(0:00 - 0:31) Bill Gates wants to be seen as a philanthropist, a savior of mankind, and he spends a great deal of money on mainstream media companies to push that narrative, but nothing could be further from the truth. Gates is the largest owner of farmland in America, and also has very large ownership of food manufacturing companies which annually produce millions of tons of toxic manufactured foods that are destroying the health of North Americans. But it's not just here in North America. (0:32 - 1:10) Through an organization called AGRA, the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, the Gates-funded Alliance for Science and other efforts, Bill Gates has had a disastrous impact on farming on the African continent, with repercussions for the health of the people and of the land itself. It is estimated that due to monoculture farming, 80% of African farmland is already degraded, in some cases, to the point where it will no longer grow food at all, and certainly not the healthy crops that Africans need. Stacy Malkan is an independent journalist with the U.S. Right to Know organization. (1:11 - 1:34) She has spent countless hours uncovering the truth about Bill Gates, and especially his efforts to own and control African agriculture as part of his global supply chain. Bill Gates is not the person that he wants everyone to believe that he is. Stacy, welcome to the show. (1:35 - 4:00) Thanks for having me, Will. I'm happy to talk about this topic. Well, and it's certainly, you have researched this so deeply. I don't think I have seen very many articles that have as many links and references as you had. As I was telling you before the interview, I do my best to prepare for my interviews, and I didn't have time to get through half of the information that you've dug up. So what we're here to talk about today is Bill Gates, AGRA, what they're doing in Africa, and how they're destroying agriculture there. Please tell us what you found. Yes, Will, thanks. So we've been covering the Gates Foundation for several years, and really we have done it because other reporters aren't following this story, at least in the U.S. I think it's getting a lot of coverage in Africa. And like you said, it's all very well referenced. The evidence shows that the Gates Foundation's efforts to shape agriculture in Africa are not helping, very probably harming. African groups are really mad about it. They've been speaking out about it, gathering evidence, confronting the Gates Foundation to no avail, because we're really talking about an unaccountable power. And the Gates Foundation is wielding power in lots of ways. It's not just the money they themselves spend to shape African food systems, but they are also influencing governments. It's a billion dollars in subsidies going to fertilizer and other industrial agricultural inputs. They're shaping policy. They're shaping research agendas. They're shaping how other donors donate. And so there are many, many questions and reasons for concern. And so that's what we've raised in a series of articles that I wrote for U.S. Right to Know, which you can find at usrtk.org. And I have a section on Bill Gates that has all my reporting on that topic. Now, you mentioned controlling policy, and this, of course, is how he influences things. He gets the governments to dictate to the farmers. How exactly is he going about that? Because part of it I know from reading your article is that just like just about everything in Africa, the farming is underfunded. And so it's U.S. aid groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that come in and provide funding. But it's not just through things like AGRA. They're also, I believe, giving money to the governments. (4:01 - 4:16) It's very hard to track the policy piece, especially because it is hidden. It's done through other groups. One example is they've given a lot of money to the World Health Organization. (4:16 - 5:29) No, it's the World Bank. The World Bank that has a program called Enabling the Business of Agriculture that goes in and tells governments, you need to do these specific things to get money or to get loans. And so that's a way of influencing policy. There are also seed laws that are being debated throughout Africa, which is an attempt to protect intellectual property rights, make it harder to save and trade traditional local seeds as an attempt to shift markets to commercial seeds, to commodity crops like corn and soy rather than traditional nutritious crops that actually feed people. So that's the big picture. It's really an attempt to industrialize food systems in Africa. It's really one of the last remaining unindustrialized massive tracts of land in terms of food systems. So there's a lot of concerns about land grabs and who's buying the land. And an effort really, as Bill Gates himself puts it, get the farmers off the farms so they can free themselves up to go do other better things. (5:29 - 10:56) But it makes no sense, according to the evidence that's now gathered over 15 years showing that that system's not working. It's exacerbating hunger, not helping, causing lots of environmental problems, environmental harm, eroding biodiversity. And it's an area in deep crisis over growing hunger. And the Gates Foundation came in, as I've reported and promised, we're going to solve these problems. We're going to lift poor farmers out of hunger. We're going to put a billion dollars toward that and get other donors to put money towards these systems. So what we've reported is, you know, 15 years in, the evidence is there, their own evidence supports it's not working. It's time to change tactics. Yes. And dramatically not working. One of the statistics that you've dug up that shocked even me, up to 80% of Africa's cultivated land is already degraded due to the monoculture and the GMOs and the way they're monkeying around with what they're actually growing. 