support this year. One, in Bangladesh, was for expansion of an experiment in which landless peasants own and manage irrigation pumps and contract out their services to farmers. Meanwhile, a Bangladesh Agricultural University research team is using Foundation funds to determine the types of lift irrigation in common use that are most productive, generate most employment, and provide equitable access to water. Across the border in India, a grant to Birla Vishvakarma Mahavidyalaya, a private research organization, is enabling researchers to test the potential of wood gasifiers, which convert biomass into combustible gas, to improve lift irrigation.

Improved management of land resources, particularly of marginal and degraded lands on which the livelihood of large numbers of the very poor depends, is also a major Foundation concern. In South and Southeast Asia and in parts of Africa, "the tragedy of the commons" —the despoliation of large tracts of public and village lands—is a familiar phenomenon. To help rehabilitate and make effective use of these lands, the Foundation has supported experiments in alternative forms of soil management, improved technology and land use, and community tree planting.

India has turned to "social forestry" programs to revitalize vast areas of underutilized, degraded lands, which constitute at least one-third of the country's land mass. In 1982, Indian leaders organized an umbrella agency, the Society for the Promotion of Wasteland Development (spwd),