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12 Oct 08
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the Canadian ecological watchdog group E.T.C. warned of “a growing trend toward privatization of foreign aid, and the fusing of the private sector with governments.”
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substantive critique of the Gates Foundation’s agricultural initiatives focuses on its excessive confidence in technology and market-based solutions — what Bill Gates himself has called “creative capitalism.” For Patel and other leaders of the agro-environmental movement, the net effect of Gates’s efforts is to enshrine this narrowly technical approach as the global response to the food crisis in Africa. “I’m happy to impute the best possible motives to them,” he told me. “But Gates’s 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.”
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it’s hard not to feel that what we’re seeing is a foundation playing God in Africa.” He was careful to note that the reason the Gates Foundation could do this at all was that “no one else has the kind of money the foundation does.” Still, he said, “There has to be something problematic about a few big brains in Washington State making decisions about an entire continent.”
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“The choices that confront African farmers and the world at large,” he went on, are simple and stark: “Either we will increase agricultural yields on the lands now under cultivation, or the combination of low yields and population increase will force smallholders” — small farmers — “to cut down virgin forest lands and cultivate them. There are no other realistic possibilities.”
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The so-called Green Revolution, which developed high-yielding crops and increased the use of pesticides and fertilizers, transformed Asian and Latin American food production in the 1950s and ’60s. But it did not touch Africa
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