One Gates Keeper has read all the material that has come out of three organisations about this much-trumpeted initiative. All that she can understand is that World Food Programme food will be procured locally. Sounds like a good market-replacement idea that the WFP might have been doing all along. The rest of it she cannot comprehend.

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WFP, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Howard G. Buffett Foundation Join Forces
September 24, 2008

Hundreds of thousands of poor farmers to benefit from new initiativeContact:

NEW YORK -- The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation today unveiled a groundbreaking initiative to help poor farmers across the developing world significantly increase their incomes.

The new initiative, Purchase for Progress (P4P), is expected to help hundreds of thousands of small farmers access reliable markets so they can sell their surplus crops at competitive prices, bolstering fragile local economies.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and the government of Belgium have committed US$76 million to this effort to transform the way WFP purchases food in developing countries, with a special focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America. The initiative was announced during the United Nations General Assembly, where progress towards the Millennium Development Goals and the global food crisis are high on the agenda of world leaders.

"The world's poor are reeling under the impact of high food and fuel prices, and buying food assistance from developing world farmers is the right solution at the right time," said Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director. "Purchase for Progress is win-win—we help our beneficiaries who have little or no food and we help local farmers who have little or no access to markets where they can sell their crops."

Sheeran was joined at the United Nations by Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Howard G. Buffett, president of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation; President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania; President Paul Kagame of Rwanda; President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda; and First Lady of Guatemala Sandra Torres de Colom.

Developed in partnership with the foundations, P4P will be launched in 21 pilot countries over the next five years. Innovations in WFP's local food procurement practices, which are central to the agency's new business model, aim to strengthen the role of smallholder and low-income farmers in agricultural markets and enable them to gain more from supplying food to the WFP’s global operations. WFP will align its efforts with organizations such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) that are focused on helping small farmers increase their productivity through the use of improved seeds and farm management techniques.

"Developing new ways for WFP to purchase food locally represents a major step toward sustainable change that could eventually benefit millions of poor rural households in Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed more than US$900 million in agricultural development efforts focused on small farmers in Africa and South Asia, most of whom are women. Gates spoke a day before he was to address the UN's High-level Event on the Millennium Development Goals. "This is exactly the kind of innovative public-private partnership we need to advance the Millennium Development Goals and address extreme hunger and poverty around the world."

The majority of the world's poorest people live in rural areas, and most rely on agriculture for their food and income. Volatility in the food commodities and fuel markets has profoundly destabilized their already fragile economic situation. Millions of people have been pushed deeper into hunger and poverty.

WFP is the world's single largest purchaser of food for humanitarian operations that include relief and safety net programs such as school feeding. In 2007, while assisting 86 million hungry people, the agency spent US$612 million on food in developing countries. With P4P, WFP will explore different ways to use its purchasing power in developing countries to maximize gains for small farmers while minimizing any distortion to local markets. By supporting small farmers' ability to produce and supply food to WFP’s global operations, P4P will help them increase their incomes, which is critical in addressing hunger and poverty at their roots.

"P4P will help large numbers of small-scale farmers to become net producers rather than net consumers, ensuring that they stand to gain rather than lose from the current climate of rising food prices," said Howard G. Buffett, president of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

The initiative will also seek to promote local food processing projects to provide food of high nutritional value, allowing farmers to gain the maximum benefit from their crops.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed US$66 million to fund pilot projects in 10 countries in Africa, and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation committed US$9.1 million to support pilot projects in seven countries. The government of Belgium contributed $750,000 for the project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Three other countries have not yet been funded.

With the support of the foundations, and in close cooperation with governments, UN agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies, P4P should significantly increase the income of at least 350,000 farmers in the pilot countries alone. The project will also identify and rigorously test practices that can be used to benefit small-scale farmers in other countries. Ultimately, the intention is to not only support farmers to capitalize on the market offered by WFP, but also to connect them to other local and regional food markets.

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About the UN World Food Programme
WFP is the world's largest humanitarian agency and the UN’s front-line agency for hunger solutions. This year, WFP plans to feed around 90 million people in 80 countries.

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About the Howard G. Buffett Foundation
The Howard G. Buffett Foundation has provided US$83 million for agricultural production advancements for small-scale and resource poor farmers and US$29 million for water development, delivery, and management in overlapping geographic areas. The foundation has focused on integrated approaches, including adoption of no-till farming techniques, improvement of soil fertility, agronomic training, participatory farmer research, and development of drought-tolerant and virus resistant crop varieties to increase crop yields. The foundation believes that building strong extension services, maintaining agro-diversity respecting cultural differences, and utilizing new technology will play an important role in addressing food insecurity in less developed countries.


