has written about Coca-Cola's work in developing countries, including this report on an African water project.

"This clearly seems like a positive thing, over all," he said in an email about the new Gates-funded partnership. But the way it's set up makes all the difference. "It would be best if these farmers are being brought into Coca Cola's supply chain in a way that doesn't leave them dependent on it," he said. "Being dependent on the purchasing whims of any particular company seems dangerous, maybe a mixed blessing."

I also checked the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, which keeps track of the record of many companies, including Coca-Cola. The company has come under fire for its water use in India. Yet it has also taken steps to build or repair water infrastructure in African countries.

Coca-Cola said the partnership will also serve as a model for the way it approaches other developing country markets where it does business.The four-year, $11.5 million partnership includes a $3 million contribution by Coca-Cola and $1 million from its bottling partner Coca-Cola Sabco.

Including loans to farmers as part of the project also raises some questions. "Anything that requires farmers to go into debt is at least a little worrisome," MacDonald said. While debt can be useful for people expecting incomes to rise, "I hope those farmers are getting some good, impartial advice about their financial planning."

The Gates Foundation's longer term goals for African agricultural development are eradicating poverty and improving food security. With a company whose main product isn't healthy, "there's reason to be worried about the company extending its reach, and hence its market, into more and poorer countries," MacDonald said.

The new face of U.S. foreign assistance stared into my living room from the TV screen, looking very familiar. There was Rajiv Shah, the former Gates Foundation agricultural development director, being interviewed by Jim Lehrer about Haiti.

Just when I was getting ready to write about how Shah must prepare to tackle things like streamlining bureaucracy, localizing programs and funding, and strengthening support for democratic governance (no pressure), along comes the biggest disaster in two centuries, striking an already fragile nation 700 miles from Miami. Now Shah, 36, is leading U.S. relief efforts just six days after being sworn into office.

COURTESY OF USAID

Rajiv Shah is sworn in as USAID Administrator as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Shah's family look on. Shah had supported her presidential campaign.

It's interesting to think that Shah was chosen to head the organization after the humanitarian physician Paul Farmer pulled out of the running last summer. Farmer, chairman of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, had dedicated so much of his life to improving health conditions in Haiti through Partners in Health that he would have seemed almost destined for that moment.

At Shah's swearing in ceremony, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded his passion, vision and quiet humility, his degrees in medicine and business and experience with the Gates Foundation. "He brings determination and an unwavering belief that anything is possible," she said.

Shah, in turn, said that belief "was founded on our country's rich experience turning crisis into progress."

Shah talked about the necessity of reforming USAID to create stronger local systems in the countries it helps, staying focused on tracking progress and elevating the position of women and girls. Now more than ever the world has the ability -- and the technology -- to create massive improvements in the human condition, he said.

"We find ourselves in a unique moment of opportunity," he said. "A powerful consensus has formed that development is vital both to our national security and the shared interests of an interconnected world."

On TV tonight Shah looked like he hadn't slept in a long time. He talked about President Obama's commitment to focus U.S. efforts around saving lives in the first 72 hours after the quake, working with various branches of the federal government and in partnership with other countries to be as effective as possible. He projected a steady, smart and genuine presence.

Shah's first major test is also an opportunity for the country to show a struggling neighbor how it intends to redefine its role in the world.

Sam Dryden, an investor and entrepreneur, was named the Gates Foundation's new director of agricultural development today.

Dryden, a managing director of New York-based Wolfensohn & Company, an investment company, will begin the new post on Feb. 1. He replaces Dr. Rajiv Shah, who was sworn in Thursday as the administrator for USAID.

"Sam brings a wealth of experience to the foundation -- not only in agriculture, research and business, but also in a wide variety of projects related to agricultural development and public-private partnerships," said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation's Global Development Program. "His strong leadership qualities will help the team deliver on our strategy to help small farmers improve their lives."

In his new position, Dryden will lead a team attempting to help the world's poorest farming families boost productivity and incomes with better seeds, management training, access to markets and effective policies. The foundation, which has targeted agricultural improvements as one of its core missions, has committed $1.4 billion to agricultural development initiatives in Africa and South Asia.

Dryden has written and lectured widely on food security and economic development issues and served as an adviser on rural development for the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation.

At Wolfensohn, which was founded by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, Dryden focused on investments in alternative energies. He formerly headed Emergent Genetics, which develops and markets seeds. Emergent Genetics, the third largest cotton seed company in the U.S., was acquired by Monsanto in 2005 in a $300 million deal.

The foundation's choice of Dryden raises a red flag for organizations that advocate against genetically modified crops, Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center on Food Safety, told the AP.

"Appointing someone like this as head of their agriculture project is a bad sign," Freese said.

Dryden has also been president and chief executive of Agrigenetics, a seed company now part of Dow AgroSciences, and was founder of Big Stone, a private venture and development company. His career began as an analyst with the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Dryden has 25 years of experience as an investor and entrepreneur in the life sciences. He has served on a number of international boards and commissions focused on agriculture development, economic development and food security.

Two recent grants and a $10 million investment by the Gates Foundation aim to boost access to education and capital for African agriculture.

A $1 million grant today to Michigan State University will support a pilot project to create a virtual hub of agricultural education material.

The MSU researchers will work with African educators to develop material designed to improve agricultural practices in an 18-month project called AgShare Open Education Resources. The idea is to develop curriculum in the public domain to share freely among agricultural universities, NGOs and farmers around Africa.

DEBBIE DEVOE/CRS

Kenyan farmer Mildred Agola and her husband Patrick Karandi, left, greet partners in a Catholic Relief Services-led project to stem the spread of two diseases affecting the cassava plant. The project was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Michigan State University received a $10.4 million grant from the Gates Foundation last year to train African biosafety regulators on the latest advances in technology. Members of the African Biosafety Network of Expertise are taking classes and working with MSU faculty to learn about biotechnology issues affecting small farmers.

The Gates Foundation is also using newly designated funds for Program-Related Investing to make a $10 million investment in Root Capital, based in Cambridge, Mass.

Root Capital funds grassroots enterprises in developing countries, loaning to small businesses that often fall through the cracks between microcredit and commercial banks.

Root Capital said it will use the Gates funding to expand its operations in sub-Saharan Africa, providing access to credit, financial management training and global market opportunities to small and growing rural businesses. Root Capital also received a $4 million operating grant from the Gates Foundation to support a five-year growth plan to achieve a financially sustainable lending program by 2013.

Speaking of increasing agricultural knowledge, a local technology non-profit called Literacy Bridge has reported successful results from its own pilot program. Founded by Cliff Schmidt, a former U.S. Navy nuclear engineer, Literacy Bridge makes a $10 portable audio computer called the Talking Book. The device (pictured below) is designed to spread knowledge among populations with low literacy rates. It can be used to play and record hours of messages, and recordings can be shared from one book to another.

Working with agriculture, education and health officials in Ghana, Literacy Bridge produced content for Talking Books with such basic advice as when to start clearing farms, how to plant rows and when to start sowing beans.

Literacy Bridge delivered 21 Talking Books to a small village, to be managed by local leaders and shared by residents. After the first year, the program helped achieve a 73 percent increase in crop production and a $45,000 increase in crop value, the non-profit reported last month.

The Gates Foundation is getting some criticism from a local food co-op for supporting research into genetically modified crops to increase production in Africa.

