F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL
When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation founded AGRA in 2006, joined by their close ally, the Rockefeller Foundation, they proclaimed their goal was to “tackle hunger in Africa by working to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa through the promotion of rapid, sustainable agricultural growth based on smallholder farmers.” AGRA promised to double the agricultural yields and incomes of 30 million small-scale food producer households by 2020. It is now 2020 and it has been a total failure in this regard. Notably, AGRA deleted these goals in June 2020 from its website without explanation. Based on what they have done, we can assume that was never the true goal of Gates and Rockefeller foundations.
In a 2009 speech in Iowa promoting his New Green Revolution for Africa, Bill Gates declared, “The next Green Revolution must be guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.” The Gates Foundation proclaimed that the AGRA “is an Africa-based and African-led effort to develop a thriving agricultural sector in sub-Saharan Africa.” Sounds very nice. Reality is quite different.
To further that “Africa-led” impression, Gates hired the former UN Secretary General, Ghana’s Kofi Annan. Annan had just retired amid an Iraq oil-for-food corruption scandal at the UN involving his son. Annan was to be the front face, the chairman of AGRA. In reality the Gates Foundation ran things, with their guy, Rajiv “Raj” Shah, directing implementation of policies in African target countries.
Suspiciously, the Gates Foundation and AGRA have been anything but open and transparent about what they have accomplished in 14 years. For good reason. The model they have pushed in 13 African countries has significantly worsened the food self-sufficiency of small farmers and, instead, created debt traps in which small producers are forced to take on heavy debt to buy expensive patented seeds, are forbidden to use their own seeds or mixed crops, and forced to produce cash crops in a monoculture for export. AGRA has received more than $1 billion dollars from mainly the Gates Foundation, with USAID and the UK and German governments adding smaller sums.
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