An analysis of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s food and agriculture grants found the majority of the foundation’s funding goes to groups heavily skewed to technologies — completely ignoring the knowledge, technologies and biodiversity Africa’s farmers already possess.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent nearly $6 billion over the past 17 years trying to improve agriculture, mainly in Africa. This is a lot of money for an underfunded sector, and, as such, carries great weight. To better understand how the Gates Foundation is shaping the global agriculture agenda, GRAIN analyzed all the food and agriculture grants the foundation has made up until 2020.
We found that, while the Foundation’s grants focus on African farmers, the vast majority of its funding goes to groups in North America and Europe. The grants are also heavily skewed to technologies developed by research centers and corporations in the North for poor farmers in the South, completely ignoring the knowledge, technologies and biodiversity that these farmers already possess.
Also, despite the Foundation’s focus on techno-fixes, much of its grants are given to groups that lobby on behalf of industrial farming and undermine alternatives. This is bad for African farmers and bad for the planet. It is time to pull the plug on the Gates’ outsized influence over global agriculture.
In 2014 GRAIN published a detailed breakdown of the grants made by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote agricultural development in Africa and other parts of the world. Our main conclusion then was that the vast majority of those grants were channelled to groups in the U.S. and Europe, not Africa nor other parts of the global South. The funding overwhelmingly went to research institutes rather than farmers. They were also mainly directed at shaping policies to support industrial farming, not smallholders.The Foundation’s agenda with agriculture has also been coming under increased scrutiny. A 2020 report from Tufts University concluded that its work in Africa completely failed to meet the objectives that it had set itself. The African Centre for Biodiversity published a string of reports denouncing the Gates Foundation for pushing GMOs and other harmful technologies onto Africa. Amongst all this, the U.S. Right to Know collective started a “Bill Gates Food Tracker” to monitor the multiple initiatives that Gates is involved in to reshape the global food system.
Of course, the Gates Foundation is about much more than just making grants. The Foundation’s Trust Fund, which manages the Foundation’s endowment, has big investments in food and agribusiness companies, buys up farmland, and has equity investments in many financial companies around the world. These, and other activities of Gates in the area of food and agriculture, are illustrated in the infographic that accompanies this report.
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