PCC Natural Markets, the Seattle-based food co-operative, published a letter and editor's note this month taking a strong stance against genetic engineering of food.

"I caution the organic community to be watchful of this NEW Green Revolution, especially since The Gates Foundation science and technology efforts are led by a former Monsanto researcher,"
Dennis L. Weaver wrote in PCC's Sound Consumer.

"The Gates Foundation apparently is pushing genetically modified crops on African farmers," PCC editor Trudy Bialic added. She cited a $42 million Gates grant to a project involving Monsanto to produce corn resistant to drought "even though genetic engineering has failed to increase crop yields significantly, despite 20 years of research."

PCC, which has nine stores in the Puget Sound region and 47,000 members, is the largest consumer-owned natural food co-operative in the United States. Its staff writes a monthly report about issues in food safety and nutrition aimed at consumers.

Mark Suzman, director of policy and advocacy in the Gates Foundation's global development program, responded in a letter to PCC that the foundation is investing in a broad array of approaches and paying attention to environmental and economic sustainability.

"Most of our grants to improve seed quality use conventional breeding," Suzman wrote. "We include biotechnology when we believe there is potential to help farmers confront drought and disease, or to increase the nutritional content of food, faster or more effectively than conventional breeding alone."

The criticism by advocates of organic agriculture isn't new but illustrates a politically charged split over food, one that Bill Gates acknowledged in a speech in October at the World Food Prize symposium.

Gates said some critics are "instantly hostile to any emphasis on productivity," and that such an "ideological wedge" could thwart major breakthroughs to help farmers deal with the effects of climate change.

"The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability -- and there is no reason we can't have both," he said.

But the local reaction reveals ongoing skepticism, even among an audience generally not at odds with Gates philanthropy.

"The organic community cannot buy into Bill's call to 'Let's just all hold hands, sing kumbaya, hug, air-kiss and "'get over" past "ideological" divides,' " Weaver wrote to PCC.

"I don't know exactly what is motivating the Gates Foundation to buy into the propaganda," Bialic said. "I think it's an ideology that technology can save the world."

By Sandi Doughton

Fear is as infectious as any virus, and gives many Americans a warped view of the dangers posed by vaccines, genetically engineered crops and other beneficial technologies, New Yorker writer Michael Specter said in Seattle Tuesday.

Touting his new book "Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens our Lives," Specter took aim at the kind of anti-science sentiment he says is hijacking public discourse and policy.

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Ice sculptures by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo melt on the steps of Berlin's Concert Hall in a WWF event aimed at calling attention to the earth's melting poles. Specter's book on denialism has been criticized for not tackling the issue of global warming.

"We need to step back and look at the other side of every issue - and we never do," Specter said at a lecture at the University of Washington sponsored by the World Affairs Council.

He was particularly critical of parents, like many who live on Vashon Island, who refuse to vaccinate their children. "This is insane," he said. "Vaccines are the most effective public health measure in the history of the world, except for clean water."

Study after study has shown no evidence that vaccines cause autism, yet people ignore a mountain of data and instead focus on unproven horror stories from neighbors or things they read on the Web, he said. "People jump to conclusions. They decide what makes sense to them intuitively."

While vaccination rates climb in the developing world, they are dropping in the United States and Western Europe - endangering more than the families who chose not to give their kids the shots, Specter said. Last year, children in Minnesota died of haemophilus influenzae for the first time since a vaccine was introduced 18 years ago.

Specter has written for The New Yorker about Bill Gates and his technologically-oriented crusade to improve global health. He's also covered the quest to develop synthetic life-forms, the AIDS epidemic and computer hackers.

Specter's Seattle audience was receptive to his pro-science message, but others have accused him of uncritically accepting arguments in favor of genetically engineered crops. See Tom Philpott's take in Grist.

The same review in Grist also took Specter to task for failing to grapple with the growing numbers of Americans who reject the overwhelming scientific evidence for global warming.

But Specter said he intentionally left that out because it's already been extensively covered.

The Obama administration has found yet another job for Rajiv Shah, the former Gates Foundation executive who has spent the past five months at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

DEAN RUTZ/SEATTLE TIMES

Shah, 36, has been nominated to head the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), according to reports quoting unnamed U.S. officials.

Shah was running the Gates Foundation's agriculture development program when he was tapped for the agricultural post as Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, as well as chief scientist, at the USDA.

Shah holds degrees in medicine and economics. A health care policy adviser on Al Gore's presidential campaign, Shah joined the Gates Foundation in 2001 where he worked as policy analyst and senior economist and developed an innovative program for vaccine financing. He served as director of strategic opportunities and deputy director of policy and finance for the global health program. While in Seattle, Shah served on the boards of the Seattle Public Library and the Seattle Community College District.

Meanwhile the top job at America's foreign assistance program has gone vacant for nine months at a time when the program and the Foreign Assistance Act need serious revamping, development experts say. The USAID's international affairs budget request for 2009 was close to $40 billion.

The Gates Foundation has shown its growing clout in the capital with Bill Gates among Obama's first visitors to the White House, influencing education policy, and Bill and Melinda Gates recently appearing before policy makers in Washington D.C., calling on them to maintain the U.S. commitment to foreign aid and global health funding.

Why Shah? It helps that he has already gone through the official vetting process, which has put off other candidates.

Senators John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Dick Lugar, the committee's top Republican, last month urged Obama to speed things up, saying that efforts to support the president's development agenda were being "hampered by a leadership vacuum" at USAID.

Food quantity or food quality? Can the world quell starvation now and still have a healthy ecosystem over the long term?

Tough questions for anyone concerned about agriculture and its relation to hunger and poverty.

In a keynote speech at the World Food Prize symposium today, Bill Gates said he supports sustainable agriculture, welcome words to experts in the field, who say there is no short term fix.

Much as he changed the landscape on health, the world's richest philanthropist is trying to spark a new revolution in agriculture. The first Green Revolution improved crop yields, but at the expense of the environment. This time, there may be a chance to get it right.

"Sustainability takes more time, more learning, more people," said John Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science at Washington State University. "In the long run it pays huge dividends."

"I really like the fact that here we have this huge philanthropic foundation and they're really trying to help Africa and South Asia," he said. "I don't mind hearing we want to feed people, we want to raise yields, improve their income, get roads and markets in there."

But Reganold said he would like to hear more about how sustainability will be measured and valued. "We tend to go in and say wow, we improved yields," he said. "That's great because these people need to eat. At the same time I'd like to hear wow, we improved the soil so that down the road they're going to be better off."

"They say the right thing, but I'm not sure they're doing the right thing yet," said Hans Herren, a Swiss scientist who won the World Food Prize in 1995. Both Herren and Reganold are attending this year's conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

Gates said in his speech that in their zeal for an ideal environment, some people "have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it."

Research into plant genetics is worthwhile, Herren said, but critics of its current usefulness in Africa shouldn't be vilified.

"What I think is wrong is to blame the people who question the utility now as the bad guys responsible for hunger," he said. "Look at the people who have quadrupled yield in perfectly good agriculturally sound systems. Why is this not taken as the example, not to multiply everywhere but as the basis to adapt to different systems?"

Herren took issue with the notion that ecological agriculture is a luxury for rich countries.

"The idea that is deeply ingrained is that the poor can't afford it. That's really a big problem and it's not true. To do it the right way is cheaper because you don't get in debt in the future," he said, by buying more expensive seeds and fertilizers.

