'Feeding The World' Channels Money to the North - (Gates Foundation)

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 details and see data base here 

Putting your money where your mouth is
In September 2014, the Rockefeller heirs decided to follow some of their philanthropic peers and divest the money in their foundations from fossil fuels, citing moral reasons. Gates too, with his foundation holding around $700 million in shares in Exxon, BP and Shell, has been under pressure to make his investments more socially responsible.
In 2007, the Los Angeles Times revealed that hundreds of Gates Foundation investments – totalling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets – were in companies that ran counter to the foundation's charitable goals or social philosophy.

(Graphic: Mother Jones)

Shortly afterwards, the foundation announced a review of its investments to assess their social responsibility. That review, however, was quickly trashed and the foundation decided to stick with a policy of investing for maximum return. The foundation does, however, claim that“when instructing the investment managers, Bill and Melinda also consider other issues beyond corporate profits, including the values that drive the foundation's work”.
It is difficult to see what that amounts to when it comes to its food and agriculture programme. The Gates Foundation maintains that “access to diverse, nutritious foods is fundamental to good health” but its food related investments go almost exclusively to the fast food industry. A stunning $3.1 billion went to companies like Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Pepsico, Burger King, and KFC in 2012. The Foundation has $1 billion tied up in the world's largest supermarket chain, Walmart, which is a major force driving out small farms in favour of large suppliers. The Gates Foundation has also bought $23 million in shares of the world's leading producer of genetically engineered crops, Monsanto.