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Episode 4: Innovation, philanthropy and racial capitalism in global food governance
52 Plays9 days ago
In Episode 2 of this podcast, Julie Guthman talked about how market-driven fixes and “techno-solucionist” approaches have fallen short of creating a fair and sustainable food system. In this episode, we turn to how these same ideas lie at the heart of modern philanthropy—initiatives that claim to fight food insecurity in the Global South.
To explore this, I invited Matthew Canfield. Matthew is a cultural anthropologist and socio-legal scholar whose work looks at the laws and governance structures shaping food security. His research sits at the crossroads of human rights, global governance, and environmental politics, and he pays particular attention to how grassroots movements and civil society groups use rights to influence the way food systems are organized.
While Matthew’s research spans a wide range of issues, our conversation today focuses on how the vision of philanthropists like Bill Gates is shaped by racialized assumptions—and how those assumptions reinforce patterns of racial capitalism and agrarian dispossession.
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📝 Show notes:
There’s No Such Thing as a Free Gift by Linsey McGoey
African Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA)
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Tierra Libertad'
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to this new episode of Tierra Libertad. I'm Thomas and I'm glad to have you with us.
Sustainable Agriculture and Social Justice
00:00:09
Speaker
In this podcast, we listen to agricultural professionals, researchers and activists from around the world.
00:00:16
Speaker
We explore the sustainable transition of the agricultural and food system while looking to social and racial justice, land concentration, the impact of agricultural technologies and the dangers of green capitalism.
Exploring Modern Philanthropy with Matthew Canfield
00:00:36
Speaker
In episode two of this podcast, Julie Gossman talked about how market-driven fixes and techno-solutionist approaches have fallen short of creating a fair and sustainable food system. In today's episode, we'll turn to how these same ideas lie at the heart of modern philanthropy, initiatives that claim to fight food insecurity in the global south.
Food Security Laws and Governance
00:00:57
Speaker
To explore this, I'm joined by Matthew Canfield. Matthew is a cultural anthropologist and sociolegal scholar whose work looks at the laws and governance structures shaping food security. His research sits at the crossroads of human rights, global governance, and environmental politics.
00:01:12
Speaker
and he pays particular attention to how grassroots movements and civil society groups use rights to influence the way food systems organized. While Matthew's research spans a wide range of issues, our conversation today focuses on how the vision of philanthropists like Bill Gates is shaped by racialized assumptions and how those assumptions reinforce patterns of racial capitalism and agrarian disposition.
00:01:37
Speaker
Hi, Matthew. It's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So to begin, could you introduce yourself and tell us about the focus of your research? Sure.
00:01:48
Speaker
um Well, it's great to be on. um My background is in cultural anthropology and in socio-legal studies. And really, I'm focused at the intersection of food system transformation and human rights.
00:02:01
Speaker
So for the past 15 years, I've really been in bestsh enmeshed with transnational agrarian movements struggling for food sovereignty, which is the language they use to claim their right to produce and consume their own foods.
00:02:14
Speaker
um And I've sought to really understand sort of the political and legal barriers to more sustainable and equitable food systems and how food sovereignty movements, small scale food producers, indigenous peoples are trying to really reorganize the legal, political and economic structures necessary to support their vision.
Bill Gates and Agriculture Innovation
00:02:34
Speaker
And more recently, in the past couple of years, I've started to focus specifically on one element of that, which is the incorporation of digital technologies into agriculture. So that's mobile phone applications, remote sensing, um all sorts of new technologies, including machine learning and AI, that are being introduced to make agriculture um more efficient, at least as its proponents claim.
00:02:59
Speaker
And so right now I'm looking at you know what are the effects of small-scale food producers? How are they mobilizing to ensure that the digital food systems that are emerging are also sustainable and equitable?
00:03:12
Speaker
And how they're articulating new kinds of digital rights. Thank you for this presentation, Mathieu. So among other things, and that's actually how I learned about your work, you studied how the ideology of technology-driven innovation is promoted by philanthropists.
00:03:29
Speaker
often as a supposed solution to food insecurity. And one of its main proponents is Bill Gates, who most people know as a co-founder of Microsoft and one of the richest people on the planet.
00:03:43
Speaker
Tell us, what is Bill Gates' vision or ideology for solving social and environmental issues, especially in relation to agriculture and food insecurity? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Bill Gates is a fascinating and really important figure in global food systems, but also in global health um and education in the United States.
00:04:05
Speaker
um He's the world's largest philanthropist. And his impact on food systems since 2006, really, when he began funding um global agricultural systems, um has really been immense.
00:04:20
Speaker
um You know, he's somebody who is fascinating because in the 1990s, he was really seen as sort of a tech technology ah a monopolist and a tech pariah. He was universally hated because of the sort of monopoly that he sought to ah create on the operating system that Microsoft created.
00:04:41
Speaker
And just around that period of time, he started to become a philanthropist. And That has really transformed his reputation. And he's really shifted from being this global tech mogul to a global leader through his philanthropy.
00:04:59
Speaker
um Gates has been very explicit in terms of what his own vision is in terms of what the foundation does. um It is all about what he says is the whole approach to saving lives is based on the idea that we need to be pushing for innovation for the poor.
00:05:17
Speaker
while also increasing demand for it. And so innovation is really at the core of everything that the Gates Foundation does. And you can see that across all of the portfolio of the Gates Foundation, whether it's funding things like vaccines, new vaccine technologies in global health, or whether it's funding new technologies in global agriculture.
