What's the Gates Foundation doing investing in Monsanto to the tune of $23.1 million—up from $360,000 worth of shares in 2008?
Since late August, when the Gates Foundation's investment portfolio was published, the foundation has been under attack by activists for boosting its shares in Monsanto this year, but the Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ) has been focused on ties between Monsanto and the Gates Foundation for years now.
The suspicious relationship seems to be ever-tighter, despite the company's massive seed failure in South Africa only last year, when local farmers lost millions of dollars in potential income because "82,000 hectares of genetically-manipulated corn (maize) failed to produce hardly any seeds," Food First writes. The plants looked healthy from the outside, but some farms, according to a local environmentalist, suffered crop failures as high as 80 percent.
Monsanto said the problem was a mistake in the lab, implying the technology shouldn't be questioned and the failure was an aberration. In fact, these incidents are not rare. More importantly, however, it should not be acceptable for a foreign company to essentially experiment with—and endanger—entire countries' food supplies. Even less acceptable is that an organization dedicated to fighting world hunger would support a company that does.
CAGJ has been digging for ties between Monsanto and the Gates Foundation, which acknowledged last week that it lacks adequate transparency overall. Some examples of these ties, from a CAGJ press release:
some grantees (in particular about 70% of grantees in Kenya) of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)—considered by the Foundation to be its "African face"—work directly with Monsanto on agricultural development projects. Other prominent links include high-level Foundation staff members who were once senior officials for Monsanto, such as Rob Horsch, formerly Monsanto Vice President of International Development Partnerships and current Senior Program Officer of the Gates Agricultural Development Program.
More from CAGJ, as quoted by Food First: "About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another." And, English says, "so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto."
The Seattle Times quotes Travis English of CAGJ's AGRA Watch: "Our biggest concern is that the foundation is invested in Monsanto so they're looking for Monsanto to make a profit."
