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ROME (AP) — Bill Gates told U.N. food agencies Thursday that current approaches to global agriculture are outdated, inefficient and failing to give small farmers in poor countries the help they really need.

The Microsoft founder brought his campaign to fight poverty and hunger in Africa and Asia to a forum of the U.N. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), one of three Rome-based U.N. food agencies.

Much of some $2 billion spent over the past five years to fight poverty and hunger in Africa and Asia by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has gone toward improving agricultural productivity. Gates urged the U.N. agencies to commit themselves to measurable targets for increasing agricultural productivity. He also advocated taking quick advantage of high-tech methods, such as genomic science, to improve plant breeding. "Use of such techniques can make the difference between suffering and self-sufficiency" for small farmers in developing countries, he said.

Gates also announced nearly $200 million in grants. Among the projects receiving funding is one to create an innovative system to monitor the effects of agricultural productivity on the population and environment.

Other funds will build on existing projects, including the release of 34 new varieties of drought-tolerant maize, and delivering vaccines to tens of millions of livestock. Gates has embraced high-tech — and for some critics, controversial — solutions for boosting agriculture, including genetic modification in plant breeding, as a way to fight starvation and malnutrition.

"When Melinda and I started our foundation more than a decade ago, we initially focused on inequities in global health. But as we spent more time learning about the diseases of poverty, we realized that many of the poorest people in the world were small farmers," Gates said.

"The conclusion was obvious. They could lift their families up by growing more food," he said. The foundation, which he co-chairs with his wife, is based in Seattle, Washington. In his speech, Gates said the foundation estimated that small farmers in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa can "double or almost triple their yields, respectively, in the next 20 years — while preserving the land for future generations."

The impact of these productivity increases would "translate into 400 million people lifting themselves out of poverty," the philanthropist contended. He called on the U.N. agencies to create a "global productivity target" for small farmers, and a system of public scorecards to measure how countries, food agencies, and donors are contributing toward the overall goal of reducing poverty.