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   Agriculture

September 14, 2006
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Joe DeVries Has Key Role in Farm Initiative

By hooking up with DeVries, who has been supervising the Rockefeller Foundation's agricultural grants to Africans for nine years, the Gates Foundation is harnessing its capital to an ongoing success story

In March, Joe DeVries found himself standing in a cornfield taking rapid-fire questions from -- monetarily speaking -- the most generous philanthropist in the world.

The pay-off for the 45-year-old, Venice-raised agricultural scientist came Tuesday when Bill and Melinda Gates, working with the Rockefeller Foundation, formally announced the launch of a $150 million project to help Africa feed itself.

"I have just been thrilled that the Gates Foundation wants to invest in this kind of thing," DeVries said in a telephone interview Tuesday from his office in Nairobi, Kenya.

"It tends to be detailed and obscure work that doesn't get onto the radar screens of big funding organizations."

But it was Melinda Gates herself that DeVries spent the day with in Africa.

The wife of the famous, bespectacled Microsoft Corp. billionaire met with DeVries and some breeders of beans, maize (the Kenyan reference to corn) and cassava, along with the chief executive of a Kenyan seed company.

Gates fired off questions for hours. Later, DeVries showed her a maize-breeding field in Mugaga, about 25 miles outside of Nairobi, the heavily urbanized Kenyan capital.

The Gates endowment of $100 million will be coupled with $50 million from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The money will enable DeVries' team, already in place, to expand what they have been doing by about eightfold, from a limited scale to one that involves much of the African continent, DeVries said.

The new Gates-Rockefeller program has been dubbed PASS, an acronym for the "Program for Africa's Seed System."

"This is not a program that is going to bring in a lot of international expertise to tell Africa how to get it right," DeVries said.

Instead, the Gates-Rockefeller initiative seeks to teach Africans to tailor seed varieties for their own needs, given the arid continent's generally sub-par soil and the general lack of knowledge of modern plant breeding.

The program also will attempt to harness the power of private enterprise by providing loans and business advice to small businesses that cater to the farmers' needs.

Stateside experts familiar with Africa's food-raising challenges applauded the effort.

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