00:05:38
Speaker
And when we're talking about agriculture, we're talking about specifically things like seed systems, which he's really interested in. um the incorporation of agrochemicals, of ah synthetic fertilizer. So really recreating the technological and um fixes of the Green Revolution, but updating them for a new era.
00:06:00
Speaker
um Of course, Gates really isn't alone. Innovation is something that we see being promoted worldwide. The Canadian sociologist Benoit Godin has called it really a panacea for every social problem.
00:06:14
Speaker
but Gates has a very particular vision of innovation that he's sought to promote. And this is really about technological innovation developed by private corporations in the global north.
00:06:27
Speaker
So he has this idea that innovation is can really only be pursued by the private sector, number one. And number two, most of that is coming through Western scientific knowledge and innovation that is produced through proprietary kinds of legal protection. So we can think about innovation in two ways, one from a cultural perspective and one from a legal perspective.
00:06:51
Speaker
From a cultural perspective, you know, it promotes particular visions of innovation. And science and technology scholars have really shown that, you know, what is recognized as a novel technology or innovation is really entwined with racialized assumptions about creatorship.
00:07:08
Speaker
So to get something truly recognized as innovative, it takes a lot of performance. And it's for this reason why, you know, some innovations like an AI based technology for detecting soil moisture might be recognized as innovative versus the embodied knowledge of peasant producers about kind of how soil microbes work.
00:07:29
Speaker
fungi and and earthworms and the kind of interrelations in the soil, those are less recognized as innovative than these sort of northern ideas that are produced in in private corporations in scientific labs.
00:07:43
Speaker
And then the second aspect of innovation is really in terms of law, because Western law really seeks to protect creator rights through intellectual property rights, which gives creators are a ah limited monopoly to extract rents from knowledge by controlling access to it.
00:07:59
Speaker
And so Gates has been really at the center of not just promoting these technologies, but also a policy environment that promotes intellectual property, plant breeders rights,
00:08:12
Speaker
um and other kinds of proprietary rights to maintain um the protection of these innovations. and And I think we have to see this within a kind of global political economy, of course, where, you know, a lot of production has been outsourced to the majority world.
00:08:28
Speaker
And so in the minority world, in the global north, um One of the ways in which economic um control is maintained is really through intellectual property rights over these creations. And so i see Gates's ideology innovation really as both a very particular ah contingent ideology, I would say, that is rooted in racialized assumption that seeks to maintain northern control of the global economy.
00:08:58
Speaker
Thank you, that's very interesting. And you've started to mention a lot of topics that we are going to explore in in more detail right now. Can you start by explaining what do you think are the main motivations for philanthropists like Bill Gates to get involved in agriculture, particularly in the global South?
00:09:17
Speaker
You know, I i don't know Gates and i don't i know exactly what his motivations are. I mean, I think that, like I said, one of the things that was really important in the initial founding of the foundation was to change his reputation, to launder his reputation, really, um and to become and to assert power on a global stage um through his genius. And, you know, if we look back to the way that he very aggressively sought to protect intellectual property rights, assert a monopoly of control through the Windows operating system, through the destruction of the free and open source software movement,
00:10:03
Speaker
um and through really the promotion of intellectual property rights more generally, um i think that gives us a lot of clues to sort of how he acts in the philanthropic world.
00:10:16
Speaker
Right now, I think, you know, we are facing a moment in which we are confronting how men with extreme wealth um are shaping our global political and economic systems.
00:10:29
Speaker
But Gates was a main pioneer of this, if we look back to the 1990s and early 2000s. um And he has really sought to become a world leader. Now, in terms of agriculture, I think one of the things that was really influential for him was to take over the the Green Revolution, which was once founded by another foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation.
00:10:56
Speaker
um In the early 2000s, the Rockefeller Foundation sought to reenergize its goal of creating a Green Revolution This time, doubly green, it said, by being more sustainable.
00:11:08
Speaker
um Although there's a lot of there's we should talk about what that means. And Gates really saw an opportunity here to use his a massive wealth to expand his global um his global influence.
00:11:24
Speaker
And through this sort of technological based outlook that was already established in the earlier Green Revolution, and this time he sort of rebranded the Green Revolution under his own um his his own reputation, his own ah funding.
Gates' Influence in Africa
00:11:42
Speaker
Mm hmm. So, philanthropy is already controversial for several reasons, and Philanthrocapitalism is even more so, which is a term you use in your writing.
00:11:56
Speaker
Could you explain what you mean by Philanthrocapitalism and discuss its impacts and limitations? Yeah, I mean, philanthropic capitalism is a relatively recent term that activists and scholars have used to describe the integration of market-based strategies and methods in charitable giving, particularly by high net worth individuals.
00:12:19
Speaker
Now, one thing that's important to just note is that, you know, philanthropy has always played a structural role in the reproduction of capitalism. I mean, we can look back to the major oil moguls of the early of the 19th and early 20th century who played a major role in sort of reshaping the development of of the corporate state of liberal capitalism the and 20th centuries.
00:12:49
Speaker
What really distinguishes this idea of philanthropic capitalism in particular is that really that the market based method, so they the promotion of public private partnerships as a method of solving um oh of global challenges and in this context in food systems.
00:13:10
Speaker
So um critics really argue that Philanthrocapitalism, by sort of framing everything instead of, for example, promoting social equity through redistribution, really ah ties it to market-based mechanisms, thereby really constraining redistributive social change and exacerbating inequality. So poverty is always sort of approached as a market opportunity in the context of Philanthrocapitalism.
