The ideology of innovation: philanthropy and racial capitalism in global food governance

ABSTRACT

The converging crises of growing food insecurity and climate change have produced a global struggle to govern food systems. While a range of actors promote innovation as a solution to transform food systems, Bill Gates has leveraged his vast philanthropic funding to advocate for a particular vision of technology-driven innovation led by the private sector. This article elaborates Gates' ‘ideology of innovation' and analyzes its continuities with an earlier ideology developed to legitimize racial capitalism-improvement. In doing so, it reveals how Gates’ ideology serves to reproduce racialized regimes of ownership and relations of dependence in the information economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• innovation
• racial capitalism
• colonialism
• philanthrocapitalism
• food governance

Introduction

In 2021, Bill Gates was tapped to give the Frank McDougall Memorial Lecture to the 42nd Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Gates’ invitation to deliver the lecture canonized his stature among a list of distinguished global leaders recognized for their impact on global food and agriculture, including several former UN Secretaries General and heads of state, as well as the famed architects of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug and John D. Rockefeller. During his address, Gates called on states and international institutions to address the effects of climate change on global food and agriculture. He warned that climate change will lower yields, shorten growing seasons, and produce new pest outbreaks thereby exacerbating food insecurity. To address these issues, he made two proposals – improve and expand data on food production and support new innovations. ‘By working together, using data to find effective interventions, and encouraging innovation, I’m confident we can tackle climate change and help farmers adapt,’ he told the Conference.

Gates’ intervention offered a summation of his approach to social and environmental transformation. To address the world’s most pressing problems – from hunger to climate change – Gates proposes a vision of progress based on a singular precept: innovation. Innovation is a contested concept (El Bilali 2019; Timmermann 2020; Anderson and Maughan 2021), but Gates’ philosophy of innovation reflects his background as one of the world’s most successful technology entrepreneurs. For Gates, social and environmental problems can most efficiently be addressed through innovation in the private sector. He has energetically promoted this approach to innovation by using his political influence and vast wealth to reframe political problems as market opportunities and catalyze technological development. As he describes in his recent book, ‘The Gates Foundation’s whole approach to saving lives is based on the idea that we need to be pushing innovation for the poor while also increasing demand for it’ (2021, 199).

Though Gates’ approach to innovation may reflect his years as a technology developer and corporate executive in Silicon Valley, it has been through his philanthropy in the field of agricultural development that Gates has endowed the concept of innovation with its fullest ideological expression. Since 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has devoted nearly $6 billion to addressing food insecurity, primarily on the African continent. Most of this funding has been directed to research institutions in North America and Europe, as well as international institutions, for the development of technologies such as hybrid and transgenic crops to improve agricultural productivity in Africa. Gates has not only sought to catalyze technology development, he has also worked to ‘stimulate demand’ for these technologies through policy advocacy and public relations campaigns at national and global levels. Over the years, Gates has expanded his advocacy from the African continent to larger global policy arenas. His speech at the FAO Conference – an organization to which his Foundation has donated in excess of $107 million¹ – reflects the authority which he has cultivated. Indeed, Gates’ influence is now imprinted in almost every major global food and agricultural initiative. As a result, innovation is emerging as a dominant discourse and criterion through which food systems transformation is increasingly imagined and evaluated.

The reduction of food systems transformation to technological innovation, however, has generated significant conflict. In 2021, the Secretary General of the UN sponsored a global Food Systems Summit aimed at transforming food systems. The leadership of the Summit, from the Secretary General’s Special Envoy to the Chair of the Summit’s Scientific Committee, was drawn almost entirely from the Gates Foundation’s global networks (Canfield, Anderson, and McMichael 2021). During the Summit, food system transformation was explicitly framed around the imperative of expanding science, technology, and innovation (Montenegro de Wit et al. 2021). The Scientific Committee, which set the terms for the debates in the Summit, emphasized the role of science, research, and technology as the primary driver of innovation in all of its social, business, and policy manifestations (Von Braun et al. 2021). Such an approach explicitly marginalized local and traditional forms of knowledge. In response, small-scale food producers and Indigenous peoples therefore mobilized to expose what they argued was an international initiative aimed at further entrenching corporate control in the global food system. In contrast to the Summit’s narrow framing of innovation through high-tech, corporate inputs, they showcased their own agroecological practices as innovations that could promote more equitable food systems and food sovereignty.² The Summit inadvertently led food sovereignty movements to strengthen transnational solidarity in opposition to Gates’ agenda.

