Though many know the legendary investor Warren Buffett, his son, Howard Buffett, has also made a name for himself; instead, as a farmer and philanthropist. In recent years, Howard has focused his attention on war-torn Ukraine. It’s been previously reported that he’s donated $500 million in aid through The Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Turns out, it’s much much more. He joined Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi on Opening Bid, to discuss the politicization of Ukrainian aid and how he hopes to make a difference, saying “we’re trying to be responsive as things happen.”
Watch the full interview here.
Video Transcript
And you’re donating hundreds of millions of dollars to Ukraine.
Where is this money going?
And what is motivating you at this point to make those donations?
Well, so, historically, our foundation is focused primarily on food security and conflict mitigation.
So, uh when Russia uh invaded Ukraine, uh when the full scale invasion occurred in, in 2022 we knew from our work in Africa, especially that we would see some uh uh impact of that in terms of food security.
So I visited Ukraine in April of 2022.
Uh I’ve been there once before in 1990 February, uh January of 1991.
It was still part of the Soviet Union.
So this is my first trip back and, you know, we could see the impact on global food security.
We could see the impact on uh food security in Ukraine.
So we started getting engaged and uh you know, it was a, it was a fast learning curve because it’s not an area we’d worked before.
And what I is it the how much first, I guess how much have you put to work there?
And this year overall, what is that?
Overall, um those givings look like.
So we’ve spent a little over $600 million at this point and uh we expect we’ll probably go over 800 million by the end of the year.
And, you know, our goal has been to focus uh on about five primary areas, obviously the food security.
But we’ve, we’ve also focused on uh agricultural production.
We’ve focused on um war crimes and crimes against humanity, investigation, documentation.
Uh They, we have done some things on critical infrastructure.
It’s not what we typically have done.
But, but that’s one of the things we are doing uh because they’re in a war.
So things happen and they, and, and our, our biggest goal really is to fill the gap.
So, for instance, uh oh, I think it was maybe last uh late last week.
Um They uh Harkey was hit again.
Kharkiv is hit just over and over.
You know, they’re on, they’re in the east part.
Uh They’re only Kharkiv City is only about 25 miles from the Russian border and they were hit and they took out uh a publishing business that produces uh almost 50% of the textbooks in the country.
And so I got calls from um different people saying, you know, can you help get them back up and going?
So we’re looking at that, I mean, that’s not something uh the day before it happened, we weren’t thinking about that and now we are thinking about how do we do that?
How do we help get it done?
So, we’re trying to be responsive to, uh, as things happen.
Uh, and, and, and some of those things are things we typically wouldn’t do.
I mean, we have done, we’ve helped the railroad rebuild bridges.
We’ve, um, you know, uh, gone in and built a school kitchen so the kids can stay in school and in the buildings and get fed.
So we’ve done a lot of different things that, that typically we would do.
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