Rockefeller Foundation Tells of 15-Year Plan for Third World

The Rockefeller Foundation Wednesday announced a 15-year plan to adapt Western science and technology to alleviate poverty in developing countries.

As much as $300 million will be committed in the first five years to “the equitable distribution of benefits inherent in scientific advance and technological innovation,” President Richard W. Lyman said in Manhattan.

In comparison, the widely publicized USA for Africa, financed with sales of the song “We Are the World” and donations from rock music fans, expects to receive a total of about $46 million.

African Staples Almost Ignored

Lyman said commercial research means that improved varieties of foods eaten in America are continually developed while almost no money is spent improving sorghum and millet, staples of African diets. He said the foundation will both promote developments benefiting Earth’s poor and adapt them to local cultures so they win wide acceptance.

The Rockefeller Foundation, the nation’s sixth largest grant-making endowment, has assets of $1.3 billion and by law must spend 5% of that sum, about $65 million, this year. Specific projects have not been chosen, but the first grants under the new policy are expected next fall, Lyman said.

The new policy, affecting 60% of the foundation’s grants, was developed by a trustee task force formed to examine how the Rockefeller Foundation could speed human and material progress in Third World countries during the closing years of the 20th Century.

The trustees said in a statement that 1 billion people live in poverty “beneath any reasonable definition of human decency” and that 11 million children die each year before reaching their first birthday.

The Human Family

“These are simple matters of justice in the human family and if our march of progress is going to leave the Southern Hemisphere behind, this is not going to be a very happy world to inhabit,” Lyman said in a telephone interview.

Ken Prewitt, vice president for the program, said “we are in the beginning surges of enormous technological breakthroughs in the advanced Western countries, especially in microelectronics and biotechnology. We want to be at least a prick on the conscience of large-scale international science so that a portion of its efforts are directed to the Third World.”

Philanthropic critic Waldemar Nielsen, who in his recent book “The Golden Donors” sharply criticized the Rockefeller Foundation for lacking the vigorous programs that once made it America’s most prestigious endowment, praised the new policy as an “abrupt turnaround.”

“This sounds terrific, absolutely marvelous,” said David Runnalls, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development’s North American office in Washington. “It sounds to me like they are going back to international agricultural research and science, to their strengths,” Runnalls said.

Times researcher Siobhan Flynn in New York contributed to this report.