The bill gates problem, p.36
The Bill Gates Problem, page 36
As criticism of AGRA mounted in 2021, the group did begin issuing a public defense—on its own terms and in its own time—often appearing to conjure up alternate realities. In one op-ed, AGRA board chair Hailemariam Dessalegn, the former prime minister of Ethiopia, asserted, “While there have always been detractors of our approach and success, these voices have become louder, deciding to campaign against our work through the media, despite being offered opportunities [to] engage directly.” The op-ed went on to argue that AGRA was too small an actor to be blamed for growing hunger in the nations where it worked, attacking this criticism as “wrong and terribly misleading.”
Yet, if AGRA and Gates do not believe they have the wherewithal to make a dent in hunger, why did they broadcast a goal of reducing it by 50 percent? And if AGRA is a champion of public engagement, why are there so many accounts of its operating in an unaccountable manner?
The group’s nonresponses have only created more space for critics, who ramped up their campaigning to defund the alliance, including a petition aimed at USAID, the largest government funder of AGRA. Additionally, three members of Congress—Ilhan Omar, Sara Jacobs, and Tom Malinowski—sought to compel USAID to justify the millions of dollars it had spent supporting AGRA, citing concerns about the alliance’s “potentially damaging effects on food security, the environment, and anti-poverty goals in the countries where it operates.” Meanwhile, German activists put pressure on their government, with the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development telling the news media in 2022 that it was reconsidering its ongoing participation with AGRA.
As this criticism grew louder, the Gates Foundation funded its own evaluation of AGRA, which acknowledged some of the findings of independent appraisals: “AGRA did not meet its headline goal of increased incomes and food security for 9 million smallholders.” The Gates-funded evaluation also highlighted the alliance’s successes—such as “accelerating policy reforms” and helping “incentivize private sector engagement.” Still, critics pounced on some of the evaluation’s underlying findings—for example, that AGRA’s interventions appeared to offer the biggest benefits to wealthier, male farmers. The evaluation also showed that AGRA had failed to generate consistent yield increases and had not fully recognized the environmental impacts of its input-intensive model. These are some of the same criticisms that hounded the original green revolution. History appears to be repeating itself, as critics long predicted.
As some media outlets took an interest in the growing opposition to AGRA, the Gates Foundation responded by scapegoating climate change for the alliance’s failures. No one should doubt that climate change affects farming, but we’ve known this for decades. If Gates pursued its agricultural strategy without climate change in mind, this once again raises questions about its claimed expertise and leadership.
Some readers at this point might be asking: Is there nothing the world can do for African farmers without being called colonial? Is there not, in fact, a major hunger problem in many parts of Africa? Couldn’t many farmers, indeed, benefit from increased yields?
Of course, agriculture can and should be improved in many parts of the African continent. But it’s not Bill Gates’s place to organize how that happens. And we also have to widen the lens on what improvement looks like. With climate change bringing new challenges to our food system—increased temperatures, droughts, and volatile weather—we do, indeed, need a revolution in farming, but much of the work needs to happen in U.S. agriculture, the model toward which Gates is pushing African farmers.
In the United States today, farming is dominated by large-scale industrialized production. Small producers have been put out of business, their acres consolidated into larger and larger farms. Notably, if not astonishingly, Bill Gates has become the largest private farmland owner in the United States, a powerful emblem of how U.S. agriculture today has increasingly become the province of soft-palmed investors, not hardworking farmer families.
In U.S. agriculture—say, Gates’s large acreage of corn and soy production in Nebraska—farmers typically spend large sums of money on expensive inputs (GMO seeds, agrochemicals, fertilizer) to churn out huge volumes of monoculture grain, much of which goes to industrial purposes, like making ethanol or corn syrup or feeding animals on factory farms. It’s a high-yielding system, but it carries huge costs to the taxpayers who heavily subsidize it. Agriculture is a leading cause of carbon emissions too, with synthetic fertilizers (made from fossil fuels) accounting for much of the sector’s emissions. (Expanding the use of synthetic fertilizers is a linchpin of AGRA’s work and a favorite intervention of Bill Gates—arguably, a bigger passion for him than GMOs.)
This model has proven quite fragile, lacking the precise thing that food systems need: resiliency. The Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 both caused major disruptions in input markets, for example. African farmers who had followed Gates and AGRA’s lead on the expanded use of synthetic fertilizer were suddenly faced with skyrocketing prices, while fertilizer manufacturers faced allegations of profiteering. Climate change will bring even more unpredictability to farming.
Many African farmer groups endorse a different model of agriculture, which trades under the academic-sounding name “agroecology.” A complex, systems-based approach to farming, agroecology depends, for example, on local, low-impact solutions like using manure for fertilizer instead of buying synthetic chemicals from foreign manufacturers. Farmers can also improve soil nutrition through crop rotation and crop diversity. And instead of buying hybrid or GMO seeds before each growing season, farmers can save seeds and replant them year after year—as humans have been doing for millennia.
The Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania has been running side-by-side comparisons between agroecological farming and conventional, input-intensive farming for four decades, reporting similar yields between the two models, but major environmental and financial benefits to well-run agroecological farms. Schools like the University of Wisconsin and North Carolina State University today offer degree programs in agroecology, teaching students “the science behind sustainable agriculture.” In 2009, a major international assessment involving four hundred experts, jointly published by the World Bank and FAO, broadly emphasized the importance of agroecology—and cast doubt on the green revolution–style input-intensive model, including the role of GMOs, in poor nations. And a decade later, the UN Committee on World Food Security commissioned a study on agroecology that highlighted limitations in the green revolution approach, noting that environmental or social costs of these methods can offset the reported economic benefits.
Agroecology, of course, is a threat to corporate interests, which want farmers to buy their seeds and agrochemicals year after year. And this is why Tim Wise calls AGRA the “perfect neoliberal project”: “It’s not perfect in the sense that it relies on all these public funds and charitable funds—so it’s not the free market in any meaningful way at all,” he told me. “But it is all intended to open markets and create markets of multilateral investment and multinational investment and sales.… In other words, somehow, Monsanto needed to open up Africa to sell more of its seeds. Fertilizer companies needed new markets to sell more fertilizer. In all of that, Bill is very useful in that effort. How would it have happened without Bill? I don’t think there would have been an AGRA without Gates.”
* * *
IN 2013, MARK Lynas took the foodie world by storm with his poster- boy good looks and coming-to-Jesus GMO conversion story. “For the record, here and upfront, I apologize for having spent several years ripping up GM[O] crops,” he announced as a keynote speaker at the Oxford Farming Conference. “I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM[O] movement back in the mid-nineties, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment. As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.”
Lynas’s self-flagellation and crocodile tears made a splash with journalists around the world, who widely profiled his crisis of conscience—in outlets ranging from the New Yorker to Slate. Companies like Monsanto could not have bought better PR—which is why Lynas’s story raised eyebrows for some.
To me, Lynas’s story felt more than a bit manufactured. At the time, I was working as a researcher for an NGO called Food & Water Watch, investigating the corporate propaganda tactics that proliferated across the GMO debates. It seemed quite coincidental that Lynas, an unknown in the GMO world and also a relatively unknown writer, could generate so much attention from a rather staid speech at what appears to have been a corporate-funded agricultural conference.
The Guardian later uncovered leaked documents showing an industry effort to create new “ambassadors” to promote GMOs, including Lynas. The documents describe Lynas as “potentially” being involved in the effort. He denied being an ambassador—or even being asked. More questions appeared when his former peers in the activist movements came forward to say that Lynas had not helped “start” the anti-GMO movement, as he had claimed. “Lynas was a player, but not a very important player, and for a very short period of time. Maybe in his mind he was important, but I don’t think anybody else saw him that way,” Jim Thomas, a former Greenpeace organizer, said. “I feel saddened by the whole thing. He’s built a very successful career on the back of portraying people who were his friends as unthinking.”
Lynas’s public brand became not just about promoting the use of GMOs but also attacking anyone who criticized the technology as being “anti-science”—the same talking point advanced by companies like Monsanto. This meant he was also singing from the same hymnal as Bill Gates. Gates praised Mark Lynas by name in an interview with Politico in 2013. A year later, the foundation launched a new project to promote GMOs at Cornell University, called the Cornell Alliance for Science, where Lynas was given a platform to expand his campaigning on GMOs.
The Alliance, to which the foundation would eventually give more than $20 million, promised to “add a stronger voice for science and depolarize the charged debate around agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified organisms.” In practice, however, the Alliance for Science ended up becoming one of the most polarizing voices, even drawing criticism for distorting the scientific debate surrounding GMOs.
Lynas and the alliance ferociously pushed the notion of a “scientific consensus” on GMOs, for example, prompting a group of PhD researchers to issue a response in the scientific journal Environmental Sciences Europe: “The joint statement developed and signed by over 300 independent researchers, and reproduced and published below, does not assert that GMOs are unsafe or safe. Rather, the statement concludes that the scarcity and contradictory nature of the scientific evidence published to date prevents conclusive claims of safety, or of lack of safety, of GMOs. Claims of consensus on the safety of GMOs are not supported by an objective analysis of the refereed literature.” (Lynas did not respond to my press inquiries, and the Alliance did not respond to specific questions.)
The Alliance for Science nevertheless appears to have been very effective at doing what Gates asked it to do: promote GMOs in poor nations. The alliance claims to have trained “796 science champions”—journalists, activists, and influencers who could spread the gospel of GMOs. Joeva Rock said that when she reads news about GMOs in Ghana, where she conducts much of her academic research, it often comes from journalists who have been trained by the Alliance for Science. Million Belay and Bridget Mugambe, writing in Scientific American, make a similar finding:
In Uganda, for example, the CAS [Cornell Alliance for Science] has recruited journalists and key government individuals working on agriculture, science and technology to the cause of promoting GM seeds. [Alliance] fellows write disparaging articles on agroecology, describing it as a “dead end,” and promote biotechnology-based solutions in its stead. In Nigeria, Alliance fellows work closely with OFAB’s [the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology] Nigeria chapter, the National Biotechnology Development Agency, the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations and the Nigerian Institute of Management to advocate for biotechnology, often characterizing it as the only scientific option.