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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, the foundation is led by CEO Jeff Raikes and co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

Bettina Luescher
WFP Chief Spokesperson, North America
Tel: +1-212-963-5196
Cell +1-646-824-1112

Brenda Barton
Deputy Director Communications, WFP/Rome
Phone: +39.06.65132602

Jennifer Parmelee, WFP/Washington
Phone: 202.653.0010 ext. 1149

Howard G. Buffett Foundation
Molly Wilson
Senior Programme Officer
Tel: +1-217-362-8603

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Phone: +1.206.709.3400
Email: media@gatesfoundation.org

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/GlobalDevelopment/Agriculture/Announcements/Announce-080924.htm?version=print

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U.N. food-program effort gets help from Gates Foundation
Kristi Heim
Seattle Times business reporter
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - Page updated at 09:12 AM

Trying new market mechanisms to address poverty, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting an effort to link one of the world's largest food buyers with the world's smallest farmers.

The plan was unveiled this morning in New York during the United Nations General Assembly, where the global food crisis is taking center stage. Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Gates Foundation, joined WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran and leaders of three African nations to launch the plan. Gates is also expected to give an address about the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Thursday.

The Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation are working with the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) on an initiative called Purchase for Progress (P4P) to transform the way WFP purchases food in developing countries.

The idea is to bring hundreds of thousands of small farmers into the market as suppliers to the U.N. food program. The largest humanitarian organization in the world, the WFP provides food for 90 million people in 80 countries and has a budget of nearly $3 billion this year.

The food program "is the only agency in the world that has trucks and planes and people on ground that can buy such large amounts of food locally and deliver somewhere else," said Howard Buffett, the eldest son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

Last year WPF spent $612 million purchasing food from developing countries, about 80 percent of its total purchases. But not enough of that has come from small farmers, Buffett said.

Many small farmers must sell surplus food after harvest at the first opportunity, often for low prices because they lack market information. The P4P program will guarantee a market for one to three years, removing some of that risk. Buying will be closer to farm production, removing logistics costs and markups passed on by middlemen.

"The closer farm production is to the commercial market, the higher price buyers will pay for that food," said David Stevenson, WFP's director of policy, planning and strategy. "We're going to be buying closer to distribution points."

The two foundations, together with the government of Belgium, have committed $76 million to the new program. It will be launched in 21 pilot countries over the next five years, and expects to significantly increase the income of at least 350,000 farmers in those nations.

The Gates Foundation contributed $66 million for pilot projects in 10 countries in Africa, and the Buffett Foundation committed $9.1 million for pilot projects in seven countries. Belgium contributed $750,000 for the project in the Democratic Republic of Congo, its former colony.

"Developing new ways for WFP to purchase food locally represents a major step toward sustainable change that could eventually benefit millions of poor rural households in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions," Gates said.

The Gates Foundation has spent $900 million on agricultural-development efforts, focusing on small farmers in Africa and South Asia. The foundation helped launch the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, aimed at increasing agricultural productivity by introducing improved fertilizer, seeds, training and other support.

The P4P food-purchasing program addresses the other side of the equation.

"We can all work on production or supply side but without something to pull that through to the market, we'll never be successful," Buffett said.

Most of the poorest people in the world live in rural areas and rely on farming to feed themselves and earn income. Skyrocketing food and fuel prices, climate change, natural disasters and war have pushed many who were already in a fragile situation to the breaking point, said Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director.

"The world's poor are reeling under the impact of high food and fuel prices, and buying food assistance from developing world farmers is the right solution at the right time."

The program helps people with little or no food at the same time it helps local farmers with little or no access to markets, she said.

Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2008199487&zsection_id=2003907475&slug=webgatesag24&date=20080924

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 washingtonpost.com
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Gates Foundation to Fund Experimental Food Aid Program
$76 Million Initiative Will Help Farmers in Developing Countries Sell Surplus Crops to U.N.

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2008; 10:26 AM

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 24 -- The world's largest philanthropy on Wednesday announced an initiative to transform the way the U.N. World Food Program purchases food by helping poor, small-scale farmers in undernourished countries of Africa and Latin America sell their surplus crops at competitive prices.

The Purchase for Progress program is designed to help combat hunger and poverty in the developing world by giving farmers, many of them women with little or no access to commercial markets, opportunities to reach reliable buyers, including the World Food Program. In a five-year pilot period, the $76 million program hopes to increase the incomes of 350,000 such farmers in 21 countries, including 15 in sub-Saharan Africa.