00:13:39
Speaker
um And, you know, one of the things that's really important here for Gates, I think, and why Gates is so important, is that we're in a really moment where we're seeing a structural transformation in terms of what we might call the regimes of accumulation, sort of how capitalism is really working, shifting increasingly towards what Gates knows best, which is digital technologies and technology more broadly.
00:14:06
Speaker
And so... If the corporations were to go into places where the Gates Foundation works, particularly the African continent, and promote their technologies, they would likely fail. They have failed. I mean, they've corporations have really failed to promote, for example, genetically modified crops in the global south.
00:14:25
Speaker
um But... With the facade of the altruism of the Gates Foundation, he plays a really important role in enabling these kinds of markets.
00:14:37
Speaker
Lindsay Magui is a big scholar of philanthropic capitalism and Gates Foundation, and her book is called There's No Such Thing as a Free Gift. um And I think that's such a perfect way of encapsulating that with this immense funding comes expectations.
00:14:51
Speaker
And one of those expectations have been, you know, the introduction of these technologies, as well as policy changes that really enable a conducive environment for for corporations. So we can say philanthropic capitalism really is central to what we see right now in agriculture was increasing which is increasing corporate consolidation and control across global food systems.
00:15:16
Speaker
Yeah. So to better understand Bill Gates' current influence on agriculture, id like to ask you, what is his actual power and reach? Who listens to him and why?
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's really hard to overstate how influential Gates has become within the global agricultural ecosystem, you know, that includes the private sector, you you know, government and international institutions, in part because he's one of the major players funding all of these different actors.
00:15:50
Speaker
um Generally, if we think about the Gates Foundation and in the context of global food systems, it's promoted, it's pursued two primary objectives. The first is funding technologies, either through grants or investments. And one of the things that's important here is that the Gates Foundation is just one arm of what the Gates Foundation, of what Gates does.
00:16:12
Speaker
So he does philanthropic funding, but also has a number of venture capital projects. um ah ventures that he has that he has started, particularly in relation to climate change.
00:16:24
Speaker
And then the second is really engaging in communication campaigns and policy advocacy to create this enabling policy framework for the adoption of new technologies and innovation. So those two things are constantly ah operating.
00:16:39
Speaker
You know, if we look, for example, on the African continent, which is where Gates has really focused his interventions, it helped found the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa 2006 and provided Agra with million, dollars which was about of its budget.
00:17:00
Speaker
um Since 2006, when the Gates Foundation started funding agriculture, it's devoted about six billion U.S. dollars to addressing food insecurity. And again, mostly on the African continent.
00:17:14
Speaker
And recently, um he pledged to spend 200 billion more dollars on the African continent. So this is immense sums of money. And I have to say, it's hard to sort of understand that Gates funds almost everybody within the agricultural development ecosystem and therefore is able to assert control in all sorts of ways. One of the major players that it funds is the CGIAR system, the global system of agricultural research.
00:17:48
Speaker
um It's pledged over $1.4 billion dollars to this organization. It's also led to complete reorganization from its 15 centers that were decentrally organized across the world into a one CGIAR system that it led itself.
00:18:04
Speaker
And it also plays an immense role on the global scale. I mean, if we think about, for example, in 2021, the UN n Secretary General organized the first global food system summit, the UN Food System Summit, which was presided over by the president of AGRA, ah Agnes Kalibata.
00:18:25
Speaker
And the UN n Food Systems Summit has played a huge role in shaping the agenda and the meaning of food systems transformation at a moment when there's really widespread consensus that the dominant approaches to agriculture have failed to produce food security and created and had massive effects on climate change.
00:18:46
Speaker
So there's there's at the global level, at the national level, at the research level, and then funding for almost every major um organization that's working on agriculture.
Genetically Modified Crops and Gates
00:19:02
Speaker
And so this influence is really immense.
00:19:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's crazy. And you mentioned the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which I believe is based in Kenya. But how do local populations in the global south or the majority world, particularly in the African countries where Gates is active, view his actions?
00:19:25
Speaker
And how are peasants' voices taken into account?
00:19:30
Speaker
Well, I think that's actually a complicated question because there's um Gates has done a really good job of doing a lot of PR.
00:19:42
Speaker
um And we can see a lot of the philanthropy as, you know, his own PR to extend his influence. And so I would say Gates has done a good job of framing himself as not only this genius expert, but as somebody who is deeply generous and cares about um the African continent.
00:20:02
Speaker
um Now, that said, you know, while I think there is some support, you know, among local populations for Gates, particularly, you know, his his success, which is seen as something that, um you know, many people want to emulate.
00:20:19
Speaker
Small scale farmers and those who are basically facing his interventions have um really mobilized to challenge his power. um the ah The AFSA, which is the um Alliance for Food Tomerty in Africa, or actually the African Food Tomerty Alliance,
00:20:40
Speaker
um is really at the forefront of challenging his vision of promoting commercialization and industrialization among African small-scale farmers.
00:20:53
Speaker
And they're very clear that the reasons are that, you know, one of the problems with this vision is it really is, A, unsustainable. It is promoting unsustainable practices that,
00:21:06
Speaker
play a huge role in making um small scale farmers more vulnerable, for example, to um two ah climate change, but also really embed them in cycles of debt um and also dispossess local and indigenous knowledge of their own knowledge, their own peasant knowledge systems that they've developed over generations.
