The bill gates problem, p.35
The Bill Gates Problem, page 35
Gates’s heavy hand also shapes national research agendas and training programs, according to Joeva Rock, an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. “If it [Gates] were to disappear overnight, there would be immense repercussions for all types of institutions—anywhere from public breeding initiatives … to public educational institutions,” Rock told me. “This isn’t just shutting down these programs; it’s shutting down training for scientists, for students.”
This level of dependency and Bill Gates’s top-down political maneuvering have proven controversial among the farmers Gates claims to help, and in 2021 and 2022, the pushback reached new levels of visibility, notably including a high-profile op-ed in Scientific American titled “Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Agriculture Africans Need.” The piece was written by Million Belay and Bridget Mugambe of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, the largest civil society organization in all of Africa, representing two hundred million farmers, fishers, pastoralists, and indigenous peoples across the continent.
We welcome investment in agriculture on our continent, but we seek it in a form that is democratic and responsive to the people at the heart of agriculture, not as a top-down force that ends up concentrating power and profit into the hands of a small number of multinational companies. While describing how GM[O] seeds and other technology would solve hunger in African countries, Bill Gates claimed that “it’s a sovereign decision. No one makes that for them.” But the massive resources of the Gates Foundation, which he co-chairs, have had an outsized influence on African scientists and policymakers, with the result that food systems on our continent are becoming ever more market-oriented and corporate-controlled.
Belay told me in an interview that the Gates Foundation’s charitable work on agriculture bears all the hallmarks of colonial power: seeking to modernize and civilize African nations while also advancing commercial interests, like pushing farmers to buy genetically modified seeds, fertilizers, chemicals, and other technology from multinational companies headquartered outside the continent. “When our agriculture is considered backward, and the only solution proffered is technology, then there is a civilization agenda,” Belay said. “And that civilization agenda is not to civilize us but to bind us to the vagaries of this technology.”
The Gates Foundation’s intended beneficiaries have very widely and very explicitly asked Bill Gates to stop helping. A letter in 2021 with more than two hundred signatories called for the defunding of AGRA, Gates’s flagship project in Africa. “Since the onset of AGRA’s program in 2006, the number of undernourished people across these 13 countries [where AGRA works] has increased by 30 percent,” the letter noted. “AGRA has unequivocally failed in its mission to increase productivity and incomes and reduce food insecurity, and has in fact harmed broader efforts to support African farmers.”
Another protest emerged when the UN secretary-general announced that AGRA’s president had been named Special Envoy to the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. More than 150 organizations called on the United Nations to revoke the appointment, saying AGRA’s presence “will result in another forum that advances the interests of agribusiness at the expense of farmers and our planet.… With 820 million people hungry and an escalating climate crisis, the need for significant global action is urgent.”
Hundreds of religious groups and faith leaders also sent an open letter to Bill Gates, asking him to listen to African farmers rather than imposing his vision on them. “While we are grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation … for its commitment to overcoming food insecurity, and acknowledging the humanitarian and infrastructural aid provided to the governments of our continent, we write out of grave concern that the Gates Foundation’s support for the expansion of intensive industrial scale agriculture is deepening the humanitarian crisis.”
The groups specifically asked the foundation for a dialogue, but it was months before they got even an initial response and then, finally, a meeting. Shortly after, the Gates Foundation appeared to announce in the news media that it was planning an additional two hundred million dollars in funding for AGRA.
“Truly this shows that no amount of input will dissuade them from supporting a system that is focused on short-term gains,” Gabriel Manyangadze of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute told me. “Their engagement is therefore a public relations exercise as what we are requesting has found no space in their narrative.”
If the foundation won’t engage in good faith with the people it claims to be helping, that may be because it isn’t trying to win hearts and minds. The goal, the overriding ambition, of the foundation is never to establish democratic legitimacy. It is to organize top-down policy changes, usually through antidemocratic means. The foundation believes it knows what is best for African farmers, who must get out of the way so that Gates can help them.
“They fund the researchers, they fund the research, they fund the drafting of laws, they fund projects, they funded agro-dealers, they got things off the ground.… It’s a lot of money over time,” Mariam Mayet of the African Centre for Biosafety told me. “It’s just more neocolonialism dressed up in fancy language about empowerment and uplifting and so on. But it’s just old-style colonial development and does not serve Africans, does not serve the continent.”
Mayet pins Gates’s growing influence on the failures of many African governments to step up and be accountable to their own people, saying the Gates Foundation has preyed on weak democratic institutions. “Another future could not be born because of the Gates’s agenda and what it funded and stood in the way of—whatever transformation and transition that may have been possible, that could have resulted in less social exclusion, less inequities, less poverty, less marginalization of already vulnerable communities,” Mayet said. She then ominously forecast what continuing down this path would bring: “a time bomb.”
