Tomorrow is World Food Day, an occasion that brings Bill Gates to Des Moines, Iowa today, speaking on behalf of the world poorest farming families and the World Food Prize.

The event is part of a larger three-day dialogue called Food, Agriculture & National Security in a Globalized World.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is urging governments, donors, researchers, farmer groups, environmentalists, and others to set aside old divisions and join forces to help millions of the world’s poorest farming families boost their yields and incomes so they can lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. Gates insists the effort must be guided by the farmers themselves, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.

Bill Gates studying grain, Karsana, NigeriaThe foundation’s new grants totaling $120 million include funding for legumes that fix nitrogen in the soil, higher yielding varieties of sorghum and millet, and new varieties of sweet potatoes that resist pests and have a higher vitamin content.

Other projects will help the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa support African governments in developing policies that serve small farmers; help get information to farmers by radio and cell phone; support school feeding programs; provide training and resources that African governments can draw on as they regulate biotechnologies; and help women farmers in India manage their land and water resources sustainably. To date, the foundation has committed $1.4 billion to agricultural development efforts.

We take note of the grant for women farmers in India, after noting Tuesday that women do most of the farming in Africa, but don’t seem to be part of Africa’s agricultural solution at the conference table.

Africa missed out on the green revolution.Gates will address the polarizing forces addressing the global fight around hunger, calling it an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two.” On one side, he will say, there are groups that support technological solutions to increase agricultural productivity without proper regard to environmental and sustainability concerns. On the other, there are those who react negatively to any emphasis on productivity.

“It’s a false choice, and it’s dangerous for the field,” Gates will say. “It blocks important advances. It breeds hostility among people who need to work together. And it makes it hard to launch a comprehensive program to help poor farmers. The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability—and there is no reason we can’t have both.”

Gates will address the successes of the Green Revolution in India and Latin America but address the problems we called out — specifically the overuse of pesticides and massive water requirements of new seeds. The Gates Foundation will not embrace a single solution to agriculatural development but seems totally focused now (after a stingingly respectful but critical article in The Nation) on developing a consensus strategy before the 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty starve to death, in the middle of decades of trying to solve the problem. Anne

Some paragraphs excerpted from the Gates Foundation press release.