6 ms·

Bill Gates's Foundation Is Leading a Green Counterrevolution in Africa

37 points by AndrewBissell 6y ago

caryd 6y ago
"The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promised Africa a “Green Revolution” to fight hunger and poverty. It hasn't worked — but it has upped corporate agriculture’s profits." It's almost like it was always about the profit. Strange
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  In 2015 and 2019 the Gates foundation invested in Moderna and BioNTech and retargeted them towards vaccine development and production. This investment will pay off handsomely. Are you going to tell me that this was about the profit too?
  - AndrewBissell 6y ago
    I don't really understand the thrust of your question. A purportedly absurd chain of reasoning with respect to one Gates Foundation initiative which ends in "they did it for the profit" means that that could not possibly be the case for any other one?
jevgeni 6y ago
Ah, another of Jacobin's crusades against foreign investments.
- fierarul 6y ago
  You should debate the facts not the motives. I had no clue about this situation but it doesn't look very well. Introducing continent-wide IP-law for seeds, getting farmers into debt by having them used only approved fertilisers and then showing virtually no productivity increase against the baseline shows no redeeming quality to the program. But hey, Gates will be declared a saint in the next 10 years so who is this little mag site to comment?
  - jevgeni 6y ago
    The program follows practices already common in the West. That means it makes it easier to convince Western companies to make long term investments there without fear of some arbitrary action to their assets (cough-Sakhalin-2-cough). But yeah, important thing is that the western upper-middleclass has a convenient boogeyman to vilify in a digestible form for day-time viewing.
    - shard972 6y ago
      Oh who will think about the western investors!
    - AndrewBissell 6y ago
      > The program follows practices already common in the West. Is this supposed to be some kind of defense?
      - jevgeni 6y ago
        It is as much of a defense as saying that software which needs to unzip files needs to implement at least the deflate algorithm.
      - hnracer 6y ago
        The sentence following the one that you quoted is the defense, perhaps you should argue against that instead?
        AndrewBissell 6y ago
        That sentence is just more question begging. "Running things the way it is done in the West (i.e. encouraging 'investment' by Western firms) is good, therefore a program which furthers that end is a good one."
        jevgeni 6y ago
        It is natural that questions arise, when you insist on not understanding what I've said.
imposterr 6y ago
Tangentially related, but isn't small scale farming, especially in poorer countries, something that's on its way out? Like if you are a farmer, you work hard and send your kids to school. Your kids will probably then move to the city or at least a more populous area and take up a job other than farming. As this happens more and more, doesn't the population of small scale farmers decrease to the point where we have to rely more on large scale farms? While I don't have enough knowledge on the subject to comment directly on article, I want to ask, based on the above, does it make sense to invest in small-scale farms?
- akiselev 6y ago
  > Tangentially related, but isn't small scale farming, especially in poorer countries, something that's on its way out? Like if you are a farmer, you work hard and send your kids to school. Your kids will probably then move to the city or at least a more populous area and take up a job other than farming. As this happens more and more, doesn't the population of small scale farmers decrease to the point where we have to rely more on large scale farms? That assumes some combination of extreme social mobility and a steady state population. We have a growing population and the benefits of much of our industrial production to go a fraction of that population, so it doesn't work out. According to the UN, there were about 2 billion people living in ~475 million rural small farm households in 2015, which by definition are "poor and food insecure and have limited access to markets and services" [1] so they wouldn't reap the benefits of industrialized agriculture. Most estimates have the global human population breaking 2 billion circa 1927 so we have more subsistence farmers alive today than there were human beings alive a hundred years ago (!!!) The birth rate inversion in developed countries is a well known phenomenon [2] so many of the subsistence agriculture dependent populations are organically growing in contrast to most of the developed world which is only growing through immigration. Throw in all the market distortions like water pricing and oncoming climate change... where this goes, nobody knows. [1] http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5251e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5251e.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
petre 6y ago
Ah, so the "Green Revolution" is ferts and hybrid seeds, monocrops and pesticides. Once big agriculture kills all the bees with monocrops and pesticides, big agro along with Gates can rebrand world hunger to global hunger and claim they're fighting against it.
- OneGuy123 6y ago
  This. Destroy natural environment so that only yours can be used.
  - f6v 6y ago
    Turns out Bill Gates is some kind of evil billionaire genius?
scotty79 6y ago
Why didn't it work?
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  The article doesn't give an explicit answer to why food production has gone down, but it alludes some reasons for it. - Prioritizing on cash crops (corn, soy) instead of the traditional nutrient-rich crops which are more suited for the region - Furthermore, the reduction of crop diversity might have lead to worsening of soil conditions - Force-selling expensive equipment and materials (hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers) made farmers fall into debt, which could lead to a contraction of the farmer workforce Although there needs to be a much more thorough study than this article to get the bigger picture, I think the main issue here is hamfisting American ways of mechanized farming to African land. With different soil, climate, and socialeconomic conditions, blindly modernizing agriculture might just not work on Africa.
- AndrewBissell 6y ago
  > It hasn't worked — but it has upped corporate agriculture’s profits Perhaps one conclusion to consider is not "it didn't work" but rather "the real objectives were different from the publicly stated ones."
  - jevgeni 6y ago
    You act like the for-profit objectives were some secret Illuminati plot.
    - AndrewBissell 6y ago
      You brought up the Illuminati, not me. Nothing about "they said their objectives were A, B, and C when it was really just A" implies an esoteric occult order of some kind. There are dozens of documented examples of Gates doing that sort of thing while he was building Microsoft.
      - jevgeni 6y ago
giorgosts 6y ago
As a farmer, you can always choose not to use these methods, stay with your traditional way. As you can do in the west also, even in the EU with all its rules and regulations. And the impact of these grants is overrated. A billion in the whole of Africa is a drop in the ocean. It is more of an experiment really, to see if technology can help, but the problems there are deeply political.
- f6v 6y ago
  It’s probably easier to manipulate people who live in extreme poverty and lack basic education.
  - giorgosts 6y ago
    The situation in Europe at least, is that if you choose the old ways you'll be loosing money, so nobody does it except for those that do it as a hobby and not for making a living.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It seems to me that the position this article characterizes as the "agribusiness" side is clearly correct. Many countries have effectively ended starvation, and all of them did so by replacing most small scale farming farming with industrial agriculture. No country has ended starvation without this replacement. So while AGRA may have issues, and the article does suggest a few, I'm very confident that a plan to keep most people stuck as low-productivity subsistence farmers will be worse. No strategy for "distribution of power resources and control over agricultural inputs" will overcome the fundamental problem that a nonindustrialized farm of staple crops produces too little value to keep a family fed and happy.
thrips552727 6y ago
This kinda thing seems like a global phenomenon. Nothing new though. For example, the current ongoing farmers' protests in India. [0] The ever intelligent and witty veteran journalist P Sainath breaks it down clearly. [1] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Indian_farmers%27_protest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Indian_farmers%27_prote... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDDUdkA2Cjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDDUdkA2Cjk
- giorgosts 6y ago
  Where in these protests do they mention the use of hybrids or intensive farming? As far as I can see these are about the deregulation of the market.
aaron695 6y ago
I was interested to see hunger is increasing as they claimed. This doesn't makes sense. But this quote from a better source seemed to explain it, basically a statistical blip. That said, with the coronavirus it will continue to increase. "The UN FAO have linked this increase in undernourishment in particular to the rising extent of conflict-affected countries (which is often a leading cause of famine), and compounded by climate-related factors such as the El Niño phenomenon (which can inflict both drought and flood conditions)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine) - "Jacobin is an American socialist quarterly magazine based in New York"

