The Gates and Buffet Foundation Shell Game
Amanda Congdon's Sometimesdaily Internet Justice: Bill Gates Owes A Bill-ion!
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It's now been ten days since we asked Microsoft's Steve Ballmer to honor his commitment to transparent business practices and open up Microsoft's Washington state tax records...we're still waiting. For now Steve, we'll take that as a non-denial confession.
This week, Internet video reporter Amanda Congdon interviewed me for Sometimesdaily's latest installment... Internet Justice: Bill Gates Owes A Bill-ion! It's a fun look at a subject that we take very seriously here in Washington State.
The Gates Foundation’s agriculture program: experimenting or floundering?
Here’s what we know about the Gates Foundation’s agriculture program:
* Gates believes it’s suggestive that “Apart from a few states and small, oil-rich countries, no country has managed a rapid rise from poverty without increasing agricultural productivity. In the poorest countries, agriculture employs a majority of the people.” * This isn’t a new argument or an undisputed one. See Peter Timmer on Green Revolution “optimists” vs. “pessimists”. * Gates’s approach is “comprehensive,” targets “no single, simple solution”, and includes farmer training/support, irrigation initiatives, market access initiatives, and funding of agricultural research with a focus on gender empowerment. * This isn’t a new approach or a historically successful one. The World Bank has focused on essentially the same set of interventions recently, with unclear results, and the previous “holistic” approach of “Integrated Rural Development” is widely considered to have failed. Details at our overview of agriculture aid.
In other words, the Gates Foundation approach – as described – appears to be neither a continuation of things that have worked before nor a fundamentally new approach to the problem. So what might be different this time around?