The net effect of the Alliance for Science and the Gates Foundation’s broader ecosystem of influence, as these authors describe it, is “narrowing the democratic space for discussion of food systems in African countries. Opposing points of view are irrational, unscientific and harmful, they often insist.”
In other words, the Gates Foundation and its surrogates don’t want to win the debate on GMOs. They want to shut it down. And Bill Gates, personally, has played a significant role in this effort. In late 2022, when he traveled to Kenya to promote his work in agriculture (and to announce seven billion dollars in new funding for projects throughout Africa), he insisted that most advanced economies had already embraced GMOs: “Ninety-nine point nine (99.9) percent of crops in [the] West are GMO. Every piece of bread I have ever eaten is from GMO-modified wheat. Every piece of corn I have also eaten is GMO corn.”
This is demonstrably false, however. There is no GMO wheat in commercial production anywhere in the world. And most nations on earth, including much of Europe, don’t grow GMOs. Maybe Gates meant that most of the food we grow has had its genetics modified through one form of breeding or another—but that’s true of virtually every crop everywhere in the world, not simply in the “West.” Except for hunter-gatherer societies foraging wild edibles, most food has had its genes modified by human intervention—as when farmers, over the course of thousands of years, save seeds from the best-yielding or best-tasting crops year over year and replant them, slowly improving the genetic stock. But this is a categorically different breeding process from the genetic modifications Gates and Monsanto work on, like moving genetic constructs between unrelated species in the laboratory.
Readers of this book who are fans of GMOs or who think that poor nations could benefit from this technology should understand that the Gates Foundation, in many places, is actually contributing to polarization and sowing distrust. And they should understand that if GMO technology is going to be successful in poor nations, it should be local scientists producing the new seeds, according to local farmers’ needs, following a robust public process that gets input from end consumers—without undue pressure from foreign philanthropists and multinational seed companies. They should also understand that whether or not a nation chooses to grow GMOs—or, for that matter, embrace or refuse any technology—is not a purely scientific decision.
In some respects, the large sums of money the Gates Foundation has put into promoting GMOs through efforts like the Alliance for Science could be seen as papering over the technical failures of GMO technology. For years, the foundation and other promoters have promised that GMOs would cure many of the world’s food problems—solving hunger, correcting nutritional deficiencies, and lifting yields. And for years, the foundation has plowed money into a graveyard of mistrials for GMO crops that it believes Africans need.
One of the foundation’s earliest bets was a $21 million project that began in the early 2000s, funding a group called Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International, run by a former Monsanto associate, Florence Wambugu. The group—based in Washington, DC, according to the foundation’s grant records—sought to engineer a new variety of sorghum with higher nutritional content. (Sorghum, a grain, is a staple crop in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Niger, and other countries.) Gates’s funding for the project appears to have ended in 2017, and there’s very little public record of what the research effort accomplished. Wambugu’s previous engineering effort, a GMO sweet potato at Monsanto, also appears to have failed. A competing sweet potato variety, created by Ugandan scientists without the use of GMOs, performed much better, according to media reports.
Gates also put money into a nutritionally fortified GMO banana that promised to fix vitamin A deficiencies, which can cause blindness and death. As of early 2023, the banana, after years of funding and promotion, has still not come to market. One researcher blamed the slow progress on the Ugandan people’s “ignorance and misinformation” and also criticized the government’s failure to enact necessary laws to advance the project.
The Gates Foundation also provided bandwagon funding for “golden rice,” another GMO food crop that promoters said would deliver vitamin A and save lives. Despite basically bottomless investments since 2000 (by GMO seed companies, governments, and Gates) and endless hype by the news media, golden rice has failed to deliver these promised benefits. Only one nation, the Philippines, has begun commercial cultivation of the rice, and it remains to be seen whether this introduction, in 2022, will have major effects on human health, as has been so widely claimed.
Doug Gurian-Sherman, a former regulator of GMOs at the Environmental Protection Agency, is skeptical that the technology will deliver on its promises to revolutionize farming. “The reality is that ecosystems are highly networked and complex. So is the genome,” he told me. Inserting new genetic traits into a crop to, say, improve yields is going to have a cascade of other effects on the plant. “It’s kind of like when you see drugs advertised on TV. At the end, they’ll have this list as long as your arm of side effects. Some may be rare or negligible; others more common and dramatic.”
In 2009, Gurian-Sherman, who holds a doctorate in plant pathology and who later in his career worked for the Union of Concerned Scientists, published a series of studies showing that the claimed benefits of GMOs—things like increased yield and improved drought tolerance—have been widely overstated. The development of new genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR may offer “more potential to get smaller incremental changes that could collectively add up to some significance,” he noted, “but how important that would be overall, especially compared to alternatives such as agroecology—I think it’s very easy to overemphasize—it’s too early days to know. The whole other piece of this is, how is this technology going to be used and developed? Who’s going to control [it]? The power dynamics have not changed.”
