As Melinda and I learned about health, we also learned about other opportunities to help the poorest move to a path of self-sufficiency and wealth creation. We thought it would be a shame to help save a child from rotavirus if she would still be chronically undernourished and never be able to earn or save money. About 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. More than 900 million suffer from chronic hunger, and most of them live in rural areas of developing countries. This is why the foundation added our Global Development Program to complement the Global Health group two years ago. We are working in areas like financial services, including savings and insurance. Our biggest investment is in improving agricultural output, another area where innovations have made a huge difference for millions of people but have not reached the poorest, especially in Africa and South Asia.
New seeds and other inputs like fertilizer allow a farmer to increase her farm’s output significantly, instead of just growing enough food to subsist. This innovation is just as important as developing and delivering vaccinations. The additional output means her children get better nutrition, which improves their health and ability to learn. (In many poor countries, most farmers are women.) It also allows the family to save food and money so they can withstand a year with bad weather, which will be happening more often to poor farmers because of climate change.
As farming families do better, they start to put their kids in school for longer periods. Almost every country that has become wealthy started with a huge increase in farming productivity. Chart 4 shows the increase in output per acre for various grains, including wheat, corn, and rice, in the United States, India, China, and Africa since 1961. This dramatic increase in output—more than three times—is often called the Green Revolution.
Africa jumps out as the only case where this increase has not taken place. A big reason is that African countries have widely varying climate conditions, and there hasn’t been the same investment in creating the seeds that fit those conditions. Because agriculture is an essential part of economic growth for most African countries, we are working with others to fund a “Green Revolution for Africa” and other areas that could benefit from this kind of investment. Since I grew up as a city boy and didn’t know anything about farming, I have been on a steep learning curve to understand things like fertilizer, drip irrigation, plant breeding, and which crops are best for which conditions. Our goal is to help 150 million of the poorest farming households in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia triple their incomes by 2025.
A big challenge in achieving this goal is that climate change will be making weather conditions more extreme—triggering both droughts and floods—in the tropical areas where most of the poor live. The negative effects will fall almost entirely on the poor, even though they did not cause the problem. I hope that the increased public interest in reducing climate change will also increase the political will to provide aid that will help the poor mitigate its negative effects. It is interesting how often the impact of climate change is illustrated by talking about the problems the polar bears will face rather than the much greater number of poor people who will die unless significant investments are made to help them.
I have been talking a lot in this letter about technological solutions like new seeds and vaccines. Our optimism about technology is a fundamental part of the foundation’s approach. Advances in science have played a huge role in improving the living conditions in the rich world over the past century. Technology is also a personal passion of Melinda’s and mine. So we try to point scientific research toward the problems of the poor, like agriculture. This is why we tend not to fund other important things like building health clinics or roads, which are better left to governments.
Some people criticize this approach, saying either that the problems can’t be solved with technology, or that the technology only works if it reaches the people who need it. There is some validity to both of these points. In agriculture, the foundation is funding research into new seeds, but we are also funding pilot projects for non-technological solutions like new agricultural extension services that teach farmers basic techniques like irrigation or crop rotation. And when we do fund research on technology, we emphasize that it must take into account the needs of the poorest. For instance, new seeds must be tailored for the climates in which they’ll be grown, and they have to produce the kind of foods that people like to eat in those areas. Technology is only useful if it helps people improve their lives, not as an end in itself.