De
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation heeft 10 miljoen dollar geschonken
aan de uiterst bedenkelijke Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS), een
communicatie campagne die is gehuisvest in Cornell (VS) en die zich
ten doel heeft gesteld mensen te trainen in het promoten en
verdedigen van genetische gemanipuleerd voedsel, gewassen en
landbouwchemicaliën….. Met deze donatie is het totaal door de
Gates Foundation geschonken bedrag aan CAS gestegen tot 22 miljoen
dollar…..
De
laatste schenking komt op een moment dat de Gates Foundation al onder
vuur ligt voor het spenderen van miljarden dollars aan
landbouwontwikkeling die niet ten goede komt aan de bevolking van
Afrikaanse landen maar aan de grote bedrijven, dit middels
landbouwontwikkeling schema’s die foute landbouwmethoden verankeren
door afhankelijkheid van bijvoorbeeld genetisch gemanipuleerde zaden
(waarna de kleine boeren bijvoorbeeld niet meer aan eigen
zaadvermeerdering mogen doen en zo overgeleverd zijn aan bedrijven
als Bayer* en Syngenta voor elk nieuwe oogst…..)
Religieuze
leiders hebben de Bill and Melinda Gates foundation gevraagd hun
strategie voor Afrika aan te passen. Met een compliment voor de inzet
van de Gates Foundation voor voedselzekerheid en de humanitaire
infrastructurele hulp aan overheden in Afrika, stellen deze
leiders dat ze bezorgd zijn over de ondersteuning die de Gates
Foundation geeft aan de uitbreiding van intensieve landbouw op industriële
schaal, daar deze juist de humanitaire crisis verdiept, e.e.a. vervat
in door velen getekende brief van de Southern African Faith
Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI).
De
brief wijst de door Gates geleide alliantie aan voor een ‘Groene
Revolutie’ (AGRA) en de hoogst problematische steun voor de commerciële manier van zaaien (met gentech zaden) die worden gecontroleerd door de grote zaadbedrijven
zoals er daarvan hierboven een paar zijn genoemd….. Ter verduidelijking: bedrijven als Bayer en daarmee ook Monsanto plus Syngenta manipuleren zaden genetisch zodat ze grote hoeveelheden landbouwgif overleven(….), daarmee nemen de bewuste gewassen veel gif op en dat belandt vervolgens op je bord….. (gif als het kankerverwekkende glyfosaat, hoofdonderdeel van Roundup…..)
Hetzelfde
gebeurt overigens al ‘een kleine eeuwigheid’ in landen als India waar
vele kleine boeren failliet zijn gegaan en waar velen zich het leven
hebben benomen….. Als die kleine boeren failliet gaan nemen de
grote zaadbedrijven de grond over en met genoeg misoogsten komen ze
zo aan enorme gebieden waar ze monoculturen telen, met een beetje
geluk mag zo’n kleine boer op zo’n bedrijf werken maar wel tegen een
grijpstuiver zoals je begrijpt……. Teruggaan naar de oude manier
van telen kunnen de boeren niet, immers als er een paar planten
tussen staan die zijn terug te leiden naar de zaden van zo’n groot
zaadbedrijf, krijgt de boer een enorme boete die hij van zijn/haar
leven niet terug kan betalen……
De
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation heeft zo grote projecten in Afrika
gesteund en geld weggehouden van duurzame landbouwprojecten…….
Het AGRA project wordt overigens ook gesteund door
schoftenorganisatie Rockefeller Foundation……
Ondanks
14 jaar lang aan miljarden steun en de belofte dat tegen 2020 de
armoede zou zijn afgenomen in de Afrikaanse landen waar men met AGRA werkt, zou de voedselzekerheid zijn toegenomen en zou er een stijging van inkomens zijn te zien, echter daar is niets
van terecht gekomen, aldus een rapport met de naam ‘False Promises’
dat in juli jl. werd vrijgegeven gebaseerd op een onderzoek door een
coalitie van Afrikaanse en Duitse groepen en werd gepubliceerd door
het Tufts Global Development en Environment Institute (TEI)…….