More global investment is needed in sustainable agriculture, as well as policies to correct fundamental imbalances in trade and access to resources, he said.

Gates Foundation Chief Executive Jeff Raikes has deeply personal ties to agriculture. He grew up on a farm outside of Omaha, Nebraska, that has belonged to his family for generations. Raikes counted Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, among his heroes.

Earlier this year Raikes paid a visit to Borlaug at his home in Texas. Raikes had wanted to meet Borlaug at the World Food Prize gathering in Iowa, but he knew Borlaug's illness would make it impossible for him to attend. Borlaug passed away Sept. 12.

Borlaug was having some trouble with his hearing, but overall "he was doing amazingly well for somebody who is 94 years old battling cancer."

JAMES A. FINLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nobel Peace Prize winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, pictured in 2005.

Raikes' burning question - what went wrong in Africa?

"When I asked him about Africa he immediately launched into a discussion about the importance of maintaining the investments and the commitment to wheat rust," Raikes said.

Last year, the Gates Foundation gave Cornell University $27 million to create a global partnership to combat the disease, called the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project.

A particularly virulent strain, called Ug99 because it was first seen in Uganda in 1999, has spread from Africa and can infect crops in hours. Clouds of invisible spores can be carried by the wind for hundreds of miles.

Borlaug's concern about the wheat rust problem reflected something larger, Raikes said. "What he was saying is that governments had not maintained their commitment to international agricultural development at the level they should have."

"What I took away from that conversation was how important it was to maintain the commitment to invest in agriculture when things like the opportunity for higher yield crops that better withstand wheat rust or drought are very important to food security."

Raikes sat with him for over an hour. While Borlaug had recently undergone chemotherapy and didn't get up from his chair, "his level of energy was quite impressive," Raikes said.

Borlaug is one of only a handful of people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

When Raikes visited, Borlaug's family was in the process of moving the awards from their safety deposit box to Texas A&M University, and showed Raikes the Congressional medal.

On the back of the medal is Borlaug's famous creed: "The first essential component for social justice is adequate food for all mankind."

Raikes accidentally dropped the medal, which landed on Borlaug's knee.

"I tested his reflexes and his reflexes were great," Raikes laughed.

Philanthropic efforts, when combined with the possibilities of the Internet, are producing interesting hybrids, and crowdsourcing ideas for development is one of them.

The Peace Corps is testing such an approach with Africa Rural Connect (ARC), an online community where creativity and global collaboration are the goals, and the best ideas can win $20,000 in funding. See the current top 10 ideas here. Oct. 15 is the deadline for submitting projects for the current contest.

PEACE CORPS

Molly Mattessich, pictured at right during her Peace Corps service in Mali, with her host, Niama Keita. She now manages an online site to take global ideas and apply them to problems she saw firsthand as a volunteer.

Anyone can submit an idea, endorse existing ideas and suggest improvements to them.

Hosted by the National Peace Corps Association, the site connects over 200,000 current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, African Diaspora, non-profit leaders, technology buffs and anyone else who has a solution for Africa's development challenges.

It uses a software called Wegora, designed to encourage a global exchange of ideas.

"We are excited about the caliber of ideas that have been posted on the site so far and we're really seeing the Wegora technology help foster a whole new way of thinking online about these types of issues," says Molly Mattessich, manager of Africa Rural Connect and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Mali. "The volume of posts from people and groups around the world has steadily increased and we hope to see that trend continue in the coming months."

The University of Washington again led the nation in the number of Peace Corps volunteers last year, with 104. Washington state has had more Peace Corps volunteers (8,087) than any other state except California and New York. A blending of humanitarian idealism with innovative technology seems to characterize perfectly this region's strengths.

Another such experiment with funding charity based on the wisdom of the crowd is Paul Buchheit's Collaborative Charity project.

Buchheit, the lead developer of Google's Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, introduced his project by declaring "I'm going to donate a bunch of money, but I want random people on the Internet to decide where it goes."

So far he has received 18,968 votes on 419 ideas from 3,274 people. Among the most popular ideas was the Talking Book project (with brightly colored Talking Books pictured above) by Seattle-based non-profit Literacy Bridge.

Jeff Raikes, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's chief executive, once said he learned about computer programming at Stanford in order to help his brother, Ron, who was running the family farm in Nebraska.

The two brothers bought an Apple II and programmed it to handle the farm's accounting. Jeff Raikes went on to work at Apple and then spent 27 years at Microsoft, while his older brother Ron remained at home in Nebraska to head a large cattle operation and grow corn, soybeans and wheat.

It was at the family farm where Ron Raikes died in an accident Saturday after getting caught under a piece of farm equipment. His funeral will be held today in Lincoln.

Ron Raikes became a state senator in 1997 and served for 11 years. He earned a doctorate in agricultural economics at the University of California-Davis and taught agricultural economics at Iowa State University before taking over the helm of the farm from his father in the late '70s.

The younger Raikes, who had thought he would return to rural Nebraska but stayed in Seattle, now heads the world's largest private foundation helping shape agricultural development around the world.

Washington State University is known for its agricultural expertise, knowledge that it spreads around the world through a dozen international development projects. Now it's linking those programs with online giving in a new initiative called Ripple Effect.

The idea is to give donors a direct way to support WSU's mission and improve the livelihoods of people in the countries where it operates. The Ripple Effect Web site features concrete items such as trees, treadle pumps, stoves, seeds for crops, goats or honey bees, which donors can purchase for rural communities where WSU works. The cost ranges from as little as $16 for a seeds kit to $1,024 for a full share of a honey bee kit.

The program, owned and operated by the WSU Foundation, gives students, alumni and others a chance to engage in philanthropy at a level they can afford and way they can understand, said Scott Garrepy WSU development director for international programs. He thinks WSU may be the first major university in the U.S. to try online '"retail philanthropy."

Each gift fits into a system connected with various aspects of village life and with WSU's larger goals of sustainable development, he said.

WSU's goals include improving the sustainable management of natural resources through tree planting and reduced wood consumption, increasing farm productivity to strengthen food security and nutrition, and improving health standards through safe water and sanitation.

WSU has worked in Malawi, since 1986, planting trees, creating conservation agriculture programs and building primary schools, fuel efficient stoves and small scale irrigation, through Total Land Care, a Malawian non-governmental organization it helped set up.

"WSU's efforts to help people help themselves in developing nations rank among our most important, and least recognized, initiatives," said WSU President Elson Floyd. "Ripple Effect allows every contributor to see who they are helping and how they are making a very real difference in the lives of struggling people half a world away."

Ripple Effect has a lot in common with other online philanthropy start-ups I've written about such as Jolkona Foundation and See Your Impact. The program takes the popular concept of online micro-giving and applies it to education.

Garrepy said the university is also using Twitter to spread the word, and its RippleEffectWSU profile page now has more than 1,500 followers.

"With budget crunch issues, we've had to be creative about how to raise awareness of the site," he said. "Social media is a very important and effective tool for us."

Gifts are received by WSU Foundation and transferred to the university's International Research and Development Department. WSU staff on the ground secure the items and services and deliver them to families and villages in Malawi.

"If one goat kit and two tree seedling kits are purchased through the Ripple Effect Web site, then one goat kit and two tree seedling kits will go exactly where they are most needed in Malawi," said Garrepy.

Mercy Karanja knows first hand what happens when money for agriculture goes away.