80% of land that can no longer, to at least to some degree, be used to grow what it used to grow, the diversified crops that actually feed people. Can you give us more details on what exactly they're doing that's causing all this damage? Well, I think the best example I could use is say, look right here to the U.S. where most, if you fly over, you know, the Midwest and you just see from a plane, like these blocks of dead land, right? We've all seen that. Growing these monocultures of corn and soy that, first of all, are genetically engineered to resist herbicides, act like insecticides. So they're getting sprayed with lots of chemicals that aren't working, that cause farmers to use more chemicals. So we have a ratcheting up of, we call it the pesticide treadmill, to produce not food, not food. The corn is really being used for, it's being used for biofuels. It's being used to feed animals and factory farms and being used to feed processed food factories. The ultra processed foods that have skyrocketed in the U.S., it's something like 70% of the diet of children is now these ultra processed foods. And we see diseases to match, like diabetes going up, obesity, all sorts of problems, even in young children. There's something like young children are expected to have a 70% increase in type 2 diabetes. Like that's alarming. And that's the, this is like the advanced food system that they're trying to put now into other countries that haven't gone there. In Africa, you see South Africa really developed the same sort of U.S. style Western industrial food system. And they're seeing a lot of the same problems, cancer rates going up in farming communities, obesity related diseases as the food system shifts to ultra processed foods. And I think in Africa, there still are a lot of industrial, traditional food systems and farmers growing traditional crops. So that's the, really what the Gates Foundation is playing the role of opening up that market, sort of a tip of the corporate spear to bring in the corporatized system that is failing globally, failing people's health, failing farmers. And I believe that really getting a handle on shifting food systems is one of the most important things we need to be doing at this time as weather's changing, climate's changing, you know, all the disruptions globally, we need to be able to feed ourselves locally. And you mentioned that a lot of these crops are crops that are used in manufactured foods. Now we know that Bill Gates owns many food manufacturing plants in North America and around the world. I'm assuming he owns some in Africa. He definitely owns a lot of sort of high tech food companies, and he's been also an evangelist for that. So synthetic meats, for example, cultivated cell cultured meats and other companies that want to basically figure out how to genetically engineer bacteria or algae to taste like foods or have certain types of textures so that food can be more, like meat can be more meat, like fake meat, like the impossible burger. He's investing lots of money in those sorts of startups, and it's just an extension of that industrial food system I just mentioned, like more places to put the corn and soy. And it's not an appetizing vision. There's a Bloomberg video that's really interesting that goes inside one of these factories that Gates is heavily invested in. It's called Ginkgo Bioworks. And it's actually supposed to be like, I've written about this company and their investor prospectus is fascinating to read, like their plan to be selling these sort of app-like products to all kinds of companies that could use to flavor foods or make certain fragrances or textures for their products. Of course, with the intellectual property owned by the investors. (10:57 - 15:53) So it's a good profit scheme, but like who wants to eat this stuff? You look inside the factory and it's like no people and just vats of goo and plastic moving through to make these ultra, ultra processed foods that maybe taste like real food or maybe don't. Consumers don't seem to really want them. So yeah, it's an investor's mindset on what to do with the food system, not a what do people need and what view of what to do with the food system. Who elected Bill Gates to decide what we're going to do with our food systems? I mean, that's the point. But it's, I would say it's driven by profit and here's the chain of thoughts that goes into that. There's a lot of organizations out there that are raising funds to help Africans and that in itself is a good thing, but very often they use what's sometimes called poverty porn and they show images of very, very poor Africans who live in rural areas and that in fact is a very, very misleading image of Africa. Much of Africa is urban just like it is here. Most Africans buy their food at a grocery store just like we do, but if you are poor, which they tend to be and they tend to not be as well off as we are, food is expensive. Well, the cheapest food is typically manufactured food. So here's the cycle. Gates pushes their agriculture towards manufactured food, owns a big chunk of that, which he can then turn around and sell to Africans in the African grocery stores, cheap manufactured food. That's the game. Yeah, that's exactly right. And who suffers? I'm glad you brought up the narrative because that's a big piece of it and the Africans have, there was a great piece in Scientific American, Bill