Leading Foundations Team Up on Food-Supply Effort

Some of the country’s biggest philanthropies are joining forces on an effort to relieve pressure on global food supplies that are pushing prices up and fueling unrest in the developing world, Bloomberg writes.

The AGree program, announced Tuesday by the Ford, Bill & Melinda Gates, W.K. Kellogg, and Walton Family foundations, will pay for agricultural research and analysis and foster dialogue between big industrial producers and smaller organic farmers to address food-related health, economic, and environmental issues.

“Food policy is too important just to be left to people in the food industry,” said Dan Glickman, a former agriculture secretary and one of the initiative’s leaders. “For too long, food and farm policy have been related to a narrow range of interests.”

The William and Flora Hewlett, McKnight, David and Lucile Packard, and Rockefeller foundations are also backing AGree.