She was working in the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture on extension programs for farmers. The system had been funded mostly from outside donors such as the World Bank.

In the early 1990s, the country started a period of structural adjustment under guidance from the World Bank and IMF. That resulted in a complete reorganization of government budgets. One of the first things to go was support for agricultural extension services.

COURTESY OF THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION

Mercy Karanja, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

For Karanja the change hit suddenly.

"The World Bank just cut the umbilical cord," she said. "It was so harsh."

She recalled receiving a notice that the following week there would no more visits to farmers to take care of cows.

"I had cows myself," she said. "It was like this is incredible. Artificial insemination requires refrigeration. Tell me who is going to invest in that?"

The cost of inseminating one cow jumped from 20 cents to $30, she said.

In 1998 Karanja left her government job and joined the Kenya National Farmers Union. She wanted to mobilize farmers to give them a stronger voice in decision making.

Farmers suddenly had to shift focus from relying on the government to fending for themselves, she said. Yet there was not enough of a private sector to support their needs.

"It was extremely painful and it has never come back," she said. "Farmers are still struggling. In my own experience this is what has caused them to really regress."

In the new scheme, the World Bank funding for agriculture was subsumed under rural development, which meant roads and other priorities, she said. As a result, money for farming went from a significant part of the budget to almost nothing.

The World Bank has since acknowledged that agricultural development is a key to reducing poverty in Africa and has increased its commitment.

Karanja was later tapped for a job in France at the International Federation of Agricultural Producers. She joined the Gates Foundation in early 2008, working under Roy Steiner on farm productivity.

The program targets small farmers living on less than $1 a day.

"We have to be more creative in reaching these small farmers," she said. One project that looks promising uses radio programs to get information out to farmers, such as how to keep plants free of disease.

As for the role of genetically engineered seeds, Karanja says she witnessed a huge debate in Kenya in the early part of the decade. Kenya has a problem with drought, diseases and productivity, she said.

"We asked transgenic proponents what does it offer us?"

The Gates Foundation has funded reseach into drought tolerant maize and fortified cassava. Such specific products might be helpful, she said, but they're not an option now.

Farmers in Kenya are "not ideologically inclined toward one thing or the other," she said. "They're saying give us solutions. Give me whatever medicine can make me better."

Karanja said the Gates program has made progress helping farmers, including getting more varieties of seeds distributed to agro-dealers and reaching some areas with irrigation, but it's too early to see an increase in productivity.

Drought and civil strife have taken a harsh toll in Kenya, which is experiencing hunger in regions where there was no such hunger before. People will have to take a long view of change, she said.

"Please let's keep the momentum for a little longer to create the mechanisms for the system to stand on its own."

Africa is getting more attention with a new U.S. administration that says it's committed to helping African countries achieve self sufficiency and food security. The Gates Foundation has also brought a renewed focus on African agriculture through its own programs and grantees, including the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

What is the best way to move forward from decades of neglect and a recent food crisis that pushed 100 million more people into poverty?

As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tours Africa this week, a coalition of grassroots groups says "business as usual" won't work, and criticized the U.S. for pursuing a narrow approach that puts too much emphasis on biotechnology.

SIMON MAINA/AFP/Getty Images

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets Masaai traditional dancers in Kenya after addressing the 8th Forum of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

The US Working Group on the Food Crisis used a visit by Clinton and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) to raise the question of whether U.S. tax dollars for food-related aid to Africa are being spent wisely.

The United States and other top industrialized nations pledged $20 billion to promote sustainable agricultural development in the world's poorest regions last month at the G8 Summit in Italy.

The USAID's policies toward agriculture in Kenya, stated here, include a public-private partnership with KARI and Monsanto to develop genetically engineered sweet potatoes resistant to virus, and promote public awareness about the technology in Kenya.

(The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center said it was never involved in the original project. I had listed the Danforth Center among the partners, based on information from the USAID Kenya Web site. Roger Beachy, president of the Danforth center, said the center brought material from Monsanto and KARI to its labs and is working on the project using a different technology, in partnership with the government of Uganda).

After 14 years and $6 million, the project proved to be a failure, the coalition said, adding that local varieties outperformed genetically modified varieties in field trials.

The coalition called such policies "misguided" and at odds with a report on the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The report, which came out earlier this year, took four years and was commissioned by the World Bank and United Nations to evaluate the impacts of agricultural methods on hunger and poverty, rural livelihoods, health and sustainable development.

The report was approved by more than 50 governments, but not the United States, Canada or Australia.

The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social clashes and environmental disaster, said the co-chair of the report, Hans Herren, who is president of the Millennium Institute.

"I fear within the new (U.S.) administration not enough time has been devoted to reading and digesting the report so it can be used for its full potential to address problems at the root," he said.

Herren, who received the World Food Prize in 1995 for developing a pest control program that rescued the African the cassava, said building more resilience in plants through classical breeding is a better answer than engineering for drought resistance. Climate change may produce drought but also may produce severe storms and unpredictable weather patterns. He said the Kenyan agricultural institute is on the right track in broadening its approach more recently.

The report's findings reject current industrial farming methods as a solution to sustainable food production, concluding that the benefits of modern agriculture have not been equitably shared and have come at too high a price to the poor and to the environment.

Josphat Ngonyo, head of the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, a network of 60 community groups, said that small holder farmers in Africa have been left out of the process of determining agricultural policy.

"We find that most of African governments ignore local farmers. They are not consulted," Ngonyo said. "We see heavy manipulation by multinational companies who have their ways to influence policies and legislation."

"What (farmers) clearly need is not biotechnology," he said. "They need water, markets for farm products. They need good roads to access markets, and they need incentives that would enhance getting their products to the markets."

The Kenya Biodiversity Coalition said the visit to KARI showcases "the Obama Administration's betrayal to Africa's small scale farmers and misplaced priorities on how to achieve sustainable food security in Africa."

"Chemical-intensive production methods continue to have adverse health and environmental effects," the group said, "while 'modern biotechnology' (genetically engineered seed) has contributed to hardly any verifiable positive impacts on equitable and sustainable development."

Asked to assess the work of Gates-funded AGRA, Herren praised its emphasis on soil quality and a program to train traditional plant breeders.

"What I think is a problem is they feel they know it all," he said. "To go out here and try to replicate the green revolution is not good enough."

He said where the effort falls short is in understanding "how the whole system operates." Key road blocks include lack of market access, infrastructure and training for farmers, he said.

"There are major gaps there in the AGRA program which are not addressed to have the impact they think they're going to have."

AGRA's main programs are seeds, soil health, market access, and policy and partnerships. The alliance has said it seeks to avoid the adverse effects of the original Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America, including overuse of fertilizer, and focus on small farmers living on less than a dollar a day--most of whom are women.

Last month AGRA, chaired by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, launched a program with KARI and other partners to improve maize yields by counteracting soil acidity.

The Gates Foundation's own assessment of the program last year can be found here.

Rajiv Shah is bringing two familiar faces to D.C. -- a former colleague at the Gates Foundation and Sen. Maria Cantwell's chief of staff, both of whom have just joined him at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Rachael Goldfarb was named counselor to the under secretary last week by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. She will work under Shah, who heads Research, Education and Economics at the USDA and is also chief scientist.