Gates, keep your hands off African agriculture, you know, making that point that the, and there's a lot of narrative work like we mentioned earlier when we were talking about how the Gates Foundation funds so much media, hundreds of millions of dollars to media from what you can see. And there's a lot that's hidden. It's not exactly transparent where they put their money. Lots of it going to media, to spin groups, to research that drives media. So, you know, the development of a narrative and the narrative is, as the African groups have pointed out, like our poor inferior seeds can't compete with these corporate products that supposedly, that come with lots of marketing promises that don't at all pan out in the evidence, you know, claiming to boost yields or whatever. You know, what they've seen in the data is that the GMO pesticide scheme hasn't boosted yields. What's boosted yields for corn and soy is taking over more land and devoting more land to corn and soy so that we have here in the U.S., as I mentioned, like most of our farmland devoted to stuff that isn't even food. Now, something that I do know about Bill Gates, a statistic I can throw, is that in America, he is the largest owner of agricultural land, owns more of it than anybody else, and of course, is using it to grow these kind of crops for his food manufacturing plants, where he makes a ton of money from selling this crap to people that's poisoning them. Or like peanuts for McDonald's fries. Yes. Now, for the question that I would have, because as I already said earlier in this interview, folks, Stacey's article is so well referenced, I didn't have time to get through half of it, so maybe you know, does he own land in Africa? That's a good question, and it's hard to figure out who owns what in terms of land in Africa, but there are some groups doing amazing research on that. Grain.org, research group, is a good source on land grabs in Africa. So I don't know much about that, but I can tell you about his land that he owns in the U.S., because you're right, he's the largest private owner of farmland, and people were shocked when that came out a couple of years ago, and people wanted to know why, and well, of course, he doesn't say why, because he doesn't need to, but he finally did say why, and I think this was on Reddit during an Ask Me Anything, people were saying, why do you own this farmland? And he said, my investment company told me it was a good investment. Like, that's why he owns farmland, because he can make money on it. It's not to create more sustainable food systems. He hasn't said anything about that. So I thought that was very telling. (15:54 - 16:52) And I think that was a really good point that you brought up, that I hadn't yet connected. I was looking at his ownership of farmland as a way of controlling the food supply and the profits he makes from the manufactured foods, but I have a group of financial experts here that I do quarterly updates with, and something we've been tracking is how close we're getting to a major economic collapse, and it is coming. There's no question it's coming. There's all kinds of indicators. And the two things that these financial experts tell people to invest in to protect themselves when this crash comes, one is precious metals, but the other one is farmland. That's fascinating. And I mean, unfortunately, I think you're right about that. We're in some dangerous times. And yeah, his answer to that question, when he finally did answer it, was so telling to me, because he said, my investment company told me to, and then made some line about how they could provide biofuels to Africa (16:53 - 17:07) Like that makes any sense whatsoever, because it makes no sense to use farmland to grow corn to feed cars. That system's insane. And yet, this is where subsidies go in the US. (17:07 - 18:16) And again, it's a chemical nightmare. That's a problem for food systems, for land, for communities surrounding the farmland and farmers, of course. So it's a terrible system to export. And it's a system we need to change here in the US as well. It's a really good point, Stacy. Why do you need corn to make fuel for cars when Africa, some African nations are some of the largest oil and gas producers in the world? They have plenty of the stuff. But I think that was not going to be true that way. He was not thinking, it's not a thoughtful, it's a make money mindset. Well, but I'm thinking maybe he is thinking it through because of what the agenda of AGRA would be. And AGRA, I think we've mentioned this, stands for the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa. So it's more of the green narrative of how fossil fuels are killing us all and we have to find all these alternatives when in fact, there's actually no evidence of that. But just the same, this is what AGRA is up to, is to create these alternative fuels, even in countries where they have plenty of oil and gas. (18:18 - 20:23) Right. Well, okay. So that, let me say about that. The green revolution frame was never really intended to be about fossil fuels because it's an intensely, intensely fossil fuel driven system from start to finish. You need fossil fuels to create the chemicals that are used as fertilizers and all of the machinery and huge industrial farms are just a massive energy suck. So the green revolution frame was more about, it was more of a euphemism about just feeding people with grains and commodity crops. And that's the system that they're trying to bring to Africa, get traditional farmers off the land, people on fertilizer, commercial seed through treadmill, which isn't working for lots of reasons because people