SELECTED COMMENTS

Bill Gates has called for "creative capitalism" - that is a philanthropy spurred on by profit. But Galés Gabirondo unmasks creative capitalism to reveal it as philanthro-capitalism. She uses the Bill Gates/Rockeffeler initiative, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, to show just how devastating it can be when good-will meets a corporate driven and market hungry capitalism

.............

At his special appearance at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates gave us his answer: creative capitalism. This, he explained to the world’s financial masters, was “[An] approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world’s inequities.” Gates acknowledged that capitalism does not work well for the poor. His explanation is that this is because there are no international market incentives to fight poverty or hunger. (This reasoning, of course, ignores the ways that international markets have actually produced hunger and poverty, but we will set this consideration aside for the moment also…) Gates takes a fairly standard neoliberal approach to solving the market incentive problem by insisting that the market is still the primary engine for social transformation. The difficulty is in persuading those who do have market power that eradicating hunger is in their own best interest. To address this challenge, Gates invites his fellow capitalists to consider the benefits of social recognition—as well as eventual profits—as the missing market-based incentive in order to make capitalism work well for everybody.

........

AGRA’s philanthro-capitalism draws the world’s attention away from local alternatives and towards global market-based “solutions” that ultimately favor those with more international market power, i.e., the seed and chemical monopolies. Though it strengthens corporate opportunities and power, it does nothing to address the weakened ministerial and regulatory capacity of the state, ignores the need to protect local markets or ensure a greater market share of the value chain for farmers. It elides land issues and does not address the eroding economic and environmental resiliency of African food systems. Worse, it diverts attention away from the role that the global markets play in creating hunger and poverty in Africa in the first place.