The Gates Foundation is best-known for its enormous investments in the global public health arena, with a budget larger than the entire World Health Organization (WHO). The Foundation has by and large invested in large, high-profile diseases, like AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. And while these investments have saved many lives, they have cost others. Namely, focusing on these diseases has often emphasized massive long-term projects aimed at eradication (in the case of malaria), and has required well-trained, specialized clinicians, which has at times diverted money from basic health care and more accessible and immediate needs. The Gates Foundation’s approach to public health does not address poverty or weak health systems as a whole, and has in some cases pushed national governments and international institutions onto paths that are misaligned with the actual health burdens poor countries face, including, for example, diarrheal diseases. In other words: “poverty is hard and malaria is easy.”

These priorities wouldn’t necessarily be bad in a more dynamic and robust global public health environment. However, the Gates Foundation is one of WHO’s largest funders, and the major funders of certain public health initiatives, like GAVI (formerly, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization). The priorities of these institutions, whose existence and operations rely on Gates Foundation funding, are also increasingly shaped and influenced by the Foundation, in ways that impact the entire field of public health. As Sonia Shah states: “The foundation—not public authorities—sets the agenda in antimalaria research.” And its authority can in some cases eclipse the authority of WHO’s own scientific recommendations, including around medical treatments and longer-term campaigns, like malaria eradication (widely considered to be a deeply flawed proposal). 

In agriculture, similar processes are occurring. As demonstrated in our first film and companion guide, Gates’ money funds unproven agricultural development efforts in Africa that actively harm small farmers. However, Gates’ reach is also gaining undue influence over international and national frameworks, key institutions (e.g. the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and USAID), and priorities (e.g. around climate change adaptation). For example, USAID—a governmental and taxpayer-funded agency—has increasingly taken the lead from the Gates Foundation, from sharing executives to funding each others’ projects to adopting the Gates Foundation’s agricultural development rhetoric. And many of the “African” institutions set up by the Gates Foundation (like AGRA), which other governmental and private funders have come to support, are not actually reflective of African movements and organizations at all. With ample financial resources from the Foundation and other donors, these organizations are able to have more of a role in influencing national governments than home-grown organizations composed of citizens of those countries themselves.

It’s also important to remember that the money Gates gives away is a tiny fraction of what he (and the Foundation) actually make through questionable investments. By law, philanthropic foundations are only required to give away five percent of their endowment per year. In fact, the Foundation has made more money through its investments than it has spent. And the Foundation’s investments—and those of Gates himself—tell a different picture than its grant-making strategy of “helping” people. 

Historically, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the Foundation’s endowment, was invested in Monsanto and fossil fuel companies, until public pressure forced them to divest. However, the Trust still has more than $100 million invested in stocks and bonds of oil and gas companies, and over a billion dollars invested in mutual funds that may indirectly hold stocks in fossil fuel companies. Even as Gates moves away from fossil fuel companies, his own investments and the Trust’s investments continue to support firms whose existence relies on them, including private jet companies, cement manufacturers, and automobile manufacturers. For example, he currently owns approximately 19 percent of Signature Aviation, the world’s largest operator of private jet bases. In January, Gates’s Cascade Investment LLC bid to buy Signature for $4.7 billion. 

Additionally, while land is one of the most serious constraints to local people’s food production around the world, Bill Gates and his Foundation profit off of land seizure and land consolidation in the US and abroad. Through Cascade Investment, Bill Gates is the largest single private landowner in the US, including nearly 98,000 hectares (242,000 acres) of farmland valued at nearly $700 million. Overseas, the Foundation’s Trust is invested in private equity firms, such as Kuramo Africa Capital, that are involved in large-scale land acquisitions for oil palm plantations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These investments are deeply at odds with supposed commitments to addressing hunger.

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