GM WATCH COMMENT: Monsanto's home town rag provides Monsanto's former vice president for international development partnerships with a sympathetic profile as a man bestriding the trinity of scientist, businessman and humanitarian.

According to Rob Horsch, people here [ie at Monsanto, where he was being interviewed] "will be more helpful to me than I will be to them." Yet, interestingly, Horsch didn't even make the effort to be interviewed away from his former employer's offices.

And while his future employment with the Gates Foundation is presented as a less restricted extension of his "rewarding" "humanitarian" role at Monsanto, the latter always had a decidedly self-interested purpose. In an earlier interview Horsch described his role in the company as twofold: to "create goodwill and help open future markets" for Monsanto.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=3632

Both aspects of his role are perfectly illustrated by the most famous project Horsch initiated for Monsanto - the GM sweet potato project fronted by Florence Wambugu. That project was a huge success in terms of public relations - generating an enormous amount of media hype - while also helping open doors to GM in Africa.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=131

The only thing the project failed to do was get a useful product out to the farmers it was supposedly helping. (See 'Monsanto's showcase project in Africa fails', New Scientist)
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=2561

But the project remained a successful vehicle for poor-washing GM while driving forward the regulatory frameworks and the technical capacity that the biotech corporations require to build-up global markets for their GM crops.

The article below makes it clear that Rob Horsch at the Gates Foundation will be very much an extension of Horsch at Monsanto.

In his new role Horsch expects "to tap local institutions". "St. Louis will be a resource for me," he says. Monsanto too, we are told, "wants to work with (organizations) like the Gates Foundation and allow them to incorporate our tools". The Gates Foundation is already, we are told, tied into the Monsanto-initiated and backed Danforth Center, which sits cheek by jowl with the company.

All of which suggests that for Horsch and Monsanto, his new role is very much business as usual.
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Scientist to humanitarian
By Rachel Melcer
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, 26 November 2006 http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/0/C4CB54948CB088B386257231000A1D70?OpenDocument

Rob Horsch, who spent 25 years pioneering biotech crops and building up Monsanto Co., is a bit boggled by his new job: spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fight hunger in the developing world.

"I actually don't know how to think about this and how to talk about it," he said in an interview at Monsanto's Creve Coeur headquarters, just days after retiring from that company to start his new post at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.

Horsch left his longtime home and colleagues to follow a dream, albeit a daunting one. At the world's largest philanthropy, flush with funds recently donated by billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Horsch is senior program officer for agricultural development.

His task is to find and fund the most promising means for helping the poorest of the world's poor - the more than 700 million people who live on less than $1 a day, depend on small-scale farming and often are hungry.

"I think, I hope I've got a set of experiences and skills that are unique and can make a difference," he said.

As a scientist, Horsch helped develop methods of genetically modifying crops to withstand herbicide applications and kill harmful pests. He created products that reduce the use of environmentally damaging pesticides, make it possible to farm without tilling to limit soil erosion, and boost crop yields.

As a businessman, he watched the bottom line and focused on projects that brought billions of dollars to Monsanto. He translated scientific theory into products bought by farmers and planted on millions of acres each year.

But it as a humanitarian that Horsch hopes to have the most impact.

Since 1995, he was Monsanto's vice president for international development partnerships, responsible for working with public and nonprofit entities to bring modern farm products and technologies to the developing world.

The work was rewarding, he said. But it can't match the scope and freedom he anticipates having at the Gates Foundation.

Horsch said his annual budget, though large, is "a drop in the bucket" compared with amounts spent by governments or on global trade. But it comes with a freedom companies and countries lack — he is not constrained by a profit motive, or a big bureaucracy and politics.

"That brings a unique power to it," he said.

Yet the Gates Foundation, created by one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs with his Microsoft Corp. fortune, has a decidedly business-like bent. Projects must pan out with measurable benefits, or they are cut, Horsch said. There is no room for sentimental favorites or throwing good money after bad.

That will be true even for approaches Horsch holds dear, such as the use of genetically modified crops.

Raj Shah, the foundation's director of agriculture and financial services and Horsch's boss, summed up the priority: "What we really focus on are the scientific and technological breakthroughs that will save lives, end hunger, dramatically impact poverty and increase security."

Much of that can be achieved, Shah said, through conventional strategies such as the use of improved hybrid seeds and fertilizers, educating farmers and increasing their access to markets.

Many scientists, including Horsch, believe great results will come from th