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WHEN THE GATES Foundation creates new NGOs, it likes to use the term alliance: the Alliance for Science, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. As the word suggests, these projects lean on allies working in common cause toward a shared goal. Rarely, however, do the targets of Gates’s goodwill, the global poor or smallholder farmers, have a seat at the table. In the case of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA, the allies include a bevy of corporate partners: Syngenta, Bayer (Monsanto), Corteva Agriscience, John Deere, Nestlé, and even Microsoft, which is “exploring the use of big data and AI in the digital transformation of AGRA.”
AGRA claims that it also works with civil society groups and farmer organizations, but, notably, it does not name them. The group, to its credit, is currently led by someone from Africa—Agnes Kalibata, Rwanda’s former agricultural minister. Yet AGRA’s first president was Gary Toenniessen, food security director for the Rockefeller Foundation. And it’s also true that the initiative would not exist without its white and mostly American funders.
AGRA was conceived of and launched by the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, and the large majority of its funding comes from Gates—at least $675 million of AGRA’s $1.1 billion in reported revenues. In the early years of its operation, most of AGRA’s board members appeared to be non-African and/or based outside Africa, including multiple representatives from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. Even today, many top brass and board members are not based in Africa—like Rodger Voorhies of the Gates Foundation. Internal policy documents at the Gates Foundation describe AGRA as an example of where it is “creating a new entity and providing significant funding”—and also serving in a governance role over the group.
As late as 2016, a decade after AGRA’s creation, a Gates-funded evaluation reported that “external stakeholders noted ambiguity over AGRA’s identity, including its perception as an African institution.” The evaluation cited a need to “re-fashion its institutional identity” as an “African-led, politically neutral entity that is distinct from BMGF.” By 2020, a new Gates evaluation reported success: “AGRA, as a unique African body, is perceived to have more legitimacy to reach governments than other development partners, creating opportunity for effective advocacy.… It has the ‘ear of government’—that is, highly regarded political access, the sort donors are not in a position to have.”
AGRA is a takeoff from the original “green revolution” of the mid- twentieth century—an agricultural development project spearheaded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and supported by the U.S. government. Yesteryear’s green revolution, like today’s, sought to industrialize agriculture around the world through the use of new seeds, agrochemicals, and irrigation. By increasing yields, the thought was, poor people could produce more food, end hunger, and become self-sufficient in agriculture. With massive investments from foundations and governments, the green revolution initially seemed to see major successes in countries like India, which charted substantial yield increases. Norman Borlaug, often referred to as the “father” of the green revolution, even won a Nobel Peace Prize for this work.
Yet many of the initial gains seemed to diminish or disappear over time. Applying large volumes of synthetic chemicals proved damaging to the soil. And the large funding required to pay for all the new inputs drove farmers into debt and then drove a decades-long wave of suicides. Another problem: input-intensive farming tended to be adopted by, and provide benefits to, the largest, wealthiest farms. Helping big farms get bigger generally means driving smallholder farmers off the land.
Virtually all scholars today acknowledge the green revolution’s problems, and many (if not most) see it as a net failure whose harms outweighed its benefits. For Bill Gates, however, it was a black-and-white success. “In the 1960s, there was this thing called the Green Revolution, where new seeds and other improvements drove up agricultural productivity in Asia and Latin America,” he said in a 2014 interview. “It saved millions of lives and lifted many people out of poverty. But it basically bypassed sub-Saharan Africa. Today, the average farmer there is only about a third as productive as an American farmer. If we can get that number up, and I think we can, it will help a lot.”
Mark Dowie, in his 2001 book, American Foundations: An Investigative History, depicts the original green revolution as a cautionary tale: “New philanthropists wishing to learn about the pitfalls of large-scale grant making would be wise to study the fifty-year history of this project.” Among other shortcomings Dowie cites, the original green revolution narrowly focused on scientific approaches to increasing yields, which were supposed to make food more widely available. There was little appreciation for the fact that, no matter how much yields were increased, the world’s poorest people still wouldn’t have enough money to buy food. That’s true even today. Across the globe, there are now more than enough calories to feed everyone, even as a billion people around the world are food insecure. The problem with hunger is not our food supply—or not just the supply. It’s also access. It’s money.
Yet, in the narrow ambitions of philanthropy and international development, the goal is often to tackle the problems you think you can solve, that will rack up quick wins, rather than addressing root causes. For the original green revolutionaries, this meant a laser focus on increasing yields through research and development. “Science was something with which Rockefeller [Foundation] trustees felt completely comfortable,” Dowie writes. “Economic justice, on the other hand, suggested socialism.” And worries about socialism were a key driver of the original green revolution, which sought to foreclose on a possible red revolution. Hungry people, the green revolutionaries worried, translated into social unrest and an opportunity for Communist propaganda to take hold. “So for the first forty years of the Green Revolution, the growing surplus of food barely moved to where it was needed most—not because the government and nongovernmental international agencies weren’t trying to improve the economic lot of the poor,” Dowie writes. “They simply couldn’t do so fast enough to compensate for the large numbers of subsistence farmers and their families who were being pushed off the land and impoverished by industrial agriculture. It was a political challenge that lay beyond the scope, interest, or ability of the foundations that had fomented the Green Revolution.”