can't afford it for one thing. Massive government subsidies are needed to get, keep that system going. And so you'll see examples where government will come in and provide subsidies and help farmers buy these commercial seeds, buy the chemicals that go with them, but then the money's not available to keep that going. And so farmers end up in a debt treadmill and they then lose their land, right? So from a capitalist perspective of wealth accumulation, I guess that makes sense because you want that land and you want the profits that go with it, but it's not feeding people. And to your point about the poverty porn, that's, I mean, it's, it should be embarrassing to the Gates Foundation, the poverty porn, the sort of white savior narrative or the Western savior narrative. Like we need to go in and help people figure out how to feed themselves by putting them on this system that benefits us. And a system that's based upon Northern European and American agriculture, which does not necessarily work in Africa. Right. And that's a whole problem with the thinking of the industrial food system. (20:24 - 21:10) In the first place, like the thought that you could have a seed that works in all climates is, it just is not how nature works. So that's why localized traditional seeds that have been cultivated over centuries make a lot more sense than seeds that are cultivated by a researcher in a lab in Europe to be used in Africa. But, you know, and we reported on this, the Gates Foundation is putting an enormous amount of money into researchers in universities, mostly in the North and the US and Europe to develop, you know, patented seed ideas or techno fixes that are developed outside the context of communities without input from communities. (21:10 - 22:45) So it's just not ever going to work. It hasn't worked. And earlier you mentioned this cycle of debt that the farmers get into and how it leads to them losing their land. And this is something I wanted to get to in a little more detail. Can you describe that whole process? Yeah. So it's again, like government's giving subsidies to, for farmers to be able to have commercial seeds. So these are in Africa, patented hybrid seeds so that companies are producing seeds that essentially work with the chemicals that they're also selling. So seeds designed to go with this fertilizer or that pesticide, but they're expensive. They're not free like seed exchange has been for centuries. So you're buying seeds from companies, buying fertilizer. It's maybe free at first or subsidized by the government. But then as that runs out and farmers are needing to purchase, because you can't reuse these seeds every year, you need to repurchase them. And so the debt treadmill, now this has happened in India. People often use India as an example of, well, the green revolution produced so much grain and help feed people, but it also put many farmers into these debt cycles, poverty cycles, and the consequences have been devastating for farmers in India. And that's been well covered and actually led to a massive mobilization of farmers across the country. (22:45 - 25:31) And farmers are not in a good place. Even in the US, it's a very difficult debt treadmill situation here too, where farmers have to do more, grow more to get the same amount. And who's profiting? The corporations. And agribusiness is really a business model that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but they're going to fight to the last. Yes, but it doesn't make sense in terms of producing healthy food. It makes a great deal of sense in terms of producing huge profits. So the next question I would ask is when that farmer gets to the point where they're forced to sell their land, what happens to the land and what happens to the farmer? Right. I mean, that's a good question. And what are the answers? I mentioned earlier, Bill Gates says, AI will free farmers up to go do other things. That's another piece of this, the big tech infiltration into food systems through robotics, through data ownership. We can talk more about that. But the free people up to go do other things, do what? Move to cities and work in sweatshops. There's not an answer for that part of the question. Well, because the only skill they have is farming. So if you put them into a city, well, what are they going to do? They have to do some unskilled labor job. Right. And people in communities are needing to eat food. So it's a yeah. Now you had mentioned robotics and AI. Let's talk about how that plays into it. Yeah. So a good example is the John Deere, the tractor company, which Bill Gates had a large ownership of maybe until recently, I think he may have given it to Melinda, but it was like on the lines of a 10% ownership of John Deere, the person on the board at the company. And now these are like super expensive tractors, but they've become also basically vacuums of data. They're gathering data on farms and taking that from farmers and from communities to then sell back to them in some ways through apps. I mean, there's been a big movement called the right to repair because farmers became upset that they weren't able to repair their own tractors. They were having to hire expensive outside people to come in and, you know, deal with these super high-tech tractors. But the data piece is sort of a new development or recent development. (25:31 - 30:28) And really, I mean, not only farming, but the question of who owns the power, who owns the data and what's going to be done with that. You know, we hear sort of these fantasies about AI will tell farmers how to farm and what to farm and which products to purchase. And I think that's