00:21:31
Speaker
There's also really, I would say, widespread concern about genetically modified crops. um Gates has really promoted genetically modified crops as a solution to as a silver bowl solution to sustainability, to food insecurity, to um nutritional deficits.
00:21:54
Speaker
But I think there's widespread skepticism that this kind of silver bullet solution is A, going to solve these issues. And we've seen and we can talk about how a lot of them have failed.
00:22:07
Speaker
And on top of that, um that, you know, they that this is undemocratic, that it's something that is being promoted from the top down. And that is an area that I think there's more consensus and concern about when it comes to gates from local populations that are facing his interventions.
00:22:25
Speaker
Since seeds and genetics are areas where Gates has invested heavily, could you give some examples of genetically modified crops he has founded?
00:22:37
Speaker
And could do you also discuss a bit about the results, not only in Africa, but also in Asia, for instance? Yeah, well, that's actually where it started for Gates.
00:22:47
Speaker
um Gates started funding golden rice back in 2002, and he's given millions of dollars since then. In 2011, he gave a $10 million dollar grant for golden rice. Golden rice yeah is a long saga for those who follow it, really about um genetically modifying rice to address vitamin A deficiencies. and And that's actually been i mean a major theme for Gates, which is biofortification.
00:23:13
Speaker
um the the One of the things that promoters of genetically modified foods in the 1990s and early 2000s said was that you know one of the reasons why they weren't successful at getting countries to um to create biosafety laws that enable the production of GMOs is because consumers didn't see a benefit. And so there was a major focus to shift genetic modification je kinds of genetic modification that would affect consumers, so vitamin A deficiency.
00:23:47
Speaker
um Now, golden rice, you know, there are lots of battles over it. um And one of the biggest, you know, one about the biosafety of it, so whether it was actually safe to consume after a while, um you know, that seemed to resolve itself. There seemed to be safety tests that suggest it was, although a lot of concern about those biosafety tests because of the way that they were run and who they were run by, what kind of conflicts of interest were involved.
00:24:15
Speaker
um But then one of the major things was that, and this is a kind of a theme that we see throughout genetically modified crops, is that they didn't produce as well as local crops. And so farmers weren't really that interested in actually growing um golden rice. And that's the thing we see with another crop, BT cotton, which was Africa's success story of genetically modification, which was um which was something that was adopted by Burkina Faso.
00:24:42
Speaker
um Brian Dowd-Uribe has written a lot about this, and he shows that actually the BT cotton was inferior, which is why small-scale farmers stopped growing it, because it really wasn't it wasn't useful on the market, in addition to requiring um a lot of agrochemicals and a particular package that that um farmers need to buy every year.
00:25:04
Speaker
But the Gates Foundation has been involved in lots of crops, ah promoting lots of different kinds of genetically modified crops, virus-resistant cassava, telomaze, which is resistant to stem borer and far all armyworms, the BT cowpea. I've written a lot about the banana that was um that was modified to have greater vitamin A, which was called the super banana or the golden banana in Uganda.
00:25:31
Speaker
And for a long time, these really failed. And I think one of the things that Gates has seen is that just funding the technologies wasn't enough. And that's really where he started to start to fund whole communications and policy apparatus to support them.
00:25:49
Speaker
So, for example, um he... funded the Cornell Alliance for Science. The Cornell Alliance for Science is an organization that does what they call science-based communication.
00:26:00
Speaker
They train a network of journalists who are very aggressive in promoting um genetically modified crops across the world, but specifically on the African continent in places where the Gates Foundation works.
00:26:12
Speaker
um And they are very aggressive also about sort of challenging, you know, people who they see as anti-technology. um The Gates Foundation also has been one of the major funders of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, the AATF, which has been also one of the main policy advocate organizations in Africa supporting biosafety laws that allow for genetically modified crops as well as associated intellectual property and plant breeder protections.
00:26:44
Speaker
In 2024, actually, I was at this conference that Gates funded called the African Conference on Agricultural Technologies. And one of the things that I was just so... um Impressed, but also shocked by is that I went to this huge conference at a major place in Nairobi where they hold lots of these conferences.
00:27:03
Speaker
And every single person who spoke, every single organization was somehow connected to the Gates Foundation. And so we really need to see this as an entire apparatus of promoting a very particular vision of of agricultural innovation.
00:27:21
Speaker
And, you know, the the last thing that I'll say here is just that, um you know, they they've been very aggressive about challenging people who challenge them. um And that has been something that I think is is really a shame because this is really an area of important debate about you know what what crops and what kinds of technologies countries should it draw adopt.
00:27:43
Speaker
And these kinds of um this kinds of tactics really show like how how ah aggressive the Gates Foundation is.
Food Sovereignty and Resistance to Gates
00:27:53
Speaker
um So it is becoming increasingly successful in promoting this vision, but it has taken a long time.
00:28:00
Speaker
And would you say there are initiatives that have actually been successful in lifting farmers out of poverty or improving food security, at least in the short term?
00:28:13
Speaker
Well, I think that genetically modified crops, one of the challenges is this kind of silver bullet techno solutionist mentality. Because they address a single problem, but as we know, agriculture and food systems are so interconnected. You know, the issues of production are linked to the ecological, agroecological context in which they grow, are related to the market in which you have for products.
