The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the European Commission will spend more than $600 million on research to help smallholder farmers who face deteriorating growing conditions due to climate change, they announced Tuesday.

Some $300 million from the Gates Foundation and $318 million from the Commission between 2018 and 2020 will go towards tackling problems such as how to protect crops against rising temperatures, droughts, floods, diseases, poor soil and pests.

"Two-thirds of the world’s poorest people live in Africa and Asia, and roughly 800 million of them rely on agriculture for their livelihoods," the Gates Foundation said in a statement. "These smallholder farmers play a negligible role in generating carbon emissions, but they suffer some of the harshest effects of climate change."

Among the possible new technologies, the foundation evoked the potential to combine big data with robotics to scan fields of crops, to better understand plant characteristics; the development of drought-tolerant varieties of rice; heat-tolerant beans; and new ways to detect and control crop diseases.

Read the full article about The Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation and EU's efforts to help smallholder farmers by Vince Chadwick at Devex International Development