The Filipino Entrepreneur

The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates (the whole world knows Microsoft is equivalent to Bill Gates) donates 19.9 Million US dollars to IRRI. This is the headline of a well known newspaper here. I guess not everybody knows where the IRRI is. It’s based in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines and it’s “a non-profit research and training center established to reduce poverty and hunger, improve the health of the farmers and consumers , and ensure environmental sustainability through collaborative research, partnerships and strengthening of national agricultural research and extension systems.” ( quoting from their website)

Gates announce the donation in Davos, Switzerland in the World Economic Forum. It will come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a package of agricultural development grants. It’s nice to know billionaires like Bill Gates share part of their riches to the poor specially to farmers where we get out food. Farming in a tropical country like Philippines and most of the time not fully equipped with modern machinery is really hard. I can still see rice farmers use water buffalo (or carabao) and plowshare to till the soil and plant the seedlings by hand in hectares and hectares of land. I don’t want to point a finger on who should be responsible for supporting those poor farmers and I guess you already know.

Taiwan’s government focused their attention on agriculture in the past and look what they are now, one of the economic tigers in Asia.

See video below: