If past Goalkeepers are a guide, this public relations event is likely to generate laudatory press coverage that ignores the global chorus of criticisms about the Gates Foundation’s agricultural development work in Africa.
Reporters who plan to cover Goalkeepers 2023 should inquire about these recent newsworthy developments.
Why is the Gates Foundation ignoring critiques from Africa-based groups?
In the wake of two important African food summits, a long list of food security and biodiversity experts; Africa-based farming, faith and seed sovereignty groups; and civil society groups around the world have documented the problems and failings of the Gates Foundation’s “green revolution” for Africa.
The Gates Foundation has largely ignored them all.
The Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi and the African Food Systems Summit in Tanzania (known as the African Green Revolution Forum before a recent rebranding) aimed to address the climate emergency and hunger crisis that has hit Africa hard.
The outcome? “False solutions and empty promises,” reports Million Belay of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.
The two summits “suffered from the same flaws — doubling down on failed policies, excluding farmers and civil society, and endorsing the talking points flown in from rich-county boardrooms.”
You can hear from these groups directly in this press conference and the recent wave of critical press coverage in Africa.
Where’s the data to justify continuing the green revolution approach?
The Gates Foundation’s own evaluations underpin these critiques.
As we reported last fall, the first major (publicly released) evaluation of AGRA suggests that the 15-year effort to expand capital-intensive, high-input agriculture has failed to achieve its goals of improving food security in Africa.
An earlier evaluation commissioned by the Gates Foundation in 2016 (and never publicly released; a summary is here) notes a lack of clarity, ambiguous identity, unrealistic goals, poor metrics and other shortcomings of the billion-dollar AGRA effort.
Independent assessments by Tufts Global Development and Environment Institute and African and German groups in 2020 provide further evidence, based on national-level data, that AGRA has not delivered significant yield or income gains for small farmers. The data shows that hunger grew by 30% across AGRA’s target countries during the AGRA years.
AGRA has disagreed with the Tufts research but has not provided data to rebut the findings.
Also worth noting: From the start, food policy experts predictedthe green revolution for Africa would not solve hunger and poverty, and could make these problems even worse, because it ignored structural inequalities and the harsh lessons of the first green revolution in India.
How involved is the Gates Foundation in pushing laws that criminalize seed saving?
An exposé just out in The Nation by Alexander Zaitchik documents the effort by philanthropists and agribusiness companies to implement policies in Africa that criminalize seed saving.
According to The Nation:
“This past summer, the global trade regime finalized details for a revolution in African agriculture.
“Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds.
“The resulting seed economy would transform African farming into a bonanza for global agribusiness, promote export-oriented monocultures, and undermine resilience during a time of deepening climate disruption.”
The most direct beneficiaries of this plan, Zaitchik wrote, are:
“Four-company oligopoly that controls half the global seed market and 75 percent of the global agrichemicals market: Bayer (formerly Monsanto), Corteva (formerly DowDuPont), BASF, and Syngenta, a subsidiary of ChemChina.”
The article provides important historical context about the Gates Foundation’s role in the “new seed economy.”
Why is the Gates Foundation supporting writers who spread misinformation?
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