the direction it's going. You know, what if there's an error or a flaw in that system? Just the idea of having global food systems connected to some outside tech ownership and decision-making process that we can't see fully into, I think is super problematic. Because again, how are we going to create food systems that are resilient, localized, and able to weather storms to come, whether it's economic collapse or ecological collapse? Because there's data, like you said, on the economic front that we're in trouble. And it's the same on the ecological front through many lines of data showing all sorts of changes to the ecosystem that could be problematic in the years to come. From soil that's depleting, you know, health effects related to pesticides and fertilizer runoff, climate change, weather patterns are for sure changing. What are we going to do? We saw during COVID that the global food system, global supply chains are vulnerable to disruption. Not a great idea to have our food come from all over the world. I mean, yeah, I think we're just in a situation where we're needing to rethink the way systems are organized to have more resilience and flexibility in the future. And as part of that, what you're just talking about, that global food supply chain, here's a scenario that I can see, and I'd like your thought on this. Recently, and just in the last couple of years, there's been new products coming out. They're not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but robotic weeding machines. They use a couple of different technologies to have these machines go through fields. They don't damage the crops. And some of them are actually quite good in that they're not using pesticides. One of the more popular ones uses lasers, and it can spot the weeds and it can kill them with lasers, so it's not causing any environmental harm. But it's not much of a jump from that to cultivators and planters and tractors that are all robotic. So here's a scenario I can see coming out of this. They put these farmers into debt. The farmer's forced to sell their land, probably to a big agricultural company that then comes along and roboticize the entire operation to produce food that goes into the global supply chain to increase their profits. Yeah, I mean, I think those changes are coming, right? And there will be some benefits to changes that are coming into tech developments, but to me, it gets back to that question of who owns the power and who is the power and who owns the data. Because farmers are being given these free apps to gather data on their farms, this is an example. And then that data gets funneled to where and who owns it and then sold back to farmers. I think that's a piece of the vision that could be coming. And also just things are going to change so fast with AI developments. I think all of our heads will be spinning and it's a good time to be thinking about, are there ways to contain that or are there ways to put better systems in place that do promote transparency and shared ownership of data? Because I think we just need to build in safeties and redundancies throughout the whole system so that there literally isn't one company owning robots on all the fields controlling our food, because what if something goes wrong? I mean, AI is notorious for things sometimes do go wrong and then it can't even tell you why it went wrong. So we need to keep human elements in the food system in order to be able to feed ourselves in the future, in my view. And there could also be tech developments that are good for the environment or helpful for farmers and hopefully those will develop in collaboration with farmers and communities to actually fulfill the needs that they have versus the needs of a corporatized profit system. And the reason why I raised that is because the conclusion, at least to me, that comes from it. (30:28 - 31:07) If we get this continual cycle that we are seeing of the farmers being forced to sell their land to the corporations, the corporations then largely automating it all to produce food for the global food supply chain, this is another transfer of wealth. Just as the lockdowns were, regardless of what a person's view of COVID might have been, it is uncontrovertible that those lockdowns result in the transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth from mom-and-pop operations, smaller people into these mega corporations. And so now this is a point where I would paraphrase what the WEF has been saying for years, you will own nothing and we will be happy because we'll own everything. (31:08 - 32:17) Well, the transfer of wealth that happened during COVID and in recent years is just unconscionable. I think people are just starting to grasp the contours of that and what it even means. And yes, that system is driving itself forward to concentrate more wealth and the food system is just one way. But you're right to keep getting back to the land because the land is the commodity. The land is the commodity. They want the land in Africa and whatever other areas of the world have not turned themselves over to industrialized food systems in order to keep this profit scheme going. Just simply for the fact that it's going, right? Like people are making money off big agribusiness, the pesticide corporations, companies like Calgene, people invested at all levels of that. And so that's a system that just wants to keep itself going. But the data is in that that system needs to change and it needs to change dramatically in order for humans to be able to feed ourselves in the future and to preserve the land that we have. (32:17 - 36:08) Because dumping chemicals all over food is terrible for our health and it's terrible for the soil. We can't keep growing food in that way. But these companies are absolutely incentivized to just keep ramping that up because that's where their profit margins are. Yes, and I would say that they probably don't care if they're eventually going to make those fields completely useless as long as they can extract their profits out of it. In the meantime, it's like any other investment. If they pull more money of it than what they had to put into it, well, that's a net profit. So who cares what happens to it after that? So one question I did have though, from our discussion earlier about specifically what's happening in Africa. And I want to put this question in context first. When I was a young man, 40 years ago, I could go to the grocery store and I could buy a full roasting chicken for $5. Now everybody knows these days that's going to cost you $17, $18. However, the inflation rate in those 40 years has only gone up by 63%, which means if it was just inflation driving it, that chicken would now cost about $8.50. Instead, it cost twice that. Now, you sure, I'm sure are aware, most of our viewers are aware that chicken farms today are almost all owned by large corporations. And we know the two things in North America where the price has been going through the roof are real estate and food. Well, here in North America, especially even in Canada, about 95% of all grocery stores are now owned by just four chains. And we know they're price fixing. We have data on that as well. So putting all of that as a context for this question, do you have any data on what's been happening to food prices in Africa? Well, food, I mean, food prices are artificial, right? They just are. And hunger is a problem of distribution. It's not a problem of food production. And that's a key place where Bill Gates needs to be called on the inaccurate information that he puts out. Because it's always about we need to produce more, we need to produce more. But we need to produce more, the right kinds of food and distribute it equally. I think the trends in Africa are similar about food prices going up. And again, especially like with just South Africa, you see food prices going up as well as food related diseases, ultra processed foods, farmers off the land, chemicals problems, and all of the health issues that go along with it. So the trends are the same. And the problem gets down again to, yeah, these companies have too much power to do whatever they want with food prices. Fixed grain prices, for example, that was, the data came out on that during COVID. It's obscene when you look at what happened during COVID, as you mentioned with the just gross change in wealth inequality. Part of that due to price fixing on food and wherever else profits could be gotten. I mean, this whole system needs to be challenged. Just the idea that short term profits matter more than anything in terms of corporate goals, it's not sustainable for living. So I think that's part, people are questioning that all over. And it's an interesting time to be alive. Interesting is one word for it. I believe that was an old curse, may you live in interesting times. Now I want to talk about the Alliance for Science, which is another Gates organization, which has been accused of misinformation. (36:09 - 36:41) And I'm not sure if it was Alliance for Science or another organization, but you found documents that they deleted. What were they hiding? Well, let's see, the deleted documents, I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I'll tell you about the Alliance for Science, which I think is an insidious example of how the Gates Foundation is wielding power in ways that are not obvious. Although they are obvious when you look at just what these people say in public. (36:41 - 37:08) So the Alliance for Science was initially called the Cornell Alliance for Science because it was created at Cornell University, funded almost entirely by the Gates Foundation. They put in, I think, $22 million at the last that we checked. And it was an outfit created to supposedly depolarize the debate about genetically engineered foods or GMOs. (37:08 - 39:34) People in the U.S. were very upset about GMOs all over the world. African countries have largely said no to GMOs. That's another piece of the puzzle here, the effort to try to break into those markets with commercial seeds. So they're getting a lot of controversy. People are upset. The Gates Foundation decides to create this program at Cornell called the Alliance for Science, standing up for farmers, standing up for science. Well, pretty immediately they just started pretty viciously attacking people who criticize pesticides and GMOs, including my group. They did a whole petition to try to delegitimize my group. We talk about how they had people over in Africa just writing attacks on basically community groups and grandmothers that were trying to protect people from pesticides. So it's really just gross. There was an academic study done just a couple of years ago looking at a report that Alliance for Science had put out about misinformation, but it was itself a piece of misinformation. So it's insidious efforts to try to shape debates about how we talk about issues that the Gates Foundation cares about from a financial perspective. Another good example, by the way, is there's a Netflix series now about Bill Gates. I don't know if you've seen that. It's called What's Next, and it's really largely a propaganda puff piece to build up Bill Gates. And there's a whole episode about misinformation that, again, itself uses misinformation tactics of twisting