00:28:42
Speaker
So, you know, if we look at um BT cotton, for example, it produced more, but it was inferior. And so it wasn't successful. There weren't markets for it. um If we look at the banana that the Gates Foundation was promoting, but and was never exactly successful in ultimately getting the Ugandan state to deregulate or to allow genetically modified crops to be produced.
00:29:06
Speaker
One of the problems was that people have very strong feelings about about bananas. They're really important. They're the staple crop. They are very important culturally.
00:29:18
Speaker
And so introducing this genetically modified crop could have really important impacts in terms of biodiversity. And Uganda, which is ah center where there are many different land races, there's lots of different indigenous forms of bananas, you know, it could threaten that.
00:29:35
Speaker
um So another example is just, you know, Bt. Cowpea. Bt. Cowpea has been the crop that I think Gates Foundation has been to date extremely successful with because it became the sort of banner child under which it got Nigeria to start growing um genetically modified crops.
00:29:55
Speaker
And BT Cowpe, know, there's lots of contestations about, um you know, the science, of course, because a lot of the science is carried out by and folks who are either tied to associated with Gates or at least with corporations. There's lots of conflicts of interest in this research. But BT Cowpe is traditionally intercropped with materials like millet, which can play a huge role in reducing soil erosion, in producing, you know, ah polycultures that can have multiple crops for food.
00:30:24
Speaker
um It can reduce pest pressures. And BT cowpea, what it does is it ships ah it shifts production to monocropping, which makes farmers reliant on one crop, which makes farmers reliant on those markets, as well as buying the entire package of fertilizer and ah and agrochemicals that are necessary, as well as the seeds. So they're now in debt, too.
00:30:47
Speaker
So it's hard to say if they've been successful because, and this is, I think, one of the major things that we often don't focus is that the Gates Foundation has been successful at promoting policy change, but most of the initiatives have failed.
00:31:05
Speaker
And they failed to actually produce what their stated objectives are. They have been successful in creating markets for corporations to sell products and the policy changes, but not the impacts on small scale food
Gates' Innovation Ideology and Colonialism
00:31:20
Speaker
producers.
00:31:20
Speaker
Mm hmm. you've You've already started to mention this, but could you expand a bit more on the impact of Gates' agenda and financial capitalism more broadly on food sovereignty?
00:31:34
Speaker
And could you especially elaborate on the rep response of food sovereignty movements? Yeah, I mean, so I want to start by saying this point about failure because um the Gates Foundation in lots of different contexts has faced failure and resistance from the populations who are the intended beneficiaries of his funding.
00:31:56
Speaker
We can see that in education in the United States, where he promoted small schools that didn't and and also ah extremely strong regime of test taking that parents have been really angry about.
00:32:10
Speaker
um We can see that in terms of global health, where he actually commandeered the global health system under during the COVID-19 pandemic. And he shifted from a system that would enable the global sharing of vaccine research to one that was dominated by intellectual property rights.
00:32:29
Speaker
And in agriculture, it's been probably the strongest reaction to his failures. the The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa Independent research has shown that it has failed to meet its own goals of doubling production.
00:32:44
Speaker
And in fact, in the target countries where it is working, there's been an increase in food insecurity by 30%. And I find this to be really... fascinating because the Gates Foundation doesn't provide data on its own evaluations on its own projects.
00:33:01
Speaker
Yet it has been really aggressive in promoting datafication and data more generally from governments. And so this is and completely untransparent.
00:33:12
Speaker
But these failures, like I said, have really had a huge impact on the populations. And you said food sovereignty. I mean, food sovereignty is all about the right of small scale farmers to determine their own food and agricultural systems. It's a democratic right.
00:33:29
Speaker
And that is absolutely opposed to the model that is supported by the Gates Foundation, which is top down, driven by the logics of corporations of his own sort of background and his own ideas. I mean, it's a really donor driven foundation.
00:33:48
Speaker
um The scholar Rachel Sherman has done a ah really excellent study of the ways in which many of the staff of the foundation are really working to please Gates rather than actually attending to the local needs and responses.
00:34:06
Speaker
So, like I said, the um African Food Sovereignty Alliance, AFSA, has been at the center of critiquing this approach. They were founded they've emerged as the each thousand nine and they've emerged as the pan-African network of small-scale farmer organizations who are articulating an alternative approach based on local and peasant knowledge, autonomy, and agricultural development driven by agroecological vision of food systems. So that's not only agricultural production, but entire food systems with
00:34:44
Speaker
For example, um territorial markets that encourage production of biodiverse foods and polycultures um that render food that render food producers not dependent on external inputs for production.
00:34:59
Speaker
um And they have been really strong in mobilizing against the Gates Foundation. In 2024, SAFSI, which is the um South African ah Alliance of Faith Driven Organizations, they issued an open letter that called for reparations from the Gates Foundation for its impact on food systems.
00:35:26
Speaker
And that is something that SAFTSI and AFTA continue to now promote, saying not only that they want the Gates Foundation to stop its promotion of industrial agriculture, but actually that it should pay reparations for the changes that it ah that it has promoted.
00:35:44
Speaker
ands Interesting. I think now is a good moment so to dive into one of the main arguments from your paper on Gates. Can you explain how his vision of innovation is shaped by racialized assumptions and how that ties into racial capitalism and agrarian disposition?
00:36:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's a an important question. And I got at it a little bit through the way I was explaining how his ideology of innovation already has some racialized dimensions in that, you know, what kinds of knowledge does it really see as valid?
