Sen discovered “counter-movements” of food stationed away from where it was needed most during some of the worst famines in history: Ireland in the 1840s; Bengal in 1943; Ethiopia in 1973. In each case, there was enough food to go around, it just went to those who could afford it. Each catastrophe could have been ameliorated by proper government intervention. This appears to be a major oversight by AGRA and Gates, who champion the role of the private sector in alleviating hunger and who have directed efforts and funds at the food itself.
Despite the insight Sen provides, Gates and the über-powerful multinationals his initiatives lobby for are still trying to disseminate the fallacy that lack of food is the problem, and that new technologies will solve it. AGRA operates under the assumption that “There Is No Alternative” to their corporate solutions to world hunger. This is an attitude that has been used to defend the economic liberalism which has allowed those in the private sector to test experimental drugs on unsuspecting Nigerian children; cause millions of malnutrition deaths in developing nations by aggressively and falsely marketing baby formula as healthier than breast milk; poison the Gulf of Mexico; and, closer to this article’s home, ruthlessly grab up arable land like it’s a game. “There Is No Alternative” gets thrown around so flippantly that it has been shortened to the acronym “TINA”. Do those four words take up too many man hours?
The Gates Foundation and AGRA must not have read the Food First policy brief:
A survey of 45 sustainable agriculture projects/initiatives spread across 17 African countries covering some 730,000 households revealed that agroecological approaches substantially improved food production and household food security. In 95 percent of the projects, cereal yields improved by 50 to 100 percent. Total farm food production increased.
In the face of other viable alternatives being empirically measured, Gates’ decisions to hire ex-Monsanto executives, invest $23 million in Monsanto, and team up with Cargill suggest that he is more interested in profits than progress.
As Kaufman points out in his article, it’s interesting how the methods that the world’s best and brightest can come up with to achieve food security in the Global South are the very same as “the age-old techniques that the best and the brightest themselves employed to ensure their own security.”
The Gates Foundation invested in Monsanto in the second quarter of 2010, when 500,000 shares at a little over $23 million worked out to roughly $46 a share. At the time of writing, Monsanto’s stock was $101.15 a share, which means Gates has more than doubled his investment now that half a million shares come out to just over $50 million. Of course, this amount of money must be a trifle to a man worth $67 billion, but that in itself begs the question: why does he need to make any more money? Isn’t going down in history as the super-rich guy who eradicated world hunger enough? Obviously not.
Other questionable investments the Gates Foundation made at the same time included McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil, Range Resources Corporation, Goldman Sachs and Walmart.
Writer and food activist Raj Patel believes that Gates isn’t looking at the problem holistically. Instead, with the money he earns from investing in oil companies — whose refineries cause respiratory disorders in local populations — he is curing polio. That is a feat by which his generosity can be empirically measured. (So what if you’re a 14-month-old with a chronic cough? At least you’re not a 14-month-old with polio!) Patel writes, “Gates’ success in imposing his terms on the debate strengthens the status quo rather than doing what needs to be done — which is to transform it.”
It took food and environmental activist Vandana Shiva 247 pages to debunk the mountain of myths circulating about GMOs. The final page of the report titled “The GMO Emperor Has No Clothes” features a picture and one of the many lapidary quotes of Albert Einstein:
“We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
I would argue that a more apposite citation does not exist. It stands to reason that by entrenching the influence of power-hungry multinationals further into the global food system, Gates is irresponsibly effecting the worsening of food insecurity in developing nations. And, his efforts will only lead to more hungry people as a result of the insatiable urge of the rich to get richer.