things. And you'll see, for example, Bernie Sanders is really pressing Bill Gates about his views on inequality and the things that we're talking about, right, like the vast change in wealth through the pandemic. And Gates sits there getting questioned, but then you don't see his answer. It cuts away to him basically explaining why he's a good guy and deserves the wealth that he has. And at one point, they're looking at a big word cloud of supposed misinformation about Gates, and he makes a comment, well, it's mostly about puppeteering the food system. Okay, so let's talk about that. (39:35 - 41:05) They don't talk about that, though. He spends most of the episode with Lady Gaga lamenting how they're so misunderstood. So, I mean, I say all that to point out, and the Alliance for Science is really, I've written a whole piece about it that you can find at USRTK.org, and I keep it updated with many, many scientists, researchers have just pointed out the inaccuracies of this group, the bad tactics, the poverty porn, as you've pointed out earlier. There's all examples of how they do that through this program that at least finally took the name Cornell out of its name, and it's now just called the Alliance for Science. But I think this is important because there's just a huge lot of money and effort going into trying to build Bill Gates up as a hero. He's not just naturally seen as a hero. There is a large propaganda effort putting those ideas out and trying to lift him up as a global health leader who should be trusted, and the fact that they have to do that just sort of shows it's not really working. Right. Now, you had made reference just a few minutes ago to this all being very insidious, and in one sense, it is. The people who are not paying any attention, who are swallowing the narrative, they don't really notice what's going on. And then there's people like us who are paying attention, and it's not insidious, it's right in your face. It's very, very obvious what's going on. (41:06 - 42:31) Now, fortunately, though, or I suppose I should more properly say, unfortunately, these efforts have now done so much damage in Africa that the everyday African is figuring out what's happening, and they're starting to push back. So what form is that pushback taking? Well, Africans are saying like, we want to control our own food systems. We want to invest in agroecological food systems that are diverse, resilient, based on local traditional seeds and foods, and created for the conditions in this community, which is different from the next, and not really a good testing grounds for uniform genetically engineered seeds and fertilizers and commodity crops for the global market. So I think that's the fight happening in Africa. And there's a wonderful group called the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa that's fighting in many countries to try to get funding and investment toward agroecology. Faith leaders have been speaking out against the Gates Foundation and being ignored. I think that part of it's also very interesting, just the lack of accountability, again, to communities that they say that they're serving and sell themselves as helping in this paternalistic kind of way, but the communities are saying, you're harming. We don't want your help. It's not working. (42:33 - 43:05) We need to change tactics. We need to change. I mean, as we're talking about here, we need to change so much. So yeah, the Gates Foundation, though, has so far not responded, except they did change the name of the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa to take out the green revolution. And now they just call it agro. So there's a rebranding, but not a change in any tactics, no substantive changes. (43:06 - 44:47) Great. Now, you're the real expert on this, Stacey, as I've made reference to a couple times in this interview. You've got so many citations on that article, I didn't have time to get to half of them. What else do you think that the viewers should know about? What else? Well, I think the Gates Foundation as a whole is a problematic entity. Oh, there's a great book I want to tell you about in case you haven't seen it called The Bill Gates Problem. Have you seen this one? So he did a really amazing job looking at the many ways of Gates Foundation is using its philanthropy channel via huge tax breaks, right? They don't have to pay taxes like you and I do. They don't have to pay taxes on their investments. It's sort of an investment vehicle posing as a charity, right? That's one way that you could think about an entity like the Gates Foundation. They have something like a $50 billion endowment. Most of that is being invested in these market-based entities, whether they be the pharmaceutical companies, the agribusiness, fake food, ultra-processed food companies, lots of different investments. Hard to figure out exactly what they are. All that being untaxed or taxed at a very low rate, and then 5% of that needs to go to these charity programs that themselves help open markets for the investments. (44:48 - 47:14) So Tim talks about that in terms of pharmaceuticals, how the Gates Foundation has been extremely involved in shaping markets for pharmaceuticals, for vaccines, while at the same time basically having significant ownership in some companies that stand to gain and benefit from that. So it's hugely problematic. We've looked just at U.S. Right to Know at the agricultural development piece of the Gates Foundation. And the reason we've done that, and again, the pharmaceutical education is another example where the Gates Foundation got extremely involved in changing policy in the U.S. to