Improving the Lives of Smallholder Farmers in Africa and South Asia: The Role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Speaker:
David Bergvinson
22 Feb 2010
8:00 PM
Sun Room, Memorial Union
David Bergvinson is a Senior Program Officer in Agricultural Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Before joining the foundation, Bergvinson spent over a decade at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, where he led a program to develop insect-resistant maize varieties for Africa and Asia. He also managed CIMMYT's drought breeding network in Southeast Asia that resulted in the development of several stress-tolerant lines that have since been released through national programs. Bergvinson currently manages seven crop improvement grants within the Science & Technology division of the foundation.
Gates Foundation-funded projects include:
- Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (CIMMYT, $39.1M over 5 years)
- Tropical Legumes 1 -developing molecular makers (Generation Challenge Program, $9.6M over 3 years)
- Tropical Legumes 2 -developing and delivering varieties for six legumes in Africa and South Asia (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, $20.6M over 3 years)
- Stress Tolerant Rice for Africa and South Asia (International Rice Research Institute, $19.9M over 3 years)
- "Green Super Rice" for the Resource-Poor of Africa and Asia (CAAS, $18.2M over 3 years)
- Cereal System initiative for South Asia (IRRI, $19.6M over 3 years)
- One Apollo Project: Creating the second Green Revolution by supercharging photosynthesis: C4-rice (IRRI, $11M over 3 years)
- Agricultural Information System: Weather Surfaces (Tulane Univ./ AWhere, $472, 823 over 18 months)
- A Molecular Breeding Platform (Generation Challenge Program/CIMMYT), $11,994,250 over 5 years)