Either unaware of or unconcerned with this history, Gates helped launch AGRA in 2006 with the same premise, approach, and strategies as the original green revolution. The plan was to double yields and farmer income and to reduce food insecurity (hunger) by 50 percent by 2020. And the revolution was both televised and well funded.
While the Gates Foundation has been the largest funder by far, supplying around two thirds of AGRA’s billion-dollar budget over the years, taxpayers have also contributed significant funds. The U.S. government has committed up to ninety million dollars, while British, Swedish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Canadian, Danish, and Luxembourgian taxpayers have pledged tens of millions more. (The Rockefeller Foundation would not agree to an interview, but told me via email that it had donated $166 million to AGRA.)
Many African governments have also partnered with AGRA or organized their own agricultural budgets in ways that complement the alliance’s green revolution approach. One study found that African nations put a billion dollars each year into subsidizing inputs like synthetic fertilizer and hybrid seeds, the same interventions AGRA prioritizes. Insofar as African governments are aligned with the foundation’s agenda, and insofar as AGRA does have real African leaders, Gates can rightfully claim that it is working with the public sector, with governments, not against them. The new green revolution is, indeed, a public-private partnership.
But that doesn’t mean it is a homegrown policy from African nations, born of a democratic process. With the Gates Foundation, donor governments, and major international agricultural research bodies all rowing in the same direction and putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, they create a powerful current that is difficult to row against. Additionally, AGRA has created institutional ties to governments, giving them grants, placing people inside agencies through secondments, and providing technical assistance. The message is loud, clear, and unyielding: We have the money and the experts. Let us help you.
The big question is: What have Gates and AGRA accomplished? Did AGRA meet its lofty goals to double yields and farmer incomes and to halve hunger by 2020? Has there been a revolution?
Tim Wise, a senior research fellow at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute, sought to answer these questions, but when he reached out to AGRA requesting access to its data, the group refused. So, Wise relied instead on national-level agricultural data reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. If AGRA was really having an impact in the thirteen nations where it has been working since 2006—Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia—wouldn’t that impact appear in national data? If there had been a revolution, wouldn’t it be easily discernible?
What Wise found were marginal increases in yields across the different crops AGRA supports, but nowhere near the 100 percent gains AGRA had promised. Meanwhile, hunger had actually increased by 30 percent—not decreased by 50 percent, as AGRA had promised. A dearth of data on farmer incomes made it impossible for Wise to assess AGRA’s goal of doubling incomes, but he reported that extreme poverty did not accelerate downward during AGRA’s tenure.
Around the same time that Wise’s analysis came out, a coalition of international groups from across Africa and from Germany published country-level case studies of AGRA’s impacts, profiling a questionable loan scheme in Tanzania that could push farmers into debt and AGRA’s prominent work with a non-African NGO in Zambia, CARE International. As these critical evaluations circulated, AGRA’s first response was not to discuss or debate the findings but to attack them. This included sending a letter to the Tufts University Office of the Vice Provost for Research, challenging the integrity and ethics of Tim Wise’s AGRA evaluation.
“AGRA is an African institution set up by [former UN secretary-general] Kofi Annan to try to transform African agriculture, not by BMGF/Rockefeller as has been falsely claimed,” the letter, authored by Andrew Cox, the UK-educated chief of staff of AGRA, read. Cox complained that Wise didn’t ask AGRA for a comment on his findings and noted that the study wasn’t peer-reviewed. The letter acknowledged that Wise had reached out to access AGRA’s data, but argued he wasn’t “specific enough for us to help him, nor to explain what his purpose was.”
“On the face of it,” the letter continued, “it seems hard to see the most basic and reasonable professional and academic standards were applied.”
Tufts confirmed with me that it had evaluated the complaint and deemed it without merit. What’s particularly striking about AGRA’s complaint was that it openly acknowledged that Wise had reached out, asking to access its data. The group had an opportunity to engage early on in the process, but it had refused. Then, when the research progressed without its participation, it cried foul.
AGRA’s refusal to engage with Wise’s independent evaluation speaks to a culture—a distinctly Gatesian culture—of nonaccountability and nontransparency. When the Al Jazeera podcast The Take reported on the growing criticism of AGRA in 2021, for example, neither AGRA nor Gates responded to inquiries from the journalists. My own efforts to reach AGRA also were not fruitful. During my reporting, I asked for copies of the alliance’s most recent U.S. tax filing, which the IRS requires nonprofit organizations to make available. I received no response. In separate correspondence, I asked AGRA for details of its funding. Again, no response. I also asked for an interview. No response.
