By Ian Wilhelm

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said today it is awarding $48-million to help poor cocoa and cashew farmers in Africa improve the quality of their crops and increase the opportunities to sell their product on the global market.

A dozen or so major agriculture and food companies, including Archer Daniels Midland, Kraft, and Starbucks, will contribute cash, products, and technical assistance, valued at a total of $42-million.

The foundation is giving $23-million to the World Cocoa Foundation, in Washington, and $25-million for the cashew project to a German development agency, known as GTZ, which is based in Eschborn.

“When you think about $1-a-day poverty, the bulk of the extreme poor people in the world — 70-plus percent — live in rural areas and are dependent on farms for food and income,” Rajiv Shah, Gates’s director of agricultural programs, said in an interview. “The goal is to help improve their production and sell their crops at an increased value so they can earn higher incomes and over time send their kids to school and pull themselves out of poverty.”

He said the foundation’s money will support the development of farmer associations, new low-cost harvesting methods, crop diversification, and community centers where farmers can buy fertilizer and equipment and also have a meeting place to discuss their work.

The Gates foundation, long known for its work in global health, began focusing on agriculture about three years ago. Critics argue that like its health work, Gates is too focused on finding a technological solution for food probelms, like creating seeds that are better adapted to Africa’s varied environments.

But Mr. Shah emphasized that creating new crop varieties is only one part of the foundation’s approach and that its new grants demonstrate that belief.

“We believe you have to work across the full value chain,” he said.

With cocoa, the grant maker aims to assist 200,000 families in West Africa, where cocoa is the largest agricultural export. The goal is to double their incomes in five years.

For cashews, the project will primarily build processing plants in Africa and helping farmers get access to them.

Richard Rogers, a program officer in agricultural development for the Gates foundation, said that supply chain obstacles hurt the potential earnings of cashew farmers. While Africa produces about 33 percent of the world’s cashew supply, almost all of it is exported as raw nuts to be processed in Asia and then shipped to North America and elsewhere.

The Gates effort “allows the farmers to sell their products directly to the processing plants there in the country and it allows the processing plants to pay more for those cashews because they have reduced the logistic costs,” he said.

By 2012, the project plans to help 150,000 cashew growers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Mozambique by increasing their incomes by 50 percent.

The companies involved in the effort will pay for the construction of processing facilities, as well as providing managerial training to farmers and other support.

Mr. Rogers said Gates began negotiating with the businesses before the economic crisis hit in the fall, but that the companies are sticking with the partnership in part because reducing inefficiencies in the market will benefit their bottom lines.

“The strength of these projects is that they are a win-win. It’s not really meant to be a philanthropic effort purely. We really tried to put together a case for why the investment made sense,” he said.

While the companies could have tried similar cost-cutting measures on their own, the foundation is making sure the development work benefits everyone, said Mr. Shah.

“Conceptually, you could imagine these firms might make similar investments,” he said, “but they wouldn’t have the natural predilection to work with small farm households that are poor.”

Information about the agriculture project is available on the Gates foundation Web site.