37 points by AndrewBissell 6y ago

"The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promised Africa a “Green Revolution” to fight hunger and poverty. It hasn't worked — but it has upped corporate agriculture’s profits." It's almost like it was always about the profit. Strange

bryanlarsen 6y ago
In 2015 and 2019 the Gates foundation invested in Moderna and BioNTech and retargeted them towards vaccine development and production. This investment will pay off handsomely. Are you going to tell me that this was about the profit too?
- AndrewBissell 6y ago
  I don't really understand the thrust of your question. A purportedly absurd chain of reasoning with respect to one Gates Foundation initiative which ends in "they did it for the profit" means that that could not possibly be the case for any other one?

jevgeni 6y ago

Ah, another of Jacobin's crusades against foreign investments.

fierarul 6y ago
You should debate the facts not the motives. I had no clue about this situation but it doesn't look very well. Introducing continent-wide IP-law for seeds, getting farmers into debt by having them used only approved fertilisers and then showing virtually no productivity increase against the baseline shows no redeeming quality to the program. But hey, Gates will be declared a saint in the next 10 years so who is this little mag site to comment?
- jevgeni 6y ago
  The program follows practices already common in the West. That means it makes it easier to convince Western companies to make long term investments there without fear of some arbitrary action to their assets (cough-Sakhalin-2-cough). But yeah, important thing is that the western upper-middleclass has a convenient boogeyman to vilify in a digestible form for day-time viewing.
  - shard972 6y ago
    Oh who will think about the western investors!
  - AndrewBissell 6y ago
    > The program follows practices already common in the West. Is this supposed to be some kind of defense?
    - jevgeni 6y ago
      It is as much of a defense as saying that software which needs to unzip files needs to implement at least the deflate algorithm.
    - hnracer 6y ago
      The sentence following the one that you quoted is the defense, perhaps you should argue against that instead?
      - AndrewBissell 6y ago
        That sentence is just more question begging. "Running things the way it is done in the West (i.e. encouraging 'investment' by Western firms) is good, therefore a program which furthers that end is a good one."
        jevgeni 6y ago
        It is natural that questions arise, when you insist on not understanding what I've said.

imposterr 6y ago

Tangentially related, but isn't small scale farming, especially in poorer countries, something that's on its way out? Like if you are a farmer, you work hard and send your kids to school. Your kids will probably then move to the city or at least a more populous area and take up a job other than farming. As this happens more and more, doesn't the population of small scale farmers decrease to the point where we have to rely more on large scale farms? While I don't have enough knowledge on the subject to comment directly on article, I want to ask, based on the above, does it make sense to invest in small-scale farms?