Through their counter-mobilization, food sovereignty movements revealed how innovation increasingly functions as an ideology, what Terry Eagleton describes as ‘a discursive field in which self-promoting social powers conflict and collide over questions central to the reproduction of social power as a whole’ (1991, 44). Deployed by Gates, the ideology of innovation is a manifestation of philanthrocapitalism, a term that activists and scholars used to describe the integration of market-based strategies and methods in the charitable giving of philanthropies and high net-worth individuals (Haydon, Jung, and Russell 2021, 367; See also Bishop and Green 2010; Morvaridi 2012b; McGoey 2015). The Gates Foundation has pioneered this approach to philanthropy, which critics argue constrains redistributive social change and exacerbates inequality in approaching poverty as a market opportunity (Holt-Giménez 2008; Morvaridi 2012a; Birn 2014; Thompson 2018; Wise 2019; Navdanya International 2020). But Gates’ ideology of innovation is more than simply a belief in the market as the principal for social ordering or a staunch faith in technology as a means of progress.³ Rather, I argue that Bill Gates’ vision of innovation is deeply inflected with racialized assumptions that serve to (re)produce racial capitalism and agrarian dispossession in the information age.

In analyzing Gates’ ideology of innovation, I draw on my collaboration, collective labor, and fieldwork with the organization AGRA Watch based in Seattle, Washington to analyze Bill Gates’ writings, his Foundation’s grants, as well as independent evaluations of the Gates Foundation’s influence by civil society organizations. Drawing on this research, I elaborate three key features of Gates’ ideology of innovation: (1) the supremacy of Northern universities and corporations as knowledge producers; (2) the duty of states to adopt liberal intellectual property rights and promote proprietary technologies; and (3) the reform of multilateral institutions through multistakeholder structures and public-private partnerships. By emphasizing these features, I argue that the ideology of innovation is not a novel framework of development, but rather recalibrates the meanings that were once embedded in the earlier ideology of improvement.

The ideology of improvement played a significant role during the colonial era to constitute new property regimes, rationales of state sovereignty, and structures of global governance (Tzouvala 2020). Colonial theorists endowed the concept of improvement with an assemblage about ideas of race, nature, and labor to justify European superiority and legitimize the expropriation of land (Bhandar 2018; Ince 2018). Through the racial regimes of ownership it produced, the ideology of improvement was critical in the formation of racial capitalism. As Gates trains his attention on Africa for private-sector expansion and market-led development, he has cultivated an ideology that shares many of the same assumptions about the kinds of bodies and labor that are capable of producing value. Yet whereas the ideology of improvement was constructed to dispossess indigenous and colonized peoples of their land, I argue that the ideology of innovation serves to enclose knowledge and extract rents through intellectual property rights and privatized data infrastructures.⁴ Seen from this lens, the ideology of innovation can be understood just like that of improvement, as an ideology and juridical formation rooted in white supremacy that is reproducing racialized relations of dependence in the global economy.

To be clear, Gates is certainly not the only powerful actor hyping innovation in global food governance. ‘Innovation-speak,’ as science and technology scholars refer to it, is now widespread (Vinsel and Russell 2020). In the arena of food governance, the former Ambassador to the Rome-based Agencies of the United Nations appointed by Donald Trump, gave a speech titled the ‘Innovation Imperative’ that lambasted agroecology and the institutions that support it.⁵ However, no other actor has promoted the ideology of innovation further or wider than Bill Gates. As he emerges as a global leader, analyzing Gates’ ideology of innovation in the field of global food governance offers a window into the kinds of social power that he and other powerful actors are aiming to reproduce.

