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02 Jun 10
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Elegantly simple in its proposal and presentation, AGRA is the global face of a renewed international effort to revive Africa’s sagging agricultural research institutions and introduce new Green Revolution products across the sub-Sahara. The complex array of institutional and financial interests lining up behind Gates and Rockefeller include multilateral and bilateral aid organizations, national and international research institutes, and the handful of powerful multinational seed, chemical, and fertilizer monopolies upon which the entire financial future of the new Green Revolution ultimately rests.
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That same week in Davos, the soon-to-retire president of Microsoft put his money where his mouth was by giving another $306 million to AGRA. That’s a lot of recognition, by anyone’s standards. Clearly, the “halo effect” created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ altruism will benefit everyone associated with AGRA—from the CGIAR to Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta.
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as a creative capitalist, what—or for whom—is AGRA’s market-based reward? Recognition for Microsoft? Undeniable, but not significant or necessary for a company who already has all the recognition it wants. Gates’ financial interests in genetic engineering? These investments pale behind AGRA itself.
The answer is; there is no market-based reward. Rather, the prize is political. AGRA, backed by Gates’ enormous philanthropic power, bolstered by the best world-renown diplomats and CEOs money can buy, and driven by the sheer financial and institutional momentum of the industrial players within the Green Revolution, is a political machine of immense proportions. AGRA allows the Gates foundation unprecedented influence not only in setting the national food and agricultural policies of many African governments, but in the agenda-setting of continental agreements (like NEPAD), multilateral development institutions (e.g. FAO), the strategies of agricultural research centers (e.g. WARDA), and the political economic re-structuring of Africa’s food systems in general. The Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa is the Gates’ Foundations bold foray into big philanthropy’s latest incarnation: philanthro-capitalism. -
A logical extension of current of neo-liberal hegemony, philanthro-capitalism sees unregulated markets not only as engines for creating wealth, but as the ultimate drivers of social change. In this view, governments are too bureaucratic and corrupt, and social movements too unruly and inefficient. Only the market can save us from… well, the market.
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16 Feb 10
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