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Can Bill Gates turn hunger into profit?
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| Gates, Sheeran explained, was going to help
| the WFP expand its program of local
| purchasing to small farmers and grain
| traders in the farther reaches of their
| client nations. Such purchases, as
| logistically difficult as they might be,
| would increase and support the agricultural
| efforts of these so-called smallholders.
| âThis is the next wave of the story,â said
| Sheeran.
|
| Grain purchases from small farmers and
| traders would put cash into the hands of
| hundreds of thousands of people and
| encourage farmers to plant and harvest more
| and more food. In addition, the WFP would
| put these farmers in contact with other
| groups, who would in turn help them acquire
| better seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides,
| more advanced irrigation systems, larger
| warehouse facilities, and improved access
| to roads. Thus could a poverty-stricken
| peasant move from being a recipient of food
| aid one year, to creating a bit of surplus
| the next, to making a profitable business
| out of it a few years down the lineâand
| supplying food for others.
|
| In order to realize these plans, the World
| Food Program would guarantee a market where
| none might now exist. They would do so, in
| part, by âforward contracting,â whereby the
| WFP would promise to purchase a certain
| amount of a farmerâs output, at a certain
| price, either one, two, or three years down
| the line. Such guarantees would give small
| farmers the incentive to plant more crops,
| since they could count on an eventual
| market for their goods. A WFP contract
| might even help farmers get credit from the
| local bank, or perhaps a bit of crop
| insurance.
|
| Josette Sheeran told me the acronym for her
| pilot program: P4P, which stands for
| Purchase for Progress. The $76 million
| program would be funded by the Howard G.
| Buffet Foundation, the Bill and Melinda
| Gates Foundation, and the government of
| Belgium. In its first year of forward
| contracting, P4P would commit the World
| Food Program to purchasing 40,000 tons of
| food from 350,000 small farmers. âWe are
| studying a proposal with Bill Gates on a
| way to do the contract,â Sheeran said.
|
| [...]
|
| Bill Gates. Why, despite our spending more
| money than had ever been spent to solve the
| problem of world hunger, and why, despite
| everybodyâs best efforts to reconceptualize
| the problemâwhy were more and more people
| going hungry? Perhaps Gates would consider
| the paradox that our efforts might be
| exacerbating the problem, that all we were
| doing was wrong. Obviously, this was not
| the kind of thing I could vet beforehand
| with a publicist, or send over to
| media@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx expecting a
| response. The nature of the question seemed
| to defy reason. Which was why I went to
| visit Amartya Sen.
`----
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/06/0082533
Gates Foundation and human rights violations in China
,----[ Quote ]
| If the Gates Foundation cares about the
| health and development of people in China
| then it could lobby Microsoft to make safer
| software.
`----
http://gateskeepers.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2010/2/8/4450368.html
Related:
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Found
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Gates Foundation Revokes Pledge to Review Portfolio
,----[ Quote ]
| ...the Gates Foundation took down their public statement on this
| and replaced it with a significantly altered version which seems to
| say that investing responsibly would just be too complex for them
| and that they need to focus on their core mission: 'There are
| dozens of factors that could be considered, almost all of which
| are outside the foundation's areas of expertise. The issues
| involved are quite complex...
`----
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/12/1756212&from=rss
Gates Foundationâs Influence Criticized
,----[ Quote ]
| The chief of malaria for the World Health Organization has complained that
| the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates
| Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping
| out the world health agencyâs policy-making function.
`----
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/science/16malaria.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation- Truth Revealed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttq0IdULfjg
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation- Truth Revealed Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVlnqnMHQ1c
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