At the Gates Foundation, Goldfarb was special assistant to Tachi Yamada, president of the foundation's global health program. Shah was the founding director of the Gates Foundation's agriculture program. Kudos to Clay Holtzman for following the trail of foundation execs to the Obama Administration.

Goldfarb, a Philadelphia native, was assistant to John Podesta, President Clinton's chief of staff. Before that she was assistant to the policy staff at the National Economic Council. She also worked at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Another Washington state Democrat now part of Shah's team at the USDA is Maura O'Neill, formerly Sen. Cantwell's chief of staff. She was named senior advisor for energy and climate, which is also part of Research, Education and Economics. O'Neill has an extensive resume, including starting technology companies, promoting investment in regional biotech, serving on Seattle City Light's Energy Advisory board, and lecturing at UC Berkeley and Columbia University. She earned a bachelor's degree and PhD from the University of Washington.

President Obama and other world leaders seem to be taking their cue from the Gates Foundation for a new three-year agricultural initiative announced today.

Leaders from the Group of Eight leading economies made the $20 billion pledge to finance agricultural projects in poor countries to fight hunger and reduce food price volatility.

The U.S.-sponsored food security initiative aims to provide poor farmers in developing countries with seeds, fertilizers, infrastructure and other tools to help them boost local food production, a shift from previous policy that emphasized sending food aid from abroad.

Here is what Obama said about the issue today:
"There is no reason why Africa cannot be self-sufficient when it comes to food. It has sufficient arable land. What's lacking is the right seeds, the right irrigation, but also the kinds of institutional mechanisms that ensure that a farmer is going to be able to grow crops, get them to market, get a fair price."

The Gates Foundation has focused on seeds, fertilizer, irrigation and market access in its own programs, spending $2.6 billion on global development so far, most of it for agriculture in Africa.

The world's largest foundation has taken on a major role in agricultural development since it launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006. AGRA funds work to improve seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, and market access for small farmers, employing techniques of the original Green Revolution started in the 1940s in an effort to boost food production in Africa.

The new grants by Gates and Rockefeller came at a time when U.S. funding for agriculture had fallen sharply. Agriculture's share of U.S. development assistance was 3 percent in 2005, compared to 12 percent in 1985, according to this report. In dollars, support for agriculture went from a high of about $8 billion in 1984 to $3.4 billion in 2004.

Now besides the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, the U.K'.s Department for International Development has become another core donor to AGRA.

Obama also talked about agriculture and his trip to Ghana in this interview with AllAfrica.com.

"I'm still frustrated over the fact that the green revolution that we introduced into India in the '60s, we haven't yet introduced into Africa in 2009," he said.

The push for a green revolution in Africa has sparked criticism and debate about the role of high-tech solutions over ecological farming methods. Obama said today that low-tech solutions are also important.

"We don't need fancy computers to solve those problems; we need tried and true agricultural methods and technologies that are cheap and are efficient but could have a huge impact in terms of people's day-to-day well-being."

The Gates Foundation has also funded policy studies and advocacy campaigns. It gave nearly $1 million to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to fund a project on the U.S. role in global agricultural development, and Gates Foundation Senior Fellow Catherine Bertini co-authored the report.

At the beginning of the Obama Administration, the Chicago Council released the report with recommendations for a new policy on agriculture as a way to restore the United States "as a force for positive change in the world."

The report, "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Hunger and Poverty: The Chicago Initiative on Global Agricultural Development," made five recommendations and more than 20 specific suggestions, calling for a renewed U.S. commitment to alleviating global poverty through agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The recommendations include increasing support for agricultural education, research, including genetic engineering, and infrastructure.

The official support for biotech and commodity crops was called into question today in this piece by food writer Paula Crossfield.

Bill Gates has used forums such as the World Economic Forum in Davos to increase public attention to the issue, and has spent more time talking directly with world leaders since leaving Microsoft to dedicate himself to full-time philanthropy.

Gates has taken up the cause of agriculture in meetings with key leaders such U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, chairman of AGRA, recently outlined a 10-year strategy to develop regional breadbaskets among African countries to produce staples. AGRA President Namanga Ngongi was in Brussels a couple of weeks ago meeting with European Union officials about the topic.

The food crisis itself may pushed the issue back onto the political agenda. The UN predicts the number of people going hungry will rise to 1.02 billion this year, reversing a four-decade trend of declines.

Yet today's G8 commitment also shows that the foundation's relatively new efforts in global development are beginning to have a catalyzing effect on agricultural policy, just as its health programs have helped shape the world health agenda.

Mark Suzman, director of policy and advocacy for the Gates Foundation's global development program, said today's pledge is encouraging. Leadership coming from the G8 on agriculture could be a platform for the future in the same way that a G8 agreement to support public health in 2000 helped create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, he said.

"It's focused on the right set of issues."

Real time information about farming, health and trading will be available to mobile phone users in Uganda with new technology services developed by the Grameen Foundation, Google and telecom operator MTN Uganda.

HEATHER THORNE/GRAMEEN FOUNDATION

Saurin Nanavati (left), a consultant for the AppLab project, explains how to use the new mobile applications to users in Uganda. AppLab aims to help Ugandans get health, agriculture and trading data on their mobile phones.

The Grameen Foundation saw the proliferation of mobile phones in Africa as a way to get information and services to poor communities in Uganda without Internet access. About 18 months ago it started a project called the Application Laboratory (AppLab), with much of the early work being done in Seattle through the Grameen Foundation's Technology Center. The first suite of those applications is being launched today.

Peter Bladin, Grameen Foundation executive vice president, said AppLab builds on the success of an earlier project, Village Phone, in which local entrepreneurs rent cell phone use to villagers for pennies a call. Uganda now has 50,000 Village Phone and pay phone operators and nine million cell phone subscribers.

Bladin said he sought out Google and MTN Uganda to help scale up the applications and roll them out to other parts of Africa, where Google has seven offices.

The new services can be accessed by existing Village phone operators, as well as by people with their own phones. They are SMS services that work on any phone capable of sending or receiving SMS messages, said Joseph Mucheru, Google's director of sub-Saharan Africa business. In Uganda almost all phones will be able to use the services, he said.

The five applications use Google SMS Search technology and MTN's telecom network. They include Farmer's Friend, a searchable database with agricultural advice and weather forecasts; Health Tips with sexual and reproductive health information, paired with Clinic Finder, to locate nearby health clinics; and Google Trader, which matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce, commodities and other products.

Local partners helped provide the content. The Busoga Rural Open Source Development Initiative (BRODSI) provides agricultural information created and tested by small-holder farmers, and Marie Stopes Uganda and the Straight Talk Foundation provide health information.

For the Google Trader application, AppLab worked with the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, TechnoServe and SNV Netherlands Development Organisation to hone the concept with banana farmers and traders in Uganda.

Mobile phone users send an SMS query and receive an automatic answer back from the database. A farmer could ask a question about why the leaves on a tree are starting to wilt, or a mother could ask when her child needs a vaccine. Uganda has about 30 million people with an adult literacy rate of about 74 percent, according to the UN.

Prices for the services are 110 Uganda shillings per request (about 5 cents), on par with sending a text message to a friend in the country. Prices for requests to the trading marketplace are double, at 220 shillings per request.

Grameen Foundation President Alex Counts called the applications "a great example of innovation from and for the base of the pyramid," the billions of people who are at the bottom of the world's socio-economic hierarchy.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $20 million to the World Bank for a program to provide financial services in developing countries.