I begin by describing the ideology of improvement and its role in the formation of racial capitalism. I then elaborate the ideology of innovation embedded in the discourse and programs of the BMGF’s funding for global development, elaborating the three key features described above. Through my analysis, I show how Gates has cultivated an ideology of innovation that serves to reassert racialized and modernist assumptions and thereby justify the dispossession of peasants’ and Indigenous people’s knowledge. Just like the ideology of improvement, I argue that the ideology of innovation serves to reconstitute racial regimes of ownership. I conclude by pointing out that if racism operates as a tool of separation necessary for capital accumulation, agroecology offers a framework for connection. As food sovereignty movements develop agroecology as an anti-racist practice, they offer a powerful antidote to the racial episteme of Gates’ ideology of innovation.

Racial capitalism and the ideology of improvement

The concept of ‘improvement’ was articulated during European expansion and the formation of agrarian capitalism in seventeenth century England. In contrast to the concept of habitation, which was identified with subsistence, improvement was understood as a process of putting into profit, of turning waste into value, and enclosing common land through particular practices of cultivation (Drayton 2000, 51; Polanyi 2001, 36). As Ellen Meiksins Wood explains, the concept of improvement ‘was firmly fixed in the language to refer to someone who rendered the land productive and profitable, especially by enclosing or reclaiming waste’ (2016, 106). Wood argues improvement was a key ideology in the early formation of agrarian capitalism in England.

The concept of improvement is often attributed to John Locke, who elaborated the concept of improvement as justification for the enclosure of common land based on the labor theory of value. ‘As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labor does, as it were, inclose it from the common’ Locke famously wrote (1988, 21). But Locke was not the first to develop the ideology of improvement. Brenna Bhandar (2018) points out that the physician-general to the English army in Ireland, William Petty, first articulated the ideology of improvement. Petty described the Irish with contempt because of their subsistence livelihoods, which he argued, ‘required improvement if Ireland were ever to develop its natural fitness for trade’ (Bhandar 2018, 42). Petty’s writing, which quantified both land and people into economic units, imagined Irish labor and land use in a hierarchy of value.

By investing the concept of improvement with particular visions of cultivation, Petty and Locke crafted an ideology not just to justify the formation of private property in England, but also to legitimate the expropriation of foreign lands based on English superiority. Indeed, Locke’s reference to tillage, planting, and cultivation – all activities of the English farmer – served as the premise from which man (a gendered subject) transformed land into property. The English farmer and his practices of commercial production provided the archetype of improvement (Wood 1984). Both Petty and Locke were fundamentally concerned with English colonialism. Locke served as Secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and participated in developing the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Through the ideology of improvement, these theorists sought to legitimate private property and the extension of European sovereignty to foreign territories by racializing populations with different knowledge systems and practices of cultivation. As Bhandar elaborates, ‘while modern biological racism had yet to emerge, conceptions of racial difference and, crucially, European superiority were conditioned at this time by the concept of land use’ (2018, 44). Locke makes the racialized meanings embedded in his concept of improvement clear when he asks, rhetorically, ‘whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniencies [sic] of life, as ten acres of equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated?’ (1988, 294).

Improvement was thus a key ideology in the formation of what Cedric Robinson (2005) terms racial capitalism. Through his historical analysis, Robinson argues that the formation of racialized subjects was critical to the development of capitalism. Racism enabled both the exploitation of labor and the colonial expropriation of land. As Robinson puts it, ‘the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology’ (2005, 2). With this insight, scholars have excavated how racism operated in the formation of liberal legal concepts. Building on the foundational work of Cheryl Harris (1993) who described the co-construction of whiteness and private property in the United States, Brenna Bhandar analyzes the shared conceptual logics underpinning race and private property. She argues that the ideology of improvement served to legitimate claims for private property based on particular agricultural practices, racialized bodies, and culturally contingent visions of the natural world. As she puts it, ‘Colonialism took root on the grounds of this juridical formation, twinning the production of racial subjects with an economy of private property ownership that continues to prevail over indigenous and alternate modalities of relating to and using land and its resources’ (2018, 7).

