New from GRAIN | 4 November 2014

How does the Gates Foundation spend its money to feed the world?

Since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation added “feeding the world” to its objectives almost a decade ago, it has channelled an impressive three billion dollars towards agricultural projects, much of it to improve farming in Africa. But GRAIN analysed the foundation’s agricultural grants records for the past decade and came to some sobering conclusions.

The foundation may say it’s fighting hunger in the South, but its money is overwhelmingly spent in the North. The bulk of its funding goes to high tech scientific outfits rather than to supporting the solutions that farmers themselves are developing on the ground.

The Gates Foundation also uses its money to push for legislation and policies to open up markets to foreign corporations, to privatise land and seeds, and to allow for the introduction of GMOs.

“Listening to farmers” is a stated guiding principle for the Gates Foundation, yet when we follow the money, Africa’s farmers are rather cast as recipients, mere consumers of knowledge and technology from others.

Read more – and look at database we’ve compiled – here: grain.org/e/5064

Read an article in the Guardian which includes a response from the Gates Foundation here: http://tinyurl.com/m9fpl8m

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Feeding the world? How the @GatesFoundation spends its money gr