The World Bank said today it will use the Gates funding to establish what it calls the Agriculture Finance Support Facility.

The program's mission is "to increase access to financial services, such as savings, credit, payments and insurance, in rural areas in developing countries as profitable business lines," according to the World Bank. It will make grants to banks and other institutions.

The global economic crisis means access to financial services has become even more difficult for small farmers and rural entrepreneurs.

Where traditional financial cooperatives are not providing sufficient services, the World Bank seems to be looking at funding alternative programs.

In microfinance, the World Bank Group's biggest investor is the IFC, a profit-oriented financial institution with a mixed record.

The IFC had a microfinance portfolio of $498 million in 2007 and planned to double its investment to $1.2 billion by fiscal year 2010, which would make IFC the largest investor in the microfinance industry.

The World Bank said its data shows that 69 percent of small farmers in India did not have credit with formal financial institutions. In Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru nearly 40 percent of agricultural producers are "credit-constrained," and less than 1 percent of farmers in Zambia and less than 2 percent of the rural population in Nigeria have access to credit from formal institutions.

"There is a great need among smallholder farmers, who make up the bulk of the world's poor, for ways to save and manage their money," said Carlos Cuevas, deputy director of Financial Services for the Poor at the Gates Foundation. "Having access to safe and reliable financial services such as savings, credit and insurance, allows poor farmers to safeguard cash, which they often receive only once a year during harvest."

Lack of access to credit was one factor behind the sharp rise of farmer suicides in India over the last decade. But some argue that World Bank policies are also to blame.

Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, admits that the world's largest charitable foundation needs to improve its internal processes and the quality of its outside partnerships.

"Our staff also told us that it can be hard to get things done at the foundation," Raikes wrote in his first annual letter as CEO, a post the Microsoft veteran began nine months ago. "We need to clear some hurdles so we can all focus our energy on the people we aim to help."

The feedback came from a survey of employees (the first one the foundation has ever taken) earlier this year, Raikes wrote. His letter is part of the foundation's 2008 annual report, which was released today.

ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jeff Raikes discussed the transition from business to philanthropy in his first annual letter, showing some of the humility and frankness he was known for at Microsoft.

Raikes said his first priority is to "make sure our internal processes run smoothly," and his second is to "improve the quality of our external partnerships." (I guess you don't hone phrases like that without a couple of decades as a software executive. Was he talking about Office?)

"I know we are not doing as good a job as we can in this area," he wrote. "Starting with me, everybody at the foundation needs to make a concerted effort to listen more carefully to what our partners in the field have to tell us."

In a time of economic uncertainty, such changes can make each dollar spent have greater impact, said Raikes.

Looking at finances, the foundation paid $2.8 billion in grants and other charitable expenses last year and expects to pay out $3.5 billion in grants and related expenses in 2009.

It reported endowment assets of $29.5 billion, following a 20 percent drop in its portfolio value last year as a result of the economic downturn. In 2007 its assets stood at $38.7 billion.

Warren Buffett contributed $1.8 billion in shares of Berkshire Hathaway "B" stock to the trust that manages the endowment, while Bill Gates contributed about $183 million in investment management services.

But the world's top two billionaires weren't the only ones giving money.

"Several donors from the general public made contributions to the trust and foundation," according to a footnote in the report. Even though the foundation doesn't solicit donations, it received $10.4 million from individual, unnamed donors in 2008.

Raikes, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, has had a chance to get back to his roots in agriculture. He traveled to Kenya and Zambia earlier this year to visit projects, including a milk-chilling plant that Gates funded with Heifer International. Raikes said the investments in feed storage and refrigeration are helping African farmers produce more milk with their cattle and find new markets to sell it.

Global health accounted for 65 percent of the foundation's spending in 2008. Raikes said the foundation plans to spend "tens of millions" to help fund the final phase of clinical trials for a malaria vaccine, which started last month.

To overcome shortages of farmland or water at home, a few wealthy countries are turning to buying or leasing land in Africa to produce their food.

Saudi Arabia, for example, has started farming in Ethiopia, where it recently brought in its first 2,000 tons of Basmati rice.

Abdullah Alireza, the Saudi minister of Commerce and Industry, talked about the practice in a recent visit to Seattle, where he addressed a private gathering of local business people.

JULIE MCMACKIN PHOTOGRAPHY

Abdullah Alireza is leading a drive by Saudi Arabia to invest in overseas agriculture.

Not only has the rice been grown successfully in Ethiopia, he said, but it's also cheaper to produce there than it is in India, he said.

It's all part of a drive by the desert kingdom to make agricultural investments abroad, which Alireza is spearheading. The Saudi government is investing in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania, countries chosen for their close proximity to Saudi Arabia and abundant water supply, Alireza said. But competition for water is already causing conflicts in Ethiopia, and like many countries in Africa, it struggles to produce enough food for itself.

The three countries would make up a new agricultural export zone. "If we can string them along we can actually begin to create a whole area built for agriculture," Alireza said.

The Economist reports that nearly 50 million acres of African farmland worth $20 billion to $30 billion has been acquired by China, Saudi Arabia and other countries for offshore farming. Critics call it the newest form of colonialism and say the deals are destabilizing land grabs that push out local farmers.

Others say that after decades of neglect and failure by international aid organizations to improve the situation, commercial investment might actually help. To learn more about the topic, check out excerpts and videos from a conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars.

The Gates Foundation-supported Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) aims to reduce poverty using market-based approaches and improving things like seeds, soil and irrigation for small-scale African farmers. The Rural Development Institute focuses on stronger legal rights for African farmers, most of whom are women.

The way Alireza sees it, the practice of offshore farming can enhance food security in Africa.

"We can become the farmers of the world in terms of food security to Africa," he said. "Although we're taking so many hectares, we are actually going to be helping farmers contiguous to our farms, assist them in repairing the land, plant seedlings, and have an agreement if they wish so that we can buy their products."

Saudi Arabia has slipped from a grain producing nation to a net importer, and water security is a major concern. At the same time, a development push to open six new economic cities and various new industrial zones in Saudi Arabia will consume even more land and water resources.

"We are going to be importing a lot of wheat from all over the world," Alireza said.

After sitting next to Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) at the Seattle dinner, Alireza hinted that he might reconsider where to make investments. "He has given me many, many thoughts," Alireza said. "Maybe Seattle might be a better place to come in."

Two characteristics seem to be emerging from the Obama Administration's agriculture policy -- a global outlook and confidence in technology solutions.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack lately has been talking about the link between food security and global stability, warning that unless countries take immediate steps to sharply boost agricultural productivity and reduce hunger, the world risks fresh social instability.

Just how to do that is an important but controversial question.

ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Farmers in developing countries face price volatility, changing weather patterns and other pressures

With the challenge of feeding the world's population compounded by climate change, Vilsack called on G8 countries to back the use of science in agriculture, including genetically modified organisms, to boost productivity, according to the Financial Times and coverage of the issue on the Grist.org Web site.

Earlier this week, Vilsack nominated Gates Foundation agricultural development director Rajiv Shah as chief scientist and undersecretary for research, education and economics.

Shah, the bright star at the Gates Foundation who helped design the partnership for a new Green Revolution in Africa (and recruit Kofi Annan as its chair), will now be in a position to shape much of the research and science policy within the federal government.