shift the way public education is conducted. Didn't work so well. Oh, well, they just then walked away. So the pattern is sort of the same in all of the areas that the Gates Foundation works in, and Tim does a really good job laying all that out. Even I was surprised reading this very good book that I really suggest. We're reporting on the agricultural development piece, which Tim goes a little bit into, but not very much. And the reason why we're focused there, two reasons. The evidence is so clear that what they're doing is not working. It's been confirmed by independent analysis and the Gates Foundation's own evaluations. They've not lifted farmers out of poverty, they've not solved hunger and all the things that they promised to do with a billion dollars in investment from the Gates Foundation itself, and then influence of how governments are spending subsidies, how other governments are donating to food systems, et cetera. So it's very clear, the data, and it's also just really important to question how the remaining food systems and land in the world gets developed and have it not be turned over to an industrialized system that's failing to feed people and also seriously damaging the environment and health. And as you say, it's not working for all of their stated objectives, but what it clearly is working for is to expand their control and increase their profits. (47:15 - 50:14) They're trying. I mean, that's not even working so well in the African context. Yeah. So it sort of like remains to be seen what's going to happen, which is another reason why I think it's an interesting piece of the foundation to look at and to challenge. I think there needs to be a public challenge against the Gates Foundation and entities like it that are getting these huge tax breaks to essentially help themselves and their friends. Well, I want you to expand on that because here in North America, it is working to expand their control, to increase their profits. It's working in spades. You're saying it's not necessarily working in Africa. Why do you think that would be? Well, because the Africans have been very resistant, African countries to allowing in genetically modified seeds for one thing, and that's a big policy fight that's happening in many African countries right now. So they haven't won that yet, but it doesn't look good, right? Like there's a lot of effort to go going into shaping seed loss and African groups are really fighting back against this. But so far Africa, and this is generally speaking, has rejected GMOs. That's a key piece of the profit puzzle because the GMOs are designed to go with the herbicides and the pesticides and the commodity crops and to just sort of keep the monocrops going past there. Because if you get into using these genetically modified seeds, eventually it gets to the point where with all the other crap they're dumping on there along with it, that land will only grow that genetically modified seed. If you try to plant anything else, anything that's organic, it's not going to grow there. So that gives them another level of control because where do they get the seed from? The very same companies that are making all this other stuff. Yeah, that's certainly true that once you start with the pesticides and fertilizers, you just have to keep ramping that up. I just wrote about, there's an interesting case in Mexico because Mexico has said, we're not going to accept genetically modified corn and glyphosate in our tortillas and we don't want your corn basically from the U.S. And so the U.S. has put in a trade dispute about that and that's playing out in the trade tribunal and actually is supposed to be decided within we think the next week. As to whether Mexico will be forced to accept genetically modified corn from the U.S. And Mexico, of course, has a rich, beautiful history of, it's the corn basket of the world where corn developed many, many varieties, many nutritious varieties and it's a staple of food for the Mexican people unlike anywhere else in the world. (50:14 - 51:15) And so the Mexican government really spent some now years putting together what is the evidence base for health reasons and environmental and cultural reasons for rejecting GM corn. And so definitely check that out on our website if you're interested in the science behind this because there are many health effects associated with genetically modified corn and glyphosate from links to cancer, liver problems, and many other diseases. And also they've documented through this process how corn in the U.S. has multiple toxins, whether they're coming from the genetic engineering process, that's some of it, and also the pesticides that go along with it. So the corn's changing and it's getting more toxic. And Mexico's saying, we don't want it, you know, thanks anyway. And so, you know, are they going to be forced to accept it anyway? That will be interesting to see in this trade fight. (51:16 - 51:49) Yes. And folks, for those of you watching, there will be links directly beneath this interview to the U.S. Right to Know website to the specific article that Stacey and I have been discussing today and the long list of references that are in that. So there's definitely a lot more information out there if you want to go and take a look at that. Stacey, so much thank you for your time today and for the, I can't believe how many hours you had to put into researching all of this and putting all this together. Somebody's got to be digging into this and I'm really glad you're doing it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate having this conversation and you bringing these issues to your listeners.