Bill Gates Plans to Feed the
World with Ketchup &
Cheeze Whiz

Gates Fights Malnutrition With Cheese,
Ketchup and Other Fortified Food Items

By RACHEL ZIMMERMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Let them eat Cheez Whiz?

An international consortium led by Bill Gates's charitable foundation
plans to address malnutrition around the world by offering economic
incentives to Kraft, Procter & Gamble and other food companies to bring
fortified processed foods and food commodities to impoverished nations.

The unusual program, funded mostly with $50 million from the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, has signed up Kraft Foods Inc., Procter &
Gamble Co., H.J. Heinz and vitamin manufacturers Roche and BASF Corp.
Participating companies would add nutrients, such as iron, folic acid
and vitamin A, to food products they sell in poor countries and also
provide governments and small food producers with technical assistance
for fortifying food staples, such as rice, maize meal, wheat flour, oil,
sugar, soy sauce and salt.

In exchange, the consortium, called the Global Alliance for Improved
Nutrition, or GAIN, would offer companies assistance in lobbying for
favorable tariffs and tax rates and speedier regulatory review of new
products in targeted countries. The consortium also would give local
governments money for initiatives to help create demand for fortified
foods, including large-scale public relations campaigns or a
governmental "seal of approval."

The effort, whose total funding is $70 million over five years, is set
to be launched officially Thursday by Mr. Gates at the United Nations
General Assembly Special Session on Children. The consortium includes
U.N. agencies such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization and
Unicef, the governments of the U.S., Japan, Germany and Canada, and
global health and nutrition experts. Negotiations with some countries
have already begun. The presidents of Sri Lanka and Zambia are expected
to be at the announcement and are considering expanding current
food-fortification programs under the new effort.

DEFICIENT DIETS

Facts about vitamin and micronutrient deficiencies in developing
countries:

. Two billion people suffer from anemia (mostly iron deficiency anemia)

. One-fifth of maternal deaths are due to severe anemia

. An estimated 200 million children do not get enough vitamin A from
their daily diet

. Without supplemental vitamin A, 250,000 would go blind each year

. Close to two billion people do not get enough iodine from their daily
diet

. Iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable mental
retardation in the world

Source: GAIN, USAID

Some experts are troubled by the idea of Bill Gates and multinational
food companies teaming up to reach into underdeveloped countries' food
systems. Critics dislike helping corporations peddle processed foods
that, despite added nutrients, still aren't especially healthy because
of their fat, sugar or sodium content. Many see the GAIN program as just
a heavy-handed way to ease corporate access to poor markets -- and one
that won't do much to counter malnutrition, to boot.

"This is a reductionist, single-nutrient techno-fix to a problem that is
much more complex," says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and food
studies at New York University, who is the author of "Food Politics: How
the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health." "The main reason for
the lack of decent nutritional status is poverty," she says. "Nobody's
looking at ways to get people jobs or health care. Maybe that's too hard
-- even for Bill Gates." Wouldn't it be better, she asks, to teach
people to grow fruits and vegetables in adverse conditions?

"It's a good idea, but a lot of people will die from malnutrition before
we eliminate poverty," replies Sally Stansfield, a Gates foundation
official working on the GAIN project. "We are trying to maximize the
health, cognitive power and productivity of people living right now."

Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International
Development, which represents the U.S. in the consortium, dismisses
doubts about working with big companies and processed foods. Critics
"may make comments about the multinationals," he says, "but that's how
people eat." He says the program intentionally involves fortifying both
processed foods and staples in order to reach people of all income
levels. "The only way this kind of effort works on a mass scale is by
layering," Mr. Natsios says.

Horst Kramer, spokesman for Swiss drug company Roche, says even though
Roche, as part of the program, might sell its vitamin-and-mineral
"premix" packet, which users are supposed to add to flour or rice, the
GAIN effort's overarching goal is to provide nutritional assistance to
the poor. Indeed, he notes that GAIN will provide cash to governments
and nonprofits that apply for it. "This is not a marketing tool," he
says. "It's a philanthropic effort."