00:36:22
Speaker
but I really tie the ideology of innovation to another ideology that was at the center of colonialism, which is called the ideology of improvement. um Improvement was an idea that was sort of developed by John Locke, William Petty, um English,
00:36:42
Speaker
theorists and also bureaucrats who were working to justify European expansion and colonial appropriation of indigenous peoples' lands.
00:36:52
Speaker
um And this was ah very clearly nakedly racialized ideology that really assigned greater value to northern forms of scientific expertise um and also to particular kinds of land use.
00:37:08
Speaker
So, you know, John Locke wrote all about how indigenous people are basically wasting the land, whereas the British had these scientific approaches to agriculture, the British Agricultural Revolution, and how they were really better equipped and therefore should appropriate this land and also, based on their improvement claim, private property rights over it.
00:37:30
Speaker
So improvement was really central to the creation of private property, the expansion of European land ah control, and the ideology of innovation functions really in a similar way.
00:37:43
Speaker
So whereas the ideology of improvement was really constructed to dispossess indigenous and colonize peoples with their land, I really think that the ideology of innovation serves to enclose knowledge and extract rents through intellectual property rights and privatize data infrastructure. Basically,
00:38:00
Speaker
giving the same sort of racialized ideologies of ownership, shifting from land to intellectual property rights. And right now, what I'm really interested in is these privatized data infrastructures, basically all of the data that is being collected by these mobile and applications, by remote sensing and and other kinds of technologies, which is increasingly being controlled by the private sector.
00:38:29
Speaker
And so this is really important for thinking about um different forms of colonialism. People call it data colonialism. And there's you know increasing critiques of this, especially now as African movements are thinking about how do we address not just yet the the like the or the ongoing issues of land, because there's still a lot of land grabbing going on on the African continent,
00:38:59
Speaker
but increasingly the grabbing of knowledge and resources through um through intellectual property rights, through data collection and other forms of kind of dispossession of local and indigenous knowledge.
00:39:13
Speaker
Thanks, Matthew. So, yeah, you you mentioned that big corporations are clearly benefiting from this. You also pointed out in your papers that some public funds support these activities as well, which essentially socializes the funding while privatizing the rewards.
00:39:34
Speaker
That ties directly into everything you discussed about intellectual property, Could you tell us a bit more about who actually benefits from this agricultural technology developments and any potential conflicts of interest?
00:39:49
Speaker
And don't hesitate. If you want, you can do some name dropping. It's always interesting to know exactly who we are talking about. Well, OK, so I think one of the things that's really important is that the guil Gates Foundation sees its role as catalytic funding. That's what it calls um a lot because they're focused on policy change. They do offer lots of funding. But the idea is that like with the catalytic funding is there sort of the beginning and that, you know, things will continue to be funded, particularly by the public sector.
00:40:21
Speaker
So one of the things that the Gates Foundation has really worked on ah across its target countries or and through Agra specifically is these um input subsidy programs.
00:40:33
Speaker
And these input subsidy programs, the Gates Foundation gives money, some of it, but often it's the government, you know, which are very resource scarce to fund, know,
00:40:46
Speaker
subsidies for agricultural inputs. Now, these take up a lot of public funding. And what do they do? They go to the private sector that produces particularly fertilizer, such a huge amount of focus on
Digital Agriculture and Conflicts of Interest
00:41:01
Speaker
fertilizer.
00:41:01
Speaker
I mean, the Gates Foundation recently um was one of the main funders of the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit, for example. So that's one thing that really the Gates Foundation seeks to channel funds, ah public funds, into supporting private agri capital, we could say.
00:41:22
Speaker
Now, the other thing that the Gates Foundation does is, like I said, it plays a huge role in trying to ah transform laws to create stronger plant breeder protections and intellectual property rights.
00:41:35
Speaker
um The economist Mariano Mazzucato describes this as really the most modern form of rent-seeking in which the risks of the innovation economy are socialized, where all the rewards are privatized.
00:41:47
Speaker
And again, this is through a lot of public funding for innovation, but that the actual innovations are carried out and and the benefits are um our ultimately accrued by businesses.
00:42:00
Speaker
by private companies. Now, this isn't always just big companies. I mean, often it is. It's the bears of the world. It's the Syngenta's of the world. You know, these are the major huge agritech companies and agribusiness companies.
00:42:14
Speaker
But they're also local seed companies, for example, um that often have connections to to larger um global agribusiness. um And one of the things that I think is you know really important in this is just that the Gates Foundation is playing this play a huge role at a moment in which we're seeing this sort of increasing corporate control and consolidation on a global scale.
00:42:40
Speaker
Now, one of the things i think is is pretty important shocking that the Gates Foundation ah is doing that I don't think many people are talking about is that with the rise of digital technologies and agriculture, the Gates Foundation is increasingly helping to broker these agreement and memorandums of understanding with Microsoft.
00:43:04
Speaker
So before, you know, there was a lot of concern about conflicts of interest. For example, um in the 2000s, it was found out that the Gates Foundation had a lot of shares or that Gates himself had a lot of shares and in Monsanto and that he was promoting industrial agriculture and that he divested from it. But there was a lot that was the kind of conflict of interest.
00:43:23
Speaker
And there was a lot of shock and the Gates Foundation had to had to respond to that. Now it seems to be like more naked that the Gates Foundation is promoting Microsoft um on the African continent to work with um governments to support um these massive data projects. And of course, what does that do? It gives Microsoft access to all of this data and really entrenches Microsoft in the sort of digital infrastructures of the state.
