Gates Gives $300 million - but with a Catch

It's becoming increasingly evident that Bill Gates' philanthropy is not simple and disinterested, but has woven into it a complex agenda that has to do with his love of intellectual monopolies - and power. Here's the latest instalment:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is donating another $120 million to boosting agriculture in the developing world, will focus on self-help aid for poor farmers to sustain and grow production, a top adviser to the world's leading charitable foundation said.

Sounds good, no? Here are more details:

The Gates Foundation, with a $30 billion endowment to improve health and reduce poverty in developing countries, began investing in agricultural projects three years ago. The latest grants bring its farm sector awards to $1.4 billion.

One of its first investments was in African seeds through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). The group is expected to introduce more than 1,000 new seed varieties of at least 10 crops to improve African production by 2016.

"Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa" also sounds good; here's a little background on that organisation:

It has not gone unnoticed that AGRA falls under the direct supervision of the Global Development Program, whose senior programme officer is Dr. Robert Horsch, who worked for Monsanto for 25 years before he joined the Gates Foundation. Horsch was part of the scientific team in the company that developed Monsanto’s YieldGard, BollGard and RoundUp Ready technologies. Horsch’s task at the Gates Foundation is to apply biotechnology toward improving crop yields in regions including sub-Saharan Africa. Lutz Goedde another senior program officer of the Global Development Program, is also a recruit from the biotech industry as he used to head Alta Genetics, the world's largest privately owned cattle genetics improvement and artificial insemination Company, worth US$100 million.

That is, AGRA not only has close links with the Gates Foundation, but also with Monsanto - the Microsoft of the seed world.

If you read the rest of the document from which the above information was taken, you'll see that the AGRA programme is essentially promoting approaches using seeds that are genetically modified and patented. Here's the conclusion:

Sub-Saharan Africa represents an extremely lucrative market for seed companies. The development interventions by AGRA appear on the face of it, to benevolent. However, not only will AGRA facilitate the change to a market based agricultural sector in Africa replacing traditional agriculture, but it will also go a long way towards laying the groundwork for the entry of private fertilizer and agrochemical companies and seed companies, and more particularly, GM seed companies.

So Gates' donations are ultimately promoting an agriculture based on intellectual monopolies - just as Microsoft does in the software field. The latest $300 million doesn't sound quite so generous now, does it?

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Microsoft, Monsanto and Intellectual Monopolies

Here's a brilliant, must-read feature exposing some of the hidden agendas of the Green Revolution and the dark side of the Gates Foundation's work in Africa. In particular, it makes explicit the symmetry of Microsoft and Monsanto in their use of intellectual monopolies to make their users increasingly powerless:

The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation's funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly--Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto's domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there's some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates's agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that "AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another." And, English says, "so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto."

This isn't surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge--in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies--including those that substitute for farmers' knowledge--are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power.

I fear that with hindsight we will see that contrary to the almost universal view that Gates is redeeming his bad boy years at Microsoft with the good boy promises of his Foundation, Gates will actually do even more damage in the realm of agriculture than he has in the world of computing. (Via Roy Schestowitz.)

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Good Bill, Bad Bill

I have tremendous respect for what Bill and Melinda have chosen to do with the great wealth that Microsoft afforded. The Gates Foundation is tackling some huge challenges in global health with courage, innovation, and persistence, the same qualities which represented Microsoft at its best. But it doesn’t mean that the great Gates fortune was acquired in an entirely fair way or that Bill should be held up uncritically as a model of a successful businessman for doing so. To do so is to rewrite history and endorse a way of doing business which is harmful both to consumers and markets

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Pretty much my view, too.

Monopoly in the DNA

It seems that Bill Gates' foundation is affected with the same love of monopolies and keeping things closed as its creator:

The chief of the malaria program at the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the health agency's policy-making function.

In a memorandum, the chief of the malaria program, Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, that the foundation's money, while crucial, could have "far-reaching, largely unintended consequences."

Many of the world's leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."

Amazing: exactly the same dynamics seem to be operating here for research as for software. Must be something in the DNA. (Via Slashdot.)

It's Hard to Be Good

I applaud the way Bill Gates is putting his vast wealth to good use through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, just as I despise the way he gained it. But it's interesting to see that even being good is hard:

In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.

Seems it's not so easy to keep the bad bits from ruining the good bits. (Via Slashdot.)