Weer
staat de Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in de verkeerde
schijnwerper, zo is deze foundation ook bezig met het ontwikkelen van
een Coronapaspoort, zelfs in de vorm van een chip die onder de huid
moet worden aangebracht en waarmee je toegang kan krijgen tot het
openbaar vervoer en openbare gebouwen als gemeente- of stadhuis en
supermarkten…..**
Lees
het volgende artikel van USRTK, ofwel U.S. Right To Know, voor een
aantal links naar door mij genoemde zaken zie de links in de volgende tekst:
Gates
Foundation doubles down on misinformation campaign at Cornell as
African leaders call for agroecology
Posted
on September
30, 2020 by Stacy
Malkan
The Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation awarded
another $10 million last week to the controversial Cornell
Alliance for Science, a communications
campaign housed at Cornell that trains fellows in Africa and
elsewhere to promote and defend genetically engineered foods, crops
and agrichemicals. The new grant brings BMGF grants to the group to
$22 million.
The PR investment
comes at a time when the Gates Foundation is under fire for spending
billions of dollars on agricultural development schemes in Africa
that critics say are entrenching farming methods that benefit
corporations over people.
Faith
leaders appeal to Gates Foundation
On September 10, faith
leaders in Africa posted an open
letter to the Gates Foundation asking it to reassess its
grant-making strategies for Africa.
“While we are
grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for its commitment
to overcoming food insecurity, and acknowledging the humanitarian and
infrastructural aid provided to the governments of our continent, we
write out of grave concern that the Gates Foundation’s support for
the expansion of intensive industrial scale agriculture is deepening
the humanitarian crisis,” says the sign-on letter coordinated by
the Southern
African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI).
The letter cites the
Gates-led Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) for its “highly
problematic” support of commercial seed systems controlled by large
companies, its support of restructuring seed laws to protect
certified seeds and criminalize non-certified seed, and its support
of seed dealers who offer narrow advice about corporate products over
much-needed public sector extension services.
“We appeal to the
Gates Foundation and AGRA to stop promoting failed technologies and
outdated extension methods and start listening to the farmers who are
developing appropriate solutions for their contexts,” the faith
leaders said.
Despite billions of
dollars spent and 14 years of promises, AGRA has failed to achieve
its goals of reducing poverty and raising incomes for small farmers,
according to a July
report False Promises. The research was conducted by a
coalition of African and German groups and includes data from a
recent
white paper published by Tufts Global Development and
Environment Institute. (TEI)
Uganda’s largest daily newspaper reported on AGRA’s failing project (op het orgineel kan je door op de afbeelding te klikken deze vergroten en leesbaar maken)
The Gates Foundation
has not yet responded to requests for comment for this article but
said in an earlier email, “We support
organisations like AGRA because they partner with countries to help
them implement the priorities and policies contained in their
national agricultural development strategies.”
Disappearing
promises of the green revolution
Launched in 2006 by
the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, AGRA has long promised to
double yields and incomes for 30 million farming households in Africa
by 2020. But the group quietly removed those goals from its
website sometime in the past year. AGRA’s Chief of Staff Andrew Cox
said via email that the group has not reduced his ambition but is
refining its approaches and its thinking about metrics. He said AGRA
will do a full evaluation on its results next year.
AGRA declined to
provide data or answer substantive questions from researchers of the
False Promises report, its authors say. Representatives from BIBA
Kenya, PELUM Zambia and HOMEF Nigeria sent a letter
to Cox Sept. 7 asking for a response to their research findings.
Cox responded
Sept. 15 with what one researcher described as “basically three
pages of PR.” (See full correspondence
here including BIBA’s Oct. 7 response.)
“African farmers
deserve a substantive response from AGRA,” said the letter to Cox
from Anne Maina, Mutketoi Wamunyima and Ngimmo Bassay. “So do
AGRA’s public sector donors, who would seem to be getting a very
poor return on their investments. African governments also need to
provide a clear accounting for the impacts of their own budget
outlays that support Green Revolution programs.”
African governments
spend about $1 billion per year on subsidies to support commercial
seeds and agrichemicals. Despite the large investments in
agricultural productivity gains, hunger has increased thirty percent
during the AGRA years, according to the False Promises report.
Gates Foundation
investments have a significant influence on how food systems are
shaped in Africa, according to a June report
from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems
(IPES). The group reported that billions of dollars in Gates
Foundation grants have incentivized industrial agriculture in Africa
and held back investments in more sustainable, equitable food
systems.
“BMGF looks for
quick, tangible returns on investment, and thus favours targeted,
technological solutions,” IPES said.