akiselev 6y ago
> Tangentially related, but isn't small scale farming, especially in poorer countries, something that's on its way out? Like if you are a farmer, you work hard and send your kids to school. Your kids will probably then move to the city or at least a more populous area and take up a job other than farming. As this happens more and more, doesn't the population of small scale farmers decrease to the point where we have to rely more on large scale farms? That assumes some combination of extreme social mobility and a steady state population. We have a growing population and the benefits of much of our industrial production to go a fraction of that population, so it doesn't work out. According to the UN, there were about 2 billion people living in ~475 million rural small farm households in 2015, which by definition are "poor and food insecure and have limited access to markets and services" [1] so they wouldn't reap the benefits of industrialized agriculture. Most estimates have the global human population breaking 2 billion circa 1927 so we have more subsistence farmers alive today than there were human beings alive a hundred years ago (!!!) The birth rate inversion in developed countries is a well known phenomenon [2] so many of the subsistence agriculture dependent populations are organically growing in contrast to most of the developed world which is only growing through immigration. Throw in all the market distortions like water pricing and oncoming climate change... where this goes, nobody knows. [1] http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5251e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5251e.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

petre 6y ago

Ah, so the "Green Revolution" is ferts and hybrid seeds, monocrops and pesticides. Once big agriculture kills all the bees with monocrops and pesticides, big agro along with Gates can rebrand world hunger to global hunger and claim they're fighting against it.

OneGuy123 6y ago
This. Destroy natural environment so that only yours can be used.
- f6v 6y ago
  Turns out Bill Gates is some kind of evil billionaire genius?

scotty79 6y ago

Why didn't it work?

lasagnaphil 6y ago
The article doesn't give an explicit answer to why food production has gone down, but it alludes some reasons for it. - Prioritizing on cash crops (corn, soy) instead of the traditional nutrient-rich crops which are more suited for the region - Furthermore, the reduction of crop diversity might have lead to worsening of soil conditions - Force-selling expensive equipment and materials (hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers) made farmers fall into debt, which could lead to a contraction of the farmer workforce Although there needs to be a much more thorough study than this article to get the bigger picture, I think the main issue here is hamfisting American ways of mechanized farming to African land. With different soil, climate, and socialeconomic conditions, blindly modernizing agriculture might just not work on Africa.
AndrewBissell 6y ago
> It hasn't worked — but it has upped corporate agriculture’s profits Perhaps one conclusion to consider is not "it didn't work" but rather "the real objectives were different from the publicly stated ones."
- jevgeni 6y ago
  You act like the for-profit objectives were some secret Illuminati plot.
  - AndrewBissell 6y ago
    You brought up the Illuminati, not me. Nothing about "they said their objectives were A, B, and C when it was really just A" implies an esoteric occult order of some kind. There are dozens of documented examples of Gates doing that sort of thing while he was building Microsoft.
    - jevgeni 6y ago

giorgosts 6y ago

As a farmer, you can always choose not to use these methods, stay with your traditional way. As you can do in the west also, even in the EU with all its rules and regulations. And the impact of these grants is overrated. A billion in the whole of Africa is a drop in the ocean. It is more of an experiment really, to see if technology can help, but the problems there are deeply political.

f6v 6y ago
It’s probably easier to manipulate people who live in extreme poverty and lack basic education.
- giorgosts 6y ago
  The situation in Europe at least, is that if you choose the old ways you'll be loosing money, so nobody does it except for those that do it as a hobby and not for making a living.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

It seems to me that the position this article characterizes as the "agribusiness" side is clearly correct. Many countries have effectively ended starvation, and all of them did so by replacing most small scale farming farming with industrial agriculture. No country has ended starvation without this replacement. So while AGRA may have issues, and the article does suggest a few, I'm very confident that a plan to keep most people stuck as low-productivity subsistence farmers will be worse. No strategy for "distribution of power resources and control over agricultural inputs" will overcome the fundamental problem that a nonindustrialized farm of staple crops produces too little value to keep a family fed and happy.

thrips552727 6y ago

This kinda thing seems like a global phenomenon. Nothing new though. For example, the current ongoing farmers' protests in India. [0] The ever intelligent and witty veteran journalist P Sainath breaks it down clearly. [1] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Indian_farmers%27_protest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Indian_farmers%27_prote... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDDUdkA2Cjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDDUdkA2Cjk

giorgosts 6y ago
Where in these protests do they mention the use of hybrids or intensive farming? As far as I can see these are about the deregulation of the market.

aaron695 6y ago

I was interested to see hunger is increasing as they claimed. This doesn't makes sense. But this quote from a better source seemed to explain it, basically a statistical blip. That said, with the coronavirus it will continue to increase. "The UN FAO have linked this increase in undernourishment in particular to the rising extent of conflict-affected countries (which is often a leading cause of famine), and compounded by climate-related factors such as the El Niño phenomenon (which can inflict both drought and flood conditions)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine) - "Jacobin is an American socialist quarterly magazine based in New York"