The program, to be administered by the World Food Program, is being funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's biggest grantmaker, and also is being supported by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the government of Belgium. It is the latest initiative focusing on small farmers for the Gates Foundation, which has committed more than $900 million to its agricultural development programs.

Purchase for Progress is one of several public-private hunger initiatives expected to be announced this week in New York, as world leaders converge at the U.N. General Assembly to draw attention to efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals, a series of benchmarks aimed at slashing the poverty levels in the world's poorest countries by 2015.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and co-chair of his foundation, said in a statement that the Purchase for Progress program is "a major step toward sustainable change that could eventually benefit millions of poor rural households in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions."

"This is exactly the kind of innovative public-private partnership we need to advance the Millennium Development Goals and address extreme hunger and poverty around the world," said Gates, who will address a special session of the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday.

The World Food Program, a humanitarian aid branch of the United Nations, feeds about 90 million people worldwide who do not have enough food. David Stevenson, the agency's director of policy, planning and strategy, said the new initiative will allow the agency to purchase more locally-raised food.

"Purchase for Progress is not about charity," Stevenson said. "In fact, far from it. It's about rewarding small-scale farmers, hard-working farmers, the majority of whom are women who are out every day working from sunrise, planting their fields in very difficult circumstances."

Hunger around the world is so chronic it far outstrips the financial resources committed to fight it, some scholars said. The World Food Program has warned of a surge in hunger that could plunge more than 100 million of the world's poorest people deeper into poverty.

The problem could grow more perilous against the backdrop of a food price shock that has been roiling world markets and igniting street riots. Over the past three years, world food prices were estimated to have surged by 80 percent -- outpacing even the 78 percent jump during the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75.

"There's a need for a much larger international response," said Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist and founder of the Millennium Promise Alliance, an anti-poverty nonprofit organization. "The Gates Foundation is playing an important role in helping people become aware of this, but in this case no single action is going to be decisive and what's really important is a scaling up of overall financing and support."

About 1.1 billion people live on $1 a day or less, and more than seven in 10 people around the world depend on work in agriculture for food and income, said Rajiv Shah, agriculture development director of the Gates Foundation.

"In order to help farmers and small farmers in part move out of poverty, you need to help them improve productivity," Shah said. "But you also need to improve access to markets and create the financial and commercial incentives so that farmers are rewarded for their additional efforts."

Shah said a preliminary test of the Purchase for Progress program in Uganda last year had "dramatic" results.

"For the first time, they had the incentive and the reward for participating in a formal and commercial market and that was transforming the way they thought about farming and agriculture and their ability to invest in their children," Shah said.

Howard G. Buffett, an environmentalist and businessman whose father, investor Warren Buffett, has pledged much of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, said the new initiative provides "a critical link" to existing efforts to boost crop production.

"Agriculture development is the most effective way to combat poverty and pull these people in these populations up into a higher level of food security," Buffett said. "It's important to realize that we can all work on the production of the supply side, but without something to pull that through to the market we'll never be successful in our efforts."

This week at the United Nations and at the Clinton Global Initiative conference, world leaders, philanthropists and other private partners are discussing ways to partner to combat hunger.

"We're all coming to terms with the fact that prices of basic foods in most poor countries have doubled in the last few years," said David Nabarro, a deputy U.N. system coordinator. "We're all looking for ways to ensure that the demand for lower-cost food can be met."

In 2006, the Gates Foundation joined with the Rockefeller Foundation to launch the Africa-focused Alliance for a Green Revolution. Chaired by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the alliance was modeled on the Rockefeller-pioneered "green revolution" of the mid-20th century, a philanthropic effort credited with transforming farming methods and staving off widespread famine in parts of Latin America and Asia.

"We hope that with all of this broad landscape of work, plus what so many others are doing, that maybe this time Africa really will be able to have the kind of food security that we saw in Latin America and Asia," said Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

While acknowledging the successes of the first green revolution, James Allen Smith, a philanthropic historian at the Rockefeller Archive Center, said planners of the Purchase for Progress program should consider its flaws. He said the first green revolution inadvertently favored farmers who owned land over those that did not, and created long-term ecological problems in Asia.

