Gates Foundation has fast learning curve in agriculture

SEATTLE -- A little more than a year after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made its first grants to help farmers in Africa, the foundation has already invested more than $350 million toward answering the question: Why are Africans getting hungrier while the rest of the world has made tremendous progress in this area?

The answer, says Rajiv Shah, head of the agriculture department at the Seattle-based foundation, is complicated to understand and expensive to fix.

That's no deterrent for a foundation also working on such challenges as eradicating AIDS and malaria.

"We won't feed the world," Shah said during a recent interview. "As with anything else we do ... to achieve those bigger goals of moving hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and hunger it will take a very broadly based movement."

International aid organizations estimate more than 1.1 billion people in the world live on $1 a day or less, with 75 percent of the world's poorest people dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. About 840 million people don't get 1900 calories a day, mostly because of poverty but in some cases because of war.