permaculture

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Innocents abroad?

Bill Gates's donation of $25m to fund GM research has led to criticism 
that his foundation is backing US corporate interests, not the poor

John Vidal
Thursday  October   16, 2003
The Guardian

Bill Gates wants to do public good with the immense profits of his IT 
empire, and over the past few years his foundation has given more than 
$6.5bn to global causes. The money has been well-received as socially 
useful and, generally, sensibly directed.

But this week the Gates Foundation, the largest philanthropic 
organisation in the world, was strongly criticised when it gave $25m to 
GM research to develop vitamin and protein-enriched seeds for the 
world's poor.

In scientific terms, this is not a lot of money, but it is expected to 
be just a first tranche and to   stimulate what the GM companies say is 
the second generation of GM crops - those that are potentially of some 
real use to ordinary people.

Gates was bitten hard by international charities, farmers' groups and 
academics in Europe, India and elsewhere, who argued that the money 
would not go to addressing poverty, the root cause of worldwide hunger, 
but would promote an agriculture that was of little use to the very 
poor.

He was further accused of being captured by an industry now using the 
hungry as a "Trojan horse" to get its biotech into poor countries.

The foundation, and the research organisations who will spend his 
money, deny all charges, saying that the poor are in desperate need of 
vitamins and micro nutrients, and arguing that GM will give the poorest 
a choice.

But there are reasons to believe that the Gates food agenda is now 
being shaped by US corporate and govern ment interests. The Gates 
Foundation has recently appointed a Kenyan ex-Monsanto scientist to one 
of its boards, and last year joined Kraft foods, a subsidiary of Philip 
Morris, the world's largest and most profitable tobacco corporation, in 
a programme to add vitamins to conventionally grown foods.

Gates, moreover, has chosen for his latest venture to partner the US 
Department of Agriculture and USAID, Washington's overseas aid 
organisation - two of the most active pro-GM organisations in the 
world. Also helping with money or research, are several US government 
groups and universities who have benefited from government 
biotechnology grants.

The other major financial partner is the World Bank, which is reviewing 
the costs and benefits of GM to poor countries.

The Gates money, however, is directed at some of the least known but 
most controversial organisations on the global stage. The research will 
be done mainly by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture and 
the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Both are part of the little-known Consultative Group on International 
Agricultural Research (Cgiar). This family of 16 global public 
institutes forms the world's largest public plant-breeding effort for 
poor farmers and has immense say on the direction of world agriculture.

But Cgiar is widely accused of being a creature of its two major 
funders - the US and the World Bank. The bank, dominated by the US, not 
only houses its secretariat, but provides its current chair.

Cgiar is only slightly better than the WTO when it comes to 
accessibility. It has only once held an annual meeting outside the bank 
offices and, when it did - last year in Thailand - there were major 
demonstrations against it by international and local farmers' 
organisations complaining that it was promoting a top-down, 
one-size-fits-all approach to research that ignored the knowledge and 
experience of farmers and indigenous people.

Cgiar's public research, say NGOs in Asia, Africa, Latin America and 
Europe, is being quietly corporatised, centralised in Washington and 
becoming remote from farmers in the developing world.

They argue that having promoted the "green revolution" of the 1960s - 
which introduced high-yielding, chemically dependent crops - Cgiar is 
now using large amounts of public money to develop GM foods, once again 
without consulting the people who the technology will most affect.

With hundreds of millions of small farmers around the world already in 
crisis because they cannot compete with US or EU subsidies which mainly 
go to corporate farmers, the Gates donation is seen to be supporting 
something irrelevant to most farmers - another kick in the teeth for 
those in poverty and an endorsement of a widely questioned technology 
dominated by vested big science interests.

Cgiar says its work is for the public, by public servants and it is 
aware of the power of GM companies to muscle in. But its backing of GM 
goes well beyond honest research. Last year it controversially invited 
the Syngenta Foundation on to its board.

This charitable, nominally independent organisation is owned by the 
largest GM company in the world and run by a former British civil 
servant who worked at the Department for International Development. 
Insiders believe it is only a matter of time before the Gates 
foundation is offered a place, too.

But why should the Gates Foundation be interested in a small, obscure 
organisation like Cgiar? Apart from strongly influencing the direction 
of world agriculture, one answer is that it is the custodian of more 
than 600,000 seeds, something that has been called the "collective 
wealth of nature and the food security of the world".

Almost every crop that has ever been grown is held in trust, and the 
unpatented genetic bank is of immense potential wealth to life science 
companies, not just for food but medicine. Already many have been 
investigating partnerships.

Bill Gates's foundation appears the innocent newcomer to the mucky 
world of global malnutrition and food security. The trouble may be that 
his foundation's increasing influence on the world stage makes it a 
prime target for those who have an agenda well beyond the public good.

·John Vidal is the Guardian's environment editor

john.vidal@guardian.co.uk

Special reports
GM food debate
Special report: what's wrong with our food?

Explained
03.06.2003: GM crops

May 2003 investigation
Food: the way we eat now

Useful links
GM public debate - the official site
Monsanto
Agriculture & environment biotechnology commission (government advisory 
body)
Agricultural Biotechnology Council

Official reports
Royal Society report on GM plants (pdf)
Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology report on GM food 
labelling (pdf)