(Bloomberg) —
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is pouring money into helping small-scale farmers adapt to climate change and address a gap in funding for food production.
The Gates Foundation will commit $1.4 billion over four years to expand access to innovations that help farmers across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia become more resilient. That includes boosting crop yields and livestock production, and also providing digital advisory services and restoring degraded land, the foundation said in a statement in November, ahead of the COP30 climate talks in Brazil.
“Smallholder farmers are feeding their communities under the toughest conditions imaginable,” Gates, the foundation’s chair and and co-founder of Microsoft Corp., said in the statement. “Investing in their resilience is one of the smartest, most impactful things we can do for people and the planet.”
The Gates Foundation wants to address a funding gap that’s challenged the global food systems, even though they make up about a third of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Small family farmers grow more than a third of the world’s food and they’re also on the frontline of weather extremes from droughts to floods, yet less than 1% of all public climate finance goes into helping them.
The foundation said the commitment supports Gates’ vision outlined in his COP30 memo of prioritizing climate investments for maximum human impact and advances the foundation’s goal of lifting millions of people out of poverty by 2045. The memo said it was time to adopt a more measured tone when addressing climate change and the threat it poses to the world, calling out a “doomsday view of climate change.”
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