The Gates and Rockefeller Foundations have announced they will donate $150 million to reform African agriculture and “end hunger.” Reform, in this case, means supplying them with GMO crops created by Monsanto.
Monsanto is the creator of the perverse “terminator seed,” which refuses to grow for more than a season and renders seeds useless for replanting—effectively destroying the most basic and fundamental law of nature and instrument of farming.
Last year, the Gates Foundation hired Robert Horsch as senior program officer for Africa. Horsch is the former VP of Monsanto, which also invented what the media here calls the “biotech” industry. It’s just a fancy name for the business of patenting natural life forms, which the U.S. patent office began allowing in the 1990s. Overseas they call it “biopiracy.”
How much will it cost Africa to maintain these initially “free” GMO crops? How many Africans will die from starvation when they can’t afford to pay for new GMO seeds each season, or can’t afford the necessary pesticides to make them grow? How many babies will die needlessly from even more toxic—and more scarce—water supplies as Monsanto’s pesticides take over the landscape?
You probably know that in about a year Bill Gates will retire from Microsoft to donate nearly 100% of his time to head his foundation, which is the largest charity in the world. Bill is an amazing individual and has achieved remarkable success. However he is seeking to solve these world problems from a purely economic financial analysis.
Either he has failed to gain a 50,000 foot view to understand the truth behind this, or he's part of the problem. If you believe in worldwide conspiracies of the sort of the Illuminati you would vote for the latter. However, either way this is clearly not a wise use of resources and will ultimately cause more harm than good.
If you haven’t seen the movie
CounterPunch.org June 6, 2007