Joel L. Fleishman

“Explosive population growth in much of Asia was making it less and less plausible that nations like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines would ever be able to feed themselves. In Famine—1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? William and Paul Paddock argued that a Time of Famines would soon lay waste the developing world. “The famines are inevitable,” they warned. And “riding alongside [them] will surely be riots and other civil tensions which the central government[s] will be too weak to control.” The Paddocks derided the naïve hope that “something [would] turn up” to forestall this doom.102 And the Paddocks were not alone in their assessment. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, for example, argued that Famine—1975! “may be remembered as one of the most important books of our age.” The Rockefeller Foundation shared these men’s sense of urgency. But, rather than advocate a triage system (as the Paddocks did), in which the worst-off nations would be denied assistance and left to their Darwinian fate, the foundation looked for new ways to attack the problem. The foundation had first extended its agriculture programs to India in 1956, at the request of the Indian national government. In the ensuing years, Rockefeller partnered with USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Together, they “helped establish five state agriculture universities in India. ” 103 These universities collaborated with their American counterparts on research and training. As it had in Mexico, the foundation thereby contributed to the development, in India, of a community of homegrown agriculturalists with access to the most advanced technologies in the world.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“Foundation managers need to keep the message of O.P.M. in mind in more than one way. Of course, the money they spend is other people’s money because it came originally from one or more donors. But it is also other people’s money to the extent that taxpayers shoulder part of the cost of the foregone revenue from the capital and income earned on that capital through the tax breaks that foundations enjoy. For this reason, the taxpayers, too, have an interest in how wisely and well foundation money is spent. Thus, the general public has a real, tangible, even proprietary interest in a foundation’s deployment of its assets and in all of the ways it makes its decisions.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World