"For all the successes, and the successes included reduced food costs, which certainly helped urban poor, which certainly helped some farmers, there were not always equitable outcomes that might have made it a different kind of revolution," Smith said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/24/AR2008092401051_pf.html

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Source: United Nations Department of Public Information (DPI)

Date: 24 Sep 2008
Press conference on World Food Programme ‘purchase for progress’ partnership


Announcing a partnership determined "to put hunger out of business", the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP) unveiled a groundbreaking initiative to help poor farmers in the developing world -- reeling from the triple shock of global food, fuel and financial crises -- raise their incomes.

The new initiative, Purchase for Progress, or "P4P", announced at a Headquarters press conference this morning, joins WFP, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation in connecting hundreds of thousands of farmers to reliable markets, where they could sell their surplus crops at competitive prices, thereby increasing their profits and bolstering fragile local economies. The scheme would also transform the way WFP purchased food in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Central America.

"This is a revolution in food aid where food aid becomes a productive investment that not only feeds today but produces solutions for tomorrow," said WFP Executive Director, Josette Sheeran.

For farmers in the developing world, the project came not a moment too soon, she said. "Purchase for Progress has the power to transform their lives […] and allows them to break the cycle of poverty and hunger at its root."

Together with the Government of Belgium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation have committed $76 million to fund 21 pilot projects in a variety of market environments across the developing world. Designed to evaluate how food purchases could be an economic catalyst and force multiplier, rather than a stop-gap measure, the pilot programmes would study how the use of a guaranteed sale system could provide the kind of income security that would allow farmers to purchase the inputs -– such as fertilizers, seeds and equipment -– needed to harvest more. WFP would then extend those models to the entire food aid apparatus.

Ms. Sheeran was joined today by Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda; Jakaya Kikwete, President of the United Republic of Tanzania and Chairman of the African Union; Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda; Sandra Torres de Colom, First Lady of Guatemala; Howard G. Buffett, Chairman of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation; and Bill Gates, Chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mr. Gates said his foundation "very much believes that helping small farmers is key to our mission of reducing inequity". "Allowing them to participate in these markets is a real win-win. It will increase the supply of food and it will increase the well-being of these farmers."

He said the ultimate goal was for those markets to be self-sustaining to benefit millions of families in the developing world on an ongoing basis, thereby having a measurable impact on Millennium Development Goal 1, eradicating poverty and hunger.

Mr. Buffett, who had been named an Ambassador against Hunger by WFP last year, emphasized that agricultural development was the most effective way to tackle poverty in the developing world. Many subsistence and small-scale farmers could benefit substantially from even the smallest improvements. Moving them from net buyers to net sellers was one of the initiative's main objectives. By encouraging small farmers to increase their production, the P4P programme would create opportunities for them to lift themselves out of poverty.

The Howard G. Buffett Foundation's contribution sought to expand its work in conflict and post-conflict societies, he said. It would support P4P in some of the toughest environments with the most vulnerable and marginalized populations, such as in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Sudan. It would also focus on Central America, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras, in order to learn from a regional approach.

Noting the host of problems weighing down agricultural productivity in the African continent, Mr. Kikwete said the beauty of P4P was its focus on unlocking some of those constraints. It would provide a certain market for surplus products, finally giving African farmers the incentive to increase production.

Testifying to the multifaceted assistance already provided by WFP to countries like his, Mr. Kagame outlined the potential structural impact of the current initiative. It would not only fight food insecurity and household vulnerability by providing local food on a short-term basis, but, by creating incentives to raise production, it would give farmers the opportunity to take advantage of rising food prices.

Mr. Museveni noted that the problem in Uganda was not food production -– its farmers produced foods easily. Rather, they had no market. Because the current initiative would help those farmers transform their subsistence farming into commercial farming, the scheme would couple food security with income security. That was the real sign of food security: only when the poor had enough money in their accounts to buy food when they needed it could it be said they had escaped hunger.

Noting that half of Guatemala's children suffered from malnutrition, Ms. Torres de Colom emphasized the linkages between the initiative's benefits to individual farmers and its larger potential impact on rural development. Empowering women farmers, however, should be incorporated into the World Food Programme's plans.

Responding to a question on how the money for the initiative would be spent, Ms. Sheeran stressed it would not pay for food, but would underwrite the first ever study to identify the types of contracts that were most beneficial to local agricultural development. In addition, WFP -– which was typically prohibited from committing to long-term contracts with farmers -– would present the study's results to its Board, in an attempt to reverse that policy.

She added that WFP had worked with each Government and with regional organizations like the African Union to tailor the different models to their individual communities. In the end, it would change the way it did business by helping farmers increase their yields so that they no longer required any food assistance.

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/TUJA-7JT8PQ?OpenDocument