Local
producers and short food chains
The Gates Foundation
agricultural development approach of building markets for
larger-scale, high-input commodity crops puts it at odds with
emerging thinking about how to best deal with the volatile conditions
caused by the twin crises of climate change and the Covid-19
pandemic.
In September, the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization said it is essential to
build more resilient local food systems as the pandemic “has put
local food systems at risk of disruptions along the entire food
chain.” The report documents pandemic-related challenges and
lessons from a global survey conducted in April and May that drew 860
responses.
“The clear message
is that, in order to cope with shocks such as COVID-19, cities with
suitable socio-economic and agroclimatic conditions should adopt
policies and programmes to empower local producers to grow food, and
promote short food chains to enable urban citizens to access food
products,” the report concluded. “Cities have to diversify their
food supplies and food sources, reinforcing local sources where
possible, but without shutting off national and global supplies.”
As the pandemic
threatens farming communities already struggling with climate change,
Africa is at a crossroads, wrote Million Belay, coordinator of the
African Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), and Timothy Wise, lead researcher
of the Tufts analysis of AGRA, in a Sept.
23 op-ed. “Will its people and their governments continue
trying to replicate industrial farming models promoted by developed
countries? Or will they move boldly into the uncertain future,
embracing ecological agriculture?”
Belay and Wise
described some good news from recent research; “two of the three
AGRA countries that have reduced both the number and share of
undernourished people – Ethiopia and Mali – have done so in part
due to policies that support ecological agriculture.”
The biggest success
story, Mali, saw hunger drop from 14% to 5% since 2006. According to
a case study in the False
Promises report, “progress came not because of AGRA but because
the government and farmers’ organizations actively resisted its
implementation,” Belay and Wise wrote, pointing to land and seed
laws that guarantee farmers’ rights to choose their crops and
farming practices, and government programs that promote not just
maize but a wide variety of food crops.
“It’s time for
African governments to step back from the failing Green Revolution
and chart a new food system that respects local cultures and
communities by promoting low-cost, low-input ecological agriculture,”
they wrote.
Doubling
down on PR campaign housed at Cornell
Against this backdrop,
the Gates Foundation is doubling down on its investment in the
Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS), a public relations campaign
launched in 2014 with a Gates grant and promises to “depolarize the
debate” around GMOs. With the new $10 million, CAS
plans to widen its focus “to counter conspiracy theories and
disinformation campaigns that hinder progress in climate change,
synthetic biology, agricultural innovations.”
But the Cornell
Alliance for Science has become a polarizing force and a source of
misinformation as it trains fellows around the world to promote and
lobby for genetically engineered crops in their home countries, many
of them in Africa.
Numerous academics,
food groups and policy experts have called out the group’s inaccurate
and misleading messaging. Community groups working to regulate
pesticides and biosafety have accused CAS of using
bully tactics in Hawaii and exploiting
farmers in Africa in its aggressive promotional and lobby
campaigns.
A July
30 article by Mark Lynas, a Cornell visiting fellow who works for
CAS, illuminates the controversy over the group’s messaging. Citing
a recent meta-analysis
on conservation agriculture, Lynas claimed, “agro-ecology
risks harming the poor and worsening gender equality in Africa.”
His analysis was widely panned by experts in the field.
Marc Corbeels, the
agronomist who authored the meta-analysis, said the article made
“sweeping
generalizations.” Other academics described Lynas’ article as
“really
flawed,” “deeply
unserious,” “demagogic
and non-scientific,” an erroneous conflation that jumps to
“wild
conclusions,” and
“an embarrassment for someone who wants to claim to be
scientific.”
The article should
be retracted, said Marci Branski, a former USDA climate change
specialist and Marcus
Taylor, a political ecologist at Queen’s University.
The controversy
resurfaced this week over a webinar CAS is hosting Thursday
Oct. 1 on the topic of agroecology. Citing concerns that the
Cornell-based group is “not serious enough to engage in an open,
unbiased” debate, two food-system experts withdrew from the webinar
earlier this week.
The two scientists
said they agreed to participate in the webinar after seeing each
other’s names among the panelists; “that was enough for both of
us to trust also the organization behind the event,” wrote Pablo
Tittonell, PhD, Principal Research Scientist in Argentina’s
National Council for Science and Technology (CONICET) and Sieglinde
Snapp, PhD, Professor of Soils and Cropping Systems Ecology at
Michigan State University, to panel moderator Joan Conrow, editor of
CAS.