The move was praised by the chairman of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, among others. William Danforth chairs the non-profit institute, which received a $3.3 million grant from the Gates Foundation to enhance the nutritional value of cassava through genetic engineering. This year the center received $5.4 million from the Gates Foundation to help secure the approval of African governments to allow field testing of genetically modified banana, rice, sorghum and cassava plants.

A rash of magazine ads for Monsanto in recent months also links the global food crisis with the potential of technology to solve it. But some governments are uneasy about the implications of crops like GM corn, which was banned in Germany this year.

A key piece of legislation, the Global Food Security Act of 2009 S.384 sponsored by Sen. Richard Lugar, would authorize appropriations through 2014 to provide assistance to foreign countries to promote food security, stimulate rural economies, and improve emergency response to food crises.

Part of the bill includes a provision to "include research on biotechnological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including genetically modified technology."

That clause is sparking vocal opposition by groups including Food First, the National Family Farm Coalition, Organic Consumers Association, Rainforest Action Network and others who say the bill's intentions are good but the approach is wrong.

"While the intentions behind the Global Food Security Act may be laudable, the question is whether poorer farmers left behind by the last Green Revolution will again be swept aside by a top-down approach that benefits mostly transnational corporations," said Andrew Kang Bartlett of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Instead, the coalition supports a number of actions to address the food crisis, including
regulating commodity futures markets to end excessive speculation, halting growth of industrial crops for fuel in developing countries, stabilizing commodity prices through food reserves, setting fair regional and global trade agreements and directing efforts toward ecological farming practices.

Northwest philanthropy programs are reaching into India with microcredit, improved land rights and water access. The Gates Foundation is applying techniques from the original Green Revolution that changed Indian agriculture in a huge push to transform farming in Africa.

The situation on the ground in India shows how complex those challenges are. Under desperate conditions, individuals pay the price with their lives. In one state, 1,500 farmers have committed suicide, complaining of escalating debt from loans, drought and failed crops, according to a report this week.

An in-depth series by NPR offers a cautionary tale about the Green Revolution.

The approach that seemed so promising four decades earlier -- importing modern methods of fertilizer, high-yield seeds and irrigation -- is on the brink of collapse in Punjab, India's breadbasket. Diminishing groundwater from heavy irrigation use seems to be at the heart of the problem.

KRISTI HEIM

A farmer and his young daughter on a train in Punjab province.

Almost every village in Punjab has witnessed a suicide in once-prosperous farming families and it is a major issue in the general election, notes this report from BBC.

With so much effort to expand microcredit in the region, it turns out farmers are still borrowing from moneylenders to pay for other production costs.

Each year before the harvest, small farmers of Punjab borrow from rural moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates to meet production costs, including seeds, fertilizers and electricity for irrigation.

The demand for electricity is causing a different problem along the Ganges. Dams being constructed in the foothills of the Himalayas are disrupting downstream flows and changing conditions on a river central to Hindu faith. Desperation over that issue is prompting hunger strikes. At a temple in the holy city of Varanasi, I met a man named Baba Nagnath Yogeshwar, who was rail thin and moved around in slow motion.

ANAND SINGH

Baba Nagnath Yogeshwar is on a hunger strike in Varanasi, India, to save the Ganges from hydroelectric dams that would restrict its flow and disrupt life along the sacred waterway. He is being monitored by a doctor.

He said he has been fasting since last year to protest the dams. Another activist, one of India's best known scientists, AD Agarwal, came close to dying earlier this year after staging a hunger strike in protest of the dams.

"It is our privilege to live near the holy mother Ganga which nourishes
our lives," Nagnath said through an interpreter. "Keeping the mother from impurity and destruction is our sacred duty if we want to continue receiving the irreplaceable benefits that the mother freely gives us everyday."

Questions of how to grow enough food for a burgeoning population without destroying the environment and how to modernize the country without sacrificing its identity remain central to development efforts and the Northwest dollars that support them.

Rajiv Shah, the 36-year-old director of agricultural development at the Gates Foundation, was nominated today as an Under Secretary and Chief Scientist within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to a White House press release.

PRASHANT PANJIAR

He has been nominated to head Research, Education, and Economics at the USDA, where he would have jurisdiction over food safety issues, energy and climate, agricultural productivity and global food security.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called Shah "a globally recognized leader in science, health and economics ... disciplines that are critical to the missions of this department."

Shah, who joined the Gates Foundation in 2001, previously served as health care policy adviser on Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. A native of Detroit, he has a medical degree and a master's degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Shah is considered one of the Gates Foundation's sharpest executives. His bio is here.

He lives in Seattle with his wife, Shivam, and their two young children. He is a trustee of the Seattle Community College District and a board member of the Seattle Public Library.

A local group called AGRA Watch is taking aim at some of the strategies for improving agricultural production supported by the Gates Foundation.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), was created and funded by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations in an effort to help small farmers improve productivity by using better seeds, fertilizer, irrigation and access to broader markets.

AGRA Watch calls that approach "politically, environmentally, socially, and ethically problematic." It's too heavily focused on technology solutions such as genetic modification, fertilizer and pesticides, rather than what could be more ecological farming methods and indigenous practices, say the group of volunteers, who are part of the Community Alliance for Global Justice.

The Gates Foundation has said it will consider many different methods to improve farming, but that soil in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa lacks sufficient nitrogen for organic agriculture alone.

AGRA Watch is holding a series of talks next month at the University of Washington. While the topic has provoked polite and somewhat indirect debate in two recent forums, rarely have local groups come forward with such an openly critical position on one of the Gates Foundation's programs.

Finding the right answers has become more urgent as the dally food intake of many of the world's poorest people dropped in the recent food crisis, and climate change complicates the problem.

Phil Bereano, UW professor emeritus in technical communication, kicks off the group's meetings April 1 with a critique of Gates' support of technology and the assumption that technology is in itself neutral. Other sessions are planned on genetically modified seeds, problems of the original Green Revolution in Africa and the role large agribusiness plays.

Some of the top experts on land rights and their impact on women are lawyers working with Seattle-based Rural Development Institute.

Their approach seems to be paying off, even in a tough year for non-profits. RDI's annual Women's Day fund-raising event defied the anemic economy with a turnout of 550 people Thursday and a total of $115,000, twice the amount it raised last year, not including sponsor underwriting of the event.

"Land is the most fundamental asset for most of the poor in most of the developing world," said Roy Prosterman, who founded RDI 40 years ago and has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. When I profiled him a few years ago, he was content not owning a house, property or even a car.

EMILY WAX/WASHINGTON POST

Women's ownership of property has been tied to respect and social standing. Gitanjali Chaudhry, 17, of New Delhi, started attending women's self-defense classes last year after being harassed by men on her way to school.

While women are responsible for most of the world's agricultural production, they own just 2 percent of the land, according to RDI. In some countries women don't have a right to own property; they are property. Such entrenched customs are hard to change, but RDI has made progress in places like Kyrgyzstan by advising the government to strengthen women's ownership rights in the process of reforming land laws, said Asyl Undeland, a Kyrgyz anthropologist.

I've always thought what RDI does is an interesting counter point to the explosion of microfinance, and RDI addressed that during the event.

"Before you can give a woman a loan to help her lift herself out of poverty, first she has to have land," said Radha Friedman, RDI's associate director of development and communications. If she doesn't have land, it's hard to use the money for a sewing machine or a cow, since she may have no stable place to earn her living.