00:43:53
Speaker
And so there's a huge amount of conflicts of interest that we can see. And the last thing, you know, that's interesting here is that the Gates used to be the largest shareholder of Microsoft, but he donated a lot of those shares to the foundation. and As of 2024, the foundation had more than million shares in Microsoft.
00:44:12
Speaker
So the idea that, you know, the the Gates Foundation is promoting Microsoft while also benefiting from it is a new so level of philanthropy capitalism that we haven't seen before.
00:44:24
Speaker
And it ah effectively operates like ah corporation. Hmm. and Another topic I want to discuss in this podcast greenwashing or fairwashing or whatever you want to call it.
00:44:37
Speaker
And the agroindustry corporations are highly skilled at communication and very good at shaping and countering narratives. What are some key terms that listeners should be aware of in order to identify problematic discourse or ideology?
00:44:55
Speaker
Well, I think that the the main one that we see... So over the past 10 years, as agroecology has emerged as the primary alternative to ah industrial agriculture and an alternative model of food system, we've seen that the Gates Foundation and private corporations have...
00:45:20
Speaker
really sought to create any other term to promote their vision um that is not agroecology. So if we can talk about anything that's not agroecology but sounds good, we're going to call it that. So for a long time, it was climate smart agriculture.
00:45:35
Speaker
um At the UN Conference for Climate Change in 2021, Gates um announced $315 million dollars to CGIAR, which it has increased for climate-smart agriculture, and um had a broader agricultural innovation mission for climate.
00:45:54
Speaker
A lot of the Gates Foundation's funding and agro goes to climate smart agriculture. And climate smart agriculture is a framework that can mean lots of different things.
00:46:08
Speaker
It can sometimes include agroecology, actually. But more often, it includes all the other kinds of interventions that the Gates Foundation was supporting. um precision agriculture, ah the use of drought tolerant hybrid seeds, um the use of, you know, particular kinds of agrochemicals, all of those things that are not agroecology. So climate smart agriculture basically created an umbrella, an alternative term that the Gates Foundation was you using. And there was a whole climate smart agricultural alliance that a lot has been written about,
00:46:45
Speaker
um to really try and offer this alternative framework. More recently, we've seen nature-positive production as another framework that has been pursued and used, particularly in the UN Food Systems Summit as an alternative agroecology.
00:47:02
Speaker
We've also seen the term regenerative agriculture being used a lot. And again, regenerative agriculture is um is a really contested term. Sometimes it might include agroecology and sometimes it may not. I mean, one of the things I was surprised to see, for example, in my field work in ah in eastern Kenya, ah is that climate smart agriculture, regenerative agriculture is being promoted by the Gates Foundation. But I think some people who are in the regenerative agricultural movement would say this isn't regenerative agriculture at all. It's industrial agriculture.
00:47:37
Speaker
But these are all sort of more flexible terms that shift away from agroecology, which has really been driven by the the visions and the protagonism of food sovereignty and agroecological movements of small-scale food producers.
Role of Organizations in Food Systems
00:47:56
Speaker
So you've just mentioned the United Nations, which leads me to another question. What role do multilateral organizations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, play in both encouraging this system and at the same time placing limits on it?
00:48:17
Speaker
Well, I think that the UN n Food and Agriculture Organization plays a really important role. And it plays an important role both in its role as a convener of of the United Nations, of member states, as well as through its on-the-ground work as a development and scientific organization.
00:48:37
Speaker
um One of the things that we've seen was after the 2008-2009 global food crisis, there was sort of a reckoning with the global food system.
00:48:48
Speaker
And the UN n Committee on World Food Security, which was a pretty dormant organization, ah was part of the UN n Food and Agriculture Organization,
00:48:59
Speaker
was reformed to become a much more interesting, multi-actor, more politicized arena in which small-scale food producers in the food sovereignty movement had a direct voice.
00:49:10
Speaker
And the CFS, as it's called, played a really important role in becoming a political arena in which these sorts of different visions for food system transformation could be surfaced, could be debated, um and could be really...
00:49:26
Speaker
um reckoned with by you know countries and actors who defend these visions, having to defend them in an open forum. um The UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, it was announced in 2019, really served to sort of shift the agenda.
00:49:45
Speaker
And this was part of a new ah FAO Director General coming on in addition to a broader attempt by the World Economic Forum to really reconfigure a lot of the ways in which multilateral institutions run towards a more multi-stakeholder approach. And that multi-stakeholder approach is really ah an important move that we've seen across the UN, but especially huge area as in agriculture.
00:50:14
Speaker
um in which the idea is that states are not the only actors and maybe not even the most important actors, as Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the World Economic Forum, would say, and that corporations should play a huge role.
00:50:29
Speaker
This has played a huge role in reshaping the kind of ways in which um the UN operates. And it's one that has ultimately led to sort of the adoption of much more market-based, private-driven solutions to address ah issues of food security.
00:50:49
Speaker
And so there's been a lot of momentum and mobilization by global food sovereignty movements, transnational agrarian movements to challenge the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 because of its multi-stakeholder format.
00:51:05
Speaker
And because lot of the scientific advisory committee, which was run by somebody who was involved in AGRA, the president of also led the UN Food Systems Summit.
00:51:19
Speaker
led by or the president of agra also led the un food system summit um And despite the promise by um the deputy u UN n Secretary General Aminu Mohammed that actually no new institutions would be created from the UN Food Systems Summit, it has continued to operate. And there's been this UN Food Systems Coordination Hub that's played a huge role in sort of reshaping the agenda for of food systems transformation and global food security towards a much more voluntary, much more private sector driven approach.
