McKnight food crop research gets a $27 million boost

December 8, 2008 - Matt McKinney, Star Tribune. The grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to aid the world's poorest farmers will help double what the Minnesota foundation spends per year on ag research.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest name in philanthropy, has awarded $27 million to the McKnight Foundation to study food crops and farming in some of the poorest corners of the world. The grant, for research on crops such as sorghum and finger millet and on ways to increase the yield of sweet potato in Uganda, is a first for the Minnesota-based McKnight, said the group's president, Kate Wolford.

"They were aware of the program work we were doing and reached out to us as they were expanding their agricultural research and development work," Wolford said.

The McKnight Foundation has funded crop research for more than 20 years, and today it supports 26 projects in 17 countries.

The research is precisely the sort of work that experts say must be done to stave off the possibility of famine across Africa and Central and South America, the likelihood of which grew this year as a global food crisis pushed millions of people into poverty and swelled the ranks of the malnourished to 967 million, according to the World Food Program.

The Gates Foundation grant, paid out over five years, will double the $4.7 million that McKnight spends on agriculture research every year.

The group funds research in such places as Uganda and Burkina Faso, helping farmers improve their seed varieties or improve soil and pest management with crops including sweet potato, sorghum and finger millet. The research goes on at national research institutes in the home countries or with U.S. universities.

"We're not only funding individual researchers at universities but pulling them together in networks," said Wolford.

Robert Mwanga, the director of sweet-potato research at the National Agricultural Research Organization in Uganda, said most of his work on improving sweet-potato yields is funded by McKnight.

"Sweet potato generally receives much less funding compared to other crops; therefore the capacity of researchers to conduct research on critical issues that would cause impact in the lives of the poor is limited," he said by e-mail from his office in Kampala. The range of problems confronting that crop runs from the sweet-potato weevil to drought to viruses. And once farmers get a crop, it can be difficult to get it to the marketplace.

The crop, if successful, could help with critical problems like vitamin A deficiency in Uganda, he said.

And though formidable problems remain, Mwanga said he's hopeful: "Some African governments have realized the importance of agricultural research in the development of their economies. Countries such as Uganda have full-time research scientists working on a crop such as sweet potato -- a situation that was unheard of about 20 years ago."

The Gates Foundation, with an endowment of $35 billion as of Oct. 1, is one of the largest in the world. It was created by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, in 2000. The richest man in the world, Wall Street sage Warren Buffett, pledged much of his fortune to the Gates Foundation in 2006.

The McKnight Foundation, like many other large philanthropic organizations, was dealt a blow this year when markets tumbled, its total assets falling $700 million from $2.3 billion to $1.6 billion. The charity plans to pay out $100 million supporting various programs in 2009, up from $93 million in 2007, according to Wolford.

Article: McKnight food crop research gets a $27 million boost