 Bill Gates: Donates $20 million to rice farmers
Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is to donate nearly 20 million dollars for research into helping rice farmer's deal with global warming, the International Rice Research Institute said Monday.
The Philippines-based institute said it would use the donation from Bill Gates, Microsoft founder to harness scientific advances and address major unsolved problems in agriculture.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would release the 19.9-million-dollar grant over three years, the institute said. The money initially would help give improved rice strains and linked technology to 400,000 small farmers in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, it added.
The donation from Bill Gates would help farmers struggling with little or no irrigation by helping to develop and distribute rice strains capable of withstanding stresses such as drought and flooding, the institute said.
Robert S. Zeigler, the institute's director general, emphasised that climate change threatened to worsen the frequency and severity of such problems, making the need for hardy crops urgent.
Rice is a staple food for 2.4 billion people. Annual rice output must increase by nearly 70 percent to nearly 880 million tonnes in 2025 to meet projected global demand, according to the institute's estimates.
Bill Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Bill Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000. |
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