00:51:56
Speaker
um So i would say multilateral organizations like the FAO can play a really important role. But as they adopt this sort of multi-stakeholder investment driven approach to agriculture,
00:52:08
Speaker
that what we're seeing is one in which it's giving up its role as a convener, its legitimacy as an independent and you know non-aligned actor towards one that is really um putting its um its foot on the scales towards the powerful actors in the private sector, including philanthropies.
00:52:33
Speaker
It doesn't look like it's going into the right direction. Well, I would say it's going to the wrong direction right now. And um that said, there's lots of room for contestation, for challenge at the national level. I mean, multilateral organizations play a really important role at the global level in terms of creating legitimacy for various actors and approaches.
00:52:56
Speaker
But if we look on the ground, you know, a lot of small scale food producers, and and here I'm thinking about the African content storages where i I know best, um is that small-scale food producers, ultimately, they want autonomy. They want to be able to feed their families.
00:53:15
Speaker
They want to continue to you know have access to land and resources and markets. And they're mobilized to demand these things from their governments.
00:53:27
Speaker
And so a lot of the um momentum will need to be not necessarily right now at the international level because there's closing opportunities, but at the national level where there may be more opportunities at the regional level.
00:53:42
Speaker
um And those those are really important spaces for for advocacy and action. Is there anything you wish decision makers would support more actively in the political arena?
00:53:54
Speaker
I know that's not an easy question, but I'm thinking especially in the Global North, in the minority world, where most of these philanthropists and corporations we've been discussing are based, but also in the Global South or the majority world.
00:54:08
Speaker
What would you like to see happening more there as well? Yeah, I mean, i think it's actually pretty simple, which is that small-scale food producers need to be at the center of decision-making.
00:54:19
Speaker
That's what food sovereignty is all about. And one of the things that I think has been important problematic about this shift towards multi-stakeholderism is that in some sense, that lesson has been adopted by international organizations, by governments, but they've cherry-picked the organizations that they want to talk to.
00:54:43
Speaker
And, you know, we know from over a hundred years of writing and research about agrarian transformation that, you know, the agrarian sector agricultural sector is highly diverse in terms of its class orientation, in terms of, you know, the things that it wants.
00:55:02
Speaker
um And that's important for, you know, to listen to multiple voices, of course. But The thing is, cherry picking organizations that share your ideology and calling it inclusive is not inclusive. That's actually sort of a ah watering down of democratic structures that we're seeing, you know, happen worldwide with democratic backsliding.
00:55:26
Speaker
And the most important is that self-organized farmers should be at the table in decision making. And these farmers should be driving sort of the changes that are that are that are being seen. You know, it's important, for example, after centuries of colonialism, for countries in the global north to maintain providing foreign aid or reparations to the countries from which they extracted wealth for generations.
00:55:56
Speaker
um And increasingly, you know, we're seeing that aid decline. But what's also important, in addition to providing funding, is that they're actually listening and being driven by the community is that they are seeking to help.
Challenging Philanthropic Narratives
00:56:11
Speaker
And that's something that the Gates Foundation has absolutely resisted. You know, it's this sort of top-down, i know it's best for you mentality is just a reproduction of the same sorts of colonial structures and alongside new forms of extractivism with all of the things we've talked about, the sort of intellectual property rights, proprietary modes of of, or proprietary inputs, and now new digital technologies.
00:56:40
Speaker
So I think there's ah going to be a recognition with these sort of new forms of colonialism that we're seeing um continue to evolve.
00:56:51
Speaker
um At the same time, this is an important moment for um for movements to really demand um of their governments that they that they listen to them, you know, ah for democratic movements.
00:57:05
Speaker
that you know are facing a lot of um a lot of pressure from governments, violence from their governments. But for us all across the world, I think, to continue to mobilize around.
00:57:17
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Thank you, Mathieu. I really appreciated this conversation. I think it was very interesting. Billionaires like Gates have a lot of control over the narrative, so I think it's very important to better understand their ideology and power and also to think about how we can support those who try to counter them.
Future Exploration and Podcast Support
00:57:37
Speaker
Before we finish, do you have any recommendations for listeners who want to explore the topics of technology-driven innovation in agriculture, financial capitalism, and food sovereignty? um Well, I mean, there's there's ah there's lots written on it. um You know, I think following, for example, the work of AFSA, the African Food Sovereignty Alliance, is probably the most important place for thinking about these issues.
00:58:02
Speaker
But the other place that I would encourage people to look in terms of the voices of small-scale farmers is also the CSIPM, cs ipm the um organization that represents the civil society organization ah of ah and and indigenous peoples mechanism, um which is part of the Committee on World Food Security.
00:58:26
Speaker
um I would encourage them to look at reports from IPES Food, which also issue a lot of importance important sort of analyses.
00:58:37
Speaker
um And there's many organizations as well, that food sovereignty organizations, in addition to you know the kind of scholarly work that I and many other colleagues are doing, trying to understand these global political economic changes, power relations, and new rights frameworks.
00:58:55
Speaker
Perfect. A lot of things to study. I'm looking forward to reading more about your work in the future and maybe continue this conversation one day. Bye. Yes, thanks so much for having me.
00:59:07
Speaker
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00:59:23
Speaker
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00:59:39
Speaker
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00:59:53
Speaker
Thanks for listening.