DOUG PLUMMER

RDI's Tim Hanstad worked in the fields in Skagit County as a boy.

In India, RDI has a strategy of purchasing land from sellers to obtain "micro-plots" for landless farmers to build a shelter, grow food and raise animals. RDI CEO Tim Hanstad moved his family to India and lived there for about four years to get the program going with a grant from the Gates Foundation. Now the concept is part of the country's current five-year development plan.

For years, RDI toiled in relative obscurity. But last year it won a World Bank competition for its "barefoot lawyers" project to offer legal aid and education to China's rural poor, and a new $6.7 million Gates Foundation grant to expand its "micro-land ownership" program across India.

RDI is also expanding in China and Africa. This fall it will create a Global Center for Women and Land in Seattle to train law and policy experts on gender-specific problems related to land rights, and build an electronic library of laws related to women's land rights that practitioners around the world can access and use to share information.

The Gates Foundation's grant to a cocoa industry group is raising questions about labor rights.

The foundation said this week it will give $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation and $25 million to a German development agency to help farmers in West Africa improve production and obtain higher prices for their cocoa and cashews.

The non-profit World Cocoa Foundation represents 70 chocolate companies, and most have not lived up to an agreement they signed to stop the worst forms of child labor in their cocoa supply chains, according to the International Labor Rights Forum.

Almost eight years after the major chocolate companies signed an agreement called the Harkin-Engel Protocol, they have not instituted programs to ensure that they are complying with international labor standards, says Tim Newman, the group's campaigns assistant in Washington D.C.

"After millions of dollars and many years, it appears that the chocolate companies, through their charitable organizations, are not having a broad impact on improving the lives of children on cocoa farms," Newman wrote in response to the Gates announcement.

Richard Rogers, Gates Foundation program officer in agricultural development, answered my questions today about the labor issues. He said commercial involvement is necessary for the project to succeed.

The debate reflects a gap between those who question corporate involvement in global development and the Gates' view that embraces such public-private partnerships.

By having the private sector directly involved, "farmers can have a clear understanding of what the market demands," he said. Companies will contribute technical and managerial skills and resources to help farmers develop better seed varieties and plants and post-harvest handling methods.

Rogers said he chose the World Cocoa Foundation for the grant because "they have the best network of connections with governments, NGOs and corporate partners we feel are critical to this project."

Historically, the cocoa companies have worked "in silos," Rogers said, but the Gates Foundation has tried to play a role bringing them together for the first time, "getting all these companies to share their best practices and technical innovations to have maximum impact."

Hershey, Kraft Foods, Mars, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill were among those contributing $42 million in cash and in-kind donations to the Gates project. Those contributions "enable our dollars to go twice as far," Rogers said.

West African farmers, including young children, supply 70 percent of the world's cocoa, earning just $30 to $110 a year, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

The goal is to drive up income for the 2 million small farmers in the region who earn a living through cocoa production by addressing the root cause of child labor -- low income.

When families are struggling to get food on the table every day, they need the whole family to chip in and work on farm farms, he said. "One of first things farmers do when incomes improve is send their kids to school."

But others argue that unfair trade policies lie at the root of the problem.

Stephanie Celt, director of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, said she agrees with the message the Gates Foundation is sending that "current free trade policy is not bringing promised benefits to many family farmers and agricultural workers around the world." However, she added, "we hope that the foundation will also recognize that programs such as this one only have a chance of creating long-term benefits if they are partnered with more comprehensive reforms to the trade policies that are keeping many agricultural workers in poverty."

The Washington D.C.-based World Cocoa Foundation will re-grant virtually all the Gates funds to three non-profits working in Africa, Rogers said, after using some to hire a project director, coordinator and finance specialist, and a few management consultants.

Rogers said he believes the chocolate companies are working to help solve child labor problems, but "the challenge is the constant monitoring. It's difficult to be monitoring 2 million farmers 24 hours a day."

The International Cocoa Initiative has some information and reports here.

"Certain groups will always feel there could be more done," he said. "As long as companies are abiding by their commitments and putting effort toward ending child labor, we feel satisfied with that."

I asked why organic farming isn't a part of the project. Roger responded that farmers can decide themselves what to grow. While "organic, single origin markets have been growing, they are relatively small, he said.

"We want to have large scale impact and reach the largest number of farmers. To do that we need to get at the mainstream market. Most people aren't willing to pay the premium for specialty chocolates."

One goal is to improve diversification of crops, but cocoa is the main focus because it gives more bang for the buck. For a farmer on less than 3 hectares of land, about 25 percent would be dedicated to growing cocoa, but cocoa would contribute half of the farmer's income.

Raising income may be the one way to find common ground.

"If all of us can agree that improving income is the key to improving livelihood," Rogers says, "we have a great opportunity in front of us."

At least not for many farmers.

West African farmers, including young children, supply 70 percent of all cocoa, satisfying the world's cravings for chocolate while staying on the verge of starvation themselves. Annual incomes average $30 to $110 per household member, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

In West Africa, farmers might get half of the international cocoa price, while in other countries farmers are getting up to 90 percent of that price, says Rajiv Shah, agricultural development director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

ALAN BERNER/SEATTLE TIMES

Cocoa production has a bitter history in West Africa

Trying to raise the margins for farmers, the foundation is giving $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation, a non-profit industry group of 70 companies, in a partnership to improve productivity and market access.

Some of the World Cocoa Foundation's members, including Hershey and Mars, have been criticized by the International Labor Rights Forum for failing to honor their commitment to ending child labor and ensuring transparency in cocoa supply chains. Here is the 2009 company scorecard.

Hershey, Kraft Foods, and Mars, along with Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, were among those contributing $42 million in cash and in-kind donations to the Gates project. Starbucks was also one of the corporate sponsors.

The money will go toward hiring local extension workers to train farmers and provide much needed technical and management support.

The five-year project will reach about 200,000 small cocoa farming households in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, and Nigeria, with the goal of doubling their incomes by 2013, says Shah.

While farmers in Malaysia produce 800 to 1,000 kilograms of cocoa per hectare, those in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire produce 200 to 500 kilograms per hectare, he said.

"We can double or triple that just by improving the use of best practices, appropriate fertilizers and better tending to the trees," Shah said. "That's a big output gain."

West Africa produces a third of the world's cashews, but the lack of processing facilities in Africa makes the market inefficient and denies Africans the economic benefits of jobs in the sector.

With a $25 million Gates grant to the German development organization Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the cashew project aims to help 150,000 small cashew farming households in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Mozambique increase their incomes by 50 percent over the next three years.

GTZ will lead the cashew project with assistance from the African Cashew Alliance (ACA), FairMatch Support and TechnoServe. Financial supporters include Kraft Foods and Costco Wholesale.

The roots of the problem of poverty behind sweetness are related to free trade, structural adjustment, and corporate control, says the group Global Exchange, which promotes fair trade products.

Prices are low because "major chocolate and cocoa processing companies have refused to take any steps to ensure stable and sufficient prices for cocoa producers," the group said.

Fair trade advocates may take a dim view of the program, considering that fair trade is not the aim of the corporations involved.

World Cocoa Foundation President Bill Guyton says the Gates-funded program is "looking at improving environmental, economic and social aspects of growing the crop," but that his group "does not get involved with certification of products."

Still there is one thing that both sides can agree on as a benefit: cutting out the middleman.