The folks at Kraft Foods see the project in a more pragmatic light. "We
think this partnership can accelerate the process of bringing fortified
products to market and build an accurate consumer awareness of the role
these products can play in improving nutrition," says Stuart Wilson,
director, strategic growth initiatives, for Kraft Foods International.

"Participating in GAIN complements our own focus on health and wellness
as a key growth platform," says Roger Deromedi, co-chief executive of
Kraft Foods and the chief of Kraft Foods International.

The GAIN project is modeled after the billion-dollar global vaccine
program to inoculate poor children, also backed by the Gates foundation.
The guiding principle is to bring public agencies and private industry
together to address grossly inadequate basic health care for the poor
resulting from failures of the marketplace. The foundation's approach is
to fix problems using market mechanisms. "We're interested in any health
intervention that can impact millions of lives, especially when the
intervention is incredibly inexpensive," Mr. Gates says, in an
interview. "Micronutrients fits that in a big way."

Details of the new program are still being worked out. But Kraft,
majority-owned by Philip Morris Cos., says some of its biscuits, cheeses
and beverages are already being fortified with nutrients and would make
possible candidates for the GAIN project. For example, Cheez Whiz and
Kraft Singles cheese slices are fortified with calcium, and Kool-Aid and
Tang are fortified with vitamins A and C, Kraft says. It currently sells
fortified Trakinas fruit-filled sandwich cookies in Brazil, fortified
Pacific cookies in China and fortified O'Smile cookies in Taiwan.

Meanwhile, in Venezuela, Procter & Gamble is test-marketing a new
powdered beverage mix called NutriStar, which contains iron, Vitamin A
and iodine. Heinz sells fortified ketchup in the Philippines.

GAIN's goal is to work with individual governments to assess nutritional
deficits and then, if appropriate, to help manufacturers bring fortified
foods to easy-to-reach urban populations there, says the Gates
foundation's Dr. Stansfield, who also works on the foundation's
Infectious Disease and Vaccine global health program. At the same time,
the program will try to reach desperately malnourished families in rural
areas by supporting local millers, nonprofit food programs and even
households: Mothers could add free or discounted packets of nutrients to
their children's food.

Fortified foods, of course, aren't new. Iodine added to table salt has
improved health world-wide by reducing occurrences of goiter, neck
swelling, mental retardation and growth abnormalities. In the
industrialized world, fortification is so ubiquitous it goes largely
unnoticed: Milk is fortified with vitamin D, and every box of corn
flakes has a list of added micronutrients in bold-face type. Still,
GAIN's approach -- pulling together governments, the private sector and
small nonprofits -- is unusual for its scope, makeup and funding.

GAIN officials say they hope to encourage national governments to
provide regulatory concessions for fortified foods, thereby reducing the
costs for industry. They also hope for better policing of nutrition
claims. Kraft's Mr. Wilson says regulators often can't evaluate new
products scientifically. "GAIN can help facilitate these approval
processes with appropriate guidance from scientific authorities and
public health experts," he says.

Indeed, inconsistent regulatory standards is "one of the key barriers to
the private sector jumping into product fortification at the present
time," says Keith Zook, a spokesman for Procter & Gamble's corporate
sustainable development division.

Nevertheless, GAIN remains a tough sell. The Gates foundation's Dr.
Stansfield says some European governments view such fortification
programs as one step away from genetically modified food and oppose
them. Some potential donors in Europe have been reluctant to meddle in
the politics of food distribution in poor countries -- even though GAIN,
she says, for just pennies could help children in northern Zaire with
brain damage resulting from iron deficiencies. A single added nutrient
could help two billion people world-wide with iron deficiencies or more
than 800,000 world-wide with vitamin A deficiencies, which can cause
blindness.

Write to Rachel Zimmerman at rachel.zimmerman@wsj.com

Updated May 9, 2002 12:31 a.m. EDT