Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world, and was founded by Bill and Melinda Gates.

Here is how the Foundation describes its mission on its website:

Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, we focus on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, we seek to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life.

Activities in Nigeria

A Los Angeles Times article of 2007 reported that while the Gates Foundation funds a polio and measles vaccination drive in Ebocha, Nigeria, at the same time it has invested in oil companies that are polluting the Niger Delta with flares, seriously undermining public health. The LA Times article states that the Gates Foundation

has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the [Niger] delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

The article reports that a local physician blames the oil flares for a range of health problems in Ebocha, including:

an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children. No definitive studies have documented the health effects, but many of the 250 toxic chemicals in the fumes and soot have long been linked to respiratory disease and cancer.

The LA Times article cites other conflicts between the Gates Foundation's philanthropic work in the region and its corporate investments:

Oil workers ... and soldiers protecting them are a magnet for prostitution, contributing to a surge in HIV and teenage pregnancy, both targets in the Gates Foundation's efforts to ease the ills of society, especially among the poor. Oil bore holes fill with stagnant water, which is ideal for mosquitoes that spread malaria, one of the diseases the foundation is fighting.

The LA Times investigation found the Gates Foundation endowment had major holdings in:

• Companies ranked among the worst U.S. and Canadian polluters, including ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical Co. and Tyco International Ltd.

• Many of the world's other major polluters, including companies that own an oil refinery and one that owns a paper mill, which a study shows sicken children while the foundation tries to save their parents from AIDS.

• Pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat.

The LA Times states:

hundreds of Gates Foundation investments — totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities — have been in companies that countered the foundation's charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.

The LA Times reporters blame these contradictions on "a firewall" that the Gates Foundation has erected between its grant-making side and its investing side: "The goals of the former are not allowed to interfere with the investments of the latter."

Support for GM in Africa

In October 2006 the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First, released a report that was highly critical of the Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations' $150 million "Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa" (AGRA). The "Green Revolution" that the Gates Foundation wants to see is highly dependent on genetically modified (GM) crops and technology.

The Food First Policy Brief is titled: "Ten Reasons Why the Rockefeller and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations' Alliance for Another Green Revolution Will Not Solve the Problems of Poverty and Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa", by Eric Holt-Gimenez, Ph.D., Miguel A. Altieri , Ph.D., and Peter Rosset, Ph.D.

The authors state that the $150 million "Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa" fails to take into account the failures of the original Green Revolution. The creators of AGRA promised to bring benefits to the African continent's impoverished farmers who - they claimed - had been bypassed by the first Green Revolution. In what appeared to be an orchestrated move, one day after that announcement, Jacques Diouf, Director General of UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), called for support for a "second Green Revolution" to feed the world's growing population. UN boss Kofi Annan also weighed in to support the initiative.

According to the Institute for Food and Development Policy press release:

The AGRA plan is remarkable given that over the last 20 years, the CGIAR - which brings together all the key Green Revolution research institutions - has invested 40-45% of their $350 million-a-year budget in Africa. If these public funds were not invested in a Green Revolution for Africa, then where were they spent? If they were spent on the Green Revolution, then why does Africa need another one? Either the Green Revolution's institutions don't work, or the Green Revolution itself doesn't work-or both. The Green Revolution did not "bypass" Africa. It failed. Because this new philanthropic effort ignores, misinterprets, and misrepresents the harsh lessons of the first Green Revolution's multiple failures, it will likely worsen the problem.

The Institute for Food and Development Policy report states:

1. The Green Revolution actually deepens the divide between rich and poor farmers.

2. Over time, Green Revolution technologies degrade tropical agro-ecosystems and expose already vulnerable farmers to increased environmental risk.

3. The Green Revolution leads to the loss of agro-biodiversity, the basis for smallholder livelihood security and regional environmental sustainability.

4. Hunger is not primarily due to a lack of food, but because the hungry are too poor to buy the food that is available.

5. Without addressing structural inequities in the market and political systems, approaches relying on high input technological solutions fail.

6. The private sector alone will not solve the problems of production, marketing and distribution

7. Introduction of genetic engineering - the driving force behind AGRA initiative - will make smallholder systems more environmentally vulnerable in Sub-Saharan Africa.

8. The introduction of GM crops into smallholder agriculture will likely lead to the indebtedness of these farmers.

9. AGRA's assertion that "There Is No Alternative" (TINA) ignores the many successful agroecological and non-corporate approaches to agricultural development that have grown in the wake of the Green Revolution's failures.

10. AGRA's "alliance" does not place smallholder farmers - the principal actors in agricultural improvement - in the driver's seat. In fact, peasant organizations have already put forward a more coherent alternative, called "food sovereignty," which more accurately addresses the underlying causes of rural poverty and hunger in Africa and other regions of the world.

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