“But reading some of
the blogs and opinion pieces issued by the Alliance, the publications
by other panelists, learning about the biased and uninformed
claims against agroecology, the ideologically charged push for
certain technologies, etc. we came to the conclusion that this venue
is not serious enough to engage in an open, unbiased, constructive
and, most importantly, well informed scientific debate,” Tittonell
and Snapp wrote to Conrow.
“We therefore
withdraw from this debate.” Conrow has not responded to
requests for comment.
The webinar will
go forward with Nassib
Mugwanya, a 2015 CAS global leadership fellow and doctoral
student at North Carolina State University, who has also been
accused of making unfair attacks on agroecology. In a 2019
article for the Breakthrough Institute, Mugwanya argued,
“traditional agricultural practices can’t transform African
agriculture.”
The article reflects
typical biotech industry messaging: presenting GMO crops as the
“pro-science” position while painting “alternative forms of
agricultural development as ‘anti-science,’ groundless and
harmful,” according
to an analysis by the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global
Justice.
“Particularly
notable in the article,” the group noted, “are strong usages of
metaphors (e.g., agroecology likened to handcuffs), generalizations,
omissions of information and a number of factual inaccuracies.”
With Tittonell and
Snapp off the roster at Thursday’s webinar, Mugwanya will be
joined by Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant pathology at the
University of California, Davis, who has ties
to pesticide industry front groups, and Frédéric
Baudron, senior scientist at the International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center (CIMMYT), a Gates Foundation-funded
group.
Asking
for a ‘fair fight’
Mariam Mayet,
executive director of the African Centre for Biodiversity, sees the
ramped up PR campaigns as “evidence of desperation” that they
“just cannot get it right on the continent.”
Her group has for
years been documenting “the efforts to spread the Green
Revolution in Africa, and the dead-ends it will lead to: declining
soil health, loss of agricultural biodiversity, loss of farmer
sovereignty, and locking of African farmers into a system that is not
designed for their benefit, but for the profits of mostly Northern
multinational corporations.”
The Cornell Alliance
for Science should be reigned in, Mayet said in
an August webinar about the Gates Foundation’s influence in
Africa, “because of the misinformation (and) the way that they are
extremely disingenuous and untruthful.” She asked, “Why
don’t you engage in a fair fight with us?”
Stacy Malkan is
co-founder and reporter for U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit
investigative research group focused on public health issues. She is
author of the 2007 book, “Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of
the Beauty Industry.” Follow her on Twitter @StacyMalkan
GMOs,
Our
Investigations, Pesticides
AGRA, agricultural
development, BIBA
Kenya, Cornell
Alliance for Science, Gates
Foundation, GMO, green
revolution, HOMEF
Nigeria, Joan
Conrow, Mark Lynas,
Nassib Mugwanya,
PELUM Zambia,
pesticides
============================
* Nu ook eigenaar van gifmenger en genetisch manipulator van zaden Monsanto (VS).
** Zie: ‘Wereldbevolking moet afhankelijk worden gemaakt van vaccins in combinatie met een ‘vaccinatiepaspoort’‘(Bill Gates is de grote promotor van zo’n paspoort, het liefst in de vorm van een onderhuidse chip, de idee is dat je zonder zo’n paspoort geen toegang meer zal hebben tot openbaar vervoer en openbare binnenruimten….)
‘Ausweis bitte! COVI-PASS ‘noodzakelijk’ bij aantonen ‘immuniteit’ voor Coronavirus‘ (over het eerste bedrijf dat bezig is met het ontwikkelen van zo’n pas……)
Zie ook:
‘B&M Gates Foundation, COVID-19: wellicht zijn 2 vaccinaties nodig zegt farma lobbyist Osterhaus, vandaag zijn dat er al 3: ping ping kassa!!‘
‘Bill Gates’ inzet tegen het Coronavirus en zijn handelen op vaccinatiegebied: de winsten van de farmaceuten vermenigvuldigen‘
‘Bill Gates, CDC, WHO en de farmaceuten anticipeerden op de Coronacrisis in november 2019…..‘
‘Eugenetica en genetische manipulatie gaan hand in hand……‘ (met ‘een mooie rol’ voor de B&MGates Foundation)
‘Corruptie: Europese Commissie maakt gemene zaak met Monsanto over toestaan glyfosaat!‘ (in dit bericht een aantal links over glyfosaat, Monsanto, enz. plus een link tussen Monsanto en de B&M Gates Foundation)
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