In the past few years, the foundation has begun to invest heavily in innovations that can increase agricultural productivity for the world’s poor. More than 1 billion people suffer from chronic hunger, and most of them are small farmers. We need to raise their productivity so that they have extra output, which can be saved for lean years, or sold so they can have money to send their kids to school. We will also need to feed the additional 3 billion people that will populate the earth in the next 50 years. People involved in agriculture care about both improving farm productivity and making sure farming is done in a sustainable way. Although these needs are often seen as mutually exclusive, they are actually quite complementary. They both depend on innovation, including new seeds, better training for farmers, and better access to inputs and markets. Some of the recent successful innovations in agriculture are documented in a book called
Millions Fed, which you can download at
www.ifpri.org/publication/millions-fed 
.
Edward Karasi examining his finger millet crops in Kakamega (Kisumu District, Kenya, 2009).
To make better seeds, scientists find two seeds, each with attractive characteristics—like being adapted to a local environment or having better productivity or disease resistance—and make one seed that combines the good traits. Breeding to get better seeds has been going on for thousands of years. When you see the original teosinte corn plant that is the father of today’s corn, it is hard to believe the two are related. But the change is due entirely to breeding controlled by humans.
There are three things that modern agrotechnology brings to this seed improvement process. The first is simply the ability to gather plant samples from all over the world and use databases to keep track of thousands of plants grown under different conditions. This has accelerated the progress in conventional breeding. The second is the ability to genetically sequence plants, just like we do with humans. We have some understanding of which parts of the genes control which characteristics, so when we cross two seeds we can look at the gene sequence of the resulting seed and know whether it has the characteristics we want. This is called marker-assisted breeding and it dramatically speeds up the cross-breeding process, because researchers don’t have to wait for the seed to grow before they know whether they’ve succeeded. The final technique is transgenics, where instead of just allowing cross-breeding to create the new seed genome, you actually take a gene and insert it. This is the approach that is still controversial for some people. But with the proper safety reviews, this technique can help create disease-resistant and drought-tolerant crops that could not be created any other way, protecting billions of dollars of harvest and increasing the food supply by millions of tons each year.
These modern techniques have been applied most aggressively to the big cash crops in rich countries. Just like in health, there isn’t a lot of market incentive to use the latest science for the needs of the poor. The foundation’s approach is to fund projects focused on the specific growing conditions in developing countries and the crops that are grown by poor farmers. Most of our grants involve marker-assisted breeding, but a few involve transgenics.
In December I visited the BECA Laboratory in Nairobi, Kenya, which is headed by a scientist named Segenet Kelemu. Their laboratory is doing state-of-the-art marker-assisted breeding to improve sorghum, cassava, and corn so the crops yield more food and resist pests, drought, and diseases. Segenet grew up in Ethiopia, moved away for graduate school, and worked in other countries for 25 years. But she chose to come back to Africa in 2007 to help develop a generation of plant scientists working to end Africa’s food insecurity. I was very impressed with the teams she has put together and the work they are doing with plant breeders throughout Africa. For products like sorghum, even when they can tell that a seed has all the right characteristics, they still have to develop varieties that also match local tastes, since unlike corn or wheat in rich countries there isn’t one standard form that everyone prefers.
The picture below shows you what a dramatic difference this kind of work can make. On the left you see sorghum that has been attacked by
Striga, a devastating parasitic plant. On the right you see high-yield sorghum that has genes to prevent
Striga from attacking. The difference to a small farmer between having the old seed or the new seed is the difference between starving and thriving.
A high-yield, Striga-resistant variety of sorghum (right) growing alongside a nonresistant variety infested with Striga (purple-flowered plants) (Fedis, Ethiopia, 2006).