Page 16 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 13

MY AFRIKA Health & Healing

How the Gates Foundation

IS DRIVING THE FOOD SYSTEM, IN THE

WRONG DIRECTION

by GRAIN | www.grain.org

he Bill and Melinda Gates rope. The grants are also heavily skewed In 2014 GRAIN published a
Foundation has spent nearly to technologies developed by research centres detailed breakdown of the grants
US$6 billion over the past and corporations in the North for poor made by the Bill and Melinda Gates
T17 years trying to improve farmers in the South, completely ignoring Foundation to promote agricultural
agriculture, mainly in Africa. This is a the knowledge, technologies and biodiversity development in Africa and other
lot of money for an underfunded sector, that these farmers already possess. Also, parts of the world.1 Our main con-
and, as such, carries great weight. To despite the Foundation’s focus on tech- clusion then was that the vast major-
better understand how the Gates Foun- no-fixes, much of its grants are given to ity of those grants were channelled
dation is shaping the global agriculture groups that lobby on behalf of industrial to groups in the US and Europe, not
agenda, GRAIN analyzed all the food farming and undermine alternatives. This Africa nor other parts of the global
and agriculture grants the foundation has is bad for African farmers and bad for South. The funding overwhelm-
made up until 2020. We found that, while the planet. It is time to pull the plug on ingly went to research institutes
the Foundation’s grants focus on African the Gates’ outsized influence over global rather than farmers. They were also
farmers, the vast majority of its funding agriculture. mainly directed at shaping policies
goes to groups in North America and Eu- to support industrial farming, not

16 | we tell the true afrikan story