This ideology of improvement was also institutionalized in the emergent global legal order. Public international law was constituted during the colonial encounter (Anghie 2007). European legal theorists justified the extension of European sovereignty to occupied colonies because they argued that Indigenous peoples ‘lack[ed] recognizable institutions of sovereign authority’ to protect private property (Ince 2018, 45). As Ntina Tzouvala (2020) recounts, the rights and privileges associated with membership into the family of sovereign nations were only bequeathed to non-European peoples if they met a ‘standard of civilization.’ She describes how the standard of civilization oscillated between the ‘logic of biology’ and the ‘logic of improvement.’ Whereas the former posited immutable differences between Europeans and their colonial subjects, the latter ‘conceptualized and promoted the historically contingent form of capitalist modernity had assumed in the West as the only morally acceptable state of being and equated any deviation from it with collective moral failure’ (2020, 55). The ideology of improvement linked the micro-practices of land use to the racialized international order.

The ideology of improvement has remained embedded in the structure of legal argument around self-determination (Tzouvala 2020) and continues to operate as an important discourse in projects of development (Li 2007), but its explicit mobilization as the ideology of capitalism has receded. Neoliberalism discursively displaced the overtly paternalist and racist tropes of improvement with a vision of progress and freedom through the marketplace. Nonetheless, neoliberalism has effectively reproduced unequal integration in the global economy established during the colonial era. Like the ideology of improvement, neoliberalism is fundamentally concerned with the construction and protection of private property rights, which it identifies as the state’s raison d’être. In the face of postcolonial nations’ call for permanent sovereignty over natural resources and a new international economic order, neoliberal trade agreements effectively ‘encased’ the market to protect property from the threat of democracy (Slobodian 2020).

Yet as discontent over global inequality has expanded, especially since the 2007–2008 global food and financial crisis and the global pandemic, even the captains of global capital have begun to recognize that neoliberalism is failing to provide them with legitimacy. Klaus Schwab, the Chairman of the World Economic Forum, recently described the COVID-19 pandemic as the ‘death knell of neoliberalism’ (Malleret and Schwab 2020, 78). In its wake, powerful actors are turning to a new ideology to promote capitalist development, environmental transformation, and sustainable global governance: innovation.

The ideology of innovation

Innovation emerged as a key framework for conceptualizing capitalist development beginning in the early twentieth century. The term comes from the Latin ‘to restore’ or ‘to renew.’ Joseph Schumpeter, with whom the concept of innovation is often identified, described innovation as ‘doing things differently in the realm of economic life’ ([1939] 2017). Writing in the 1930s, Schumpeter’s analysis of innovation marked a significant shift in dominant understandings of innovation – from a process that was seen by political elites as a threat to their hold on power to a necessary process for economic growth (Godin 2015). Building on the liberal tradition, Schumpeter attributed the products of innovation to the sociological persona of the entrepreneur. Though even at the time of his writing, critics charged that this individualistic approach failed to account for the collective processes through which ‘new’ ideas and technologies are developed (Sweezy 1943), innovation nonetheless became a credo of capitalist modernity within the context of shortening business cycles.

Although economists now describe innovation as a critical element of economic growth, there is significant variation in how they understand the term. Many approach innovation as a technology-driven process of economic development and promote it as part of a package of macroeconomic policies that emphasize market liberalization. In turn, a growing number of scholars are developing approaches to innovation that are more centered on equitable or sustainable growth. For example, some economists challenge the neoliberal interpretation of innovation, elaborating a critical role for the state in promoting innovation and more equitable economic development (Mazzucato 2015; Papaioannou 2020). Others have developed concepts such as ‘inclusive innovation’ to center the role of marginalized communities in processes of social and economic transformation (George, McGahan, and Prabhu 2012; Pansera and Owen 2018). These debates increasingly take place through the emerging field of ‘innovation studies’ (Fagerberg and Verspagen 2009). Yet beyond these nuanced academic debates, innovation has taken on a life of its own – serving as what Benoît Godin describes as ‘a panacea for every social problem’ (2015, 8). As he argues, ‘Innovation has an attractive and unifying force because it has legitimacy and authority and is an incontestable value or ideology. Innovation itself is the criterion of judgment: Action is undertaken in the name of innovation’ (2015, 3).

As one of the pioneers of the information age, Bill Gates has long been at the forefront of promoting a specific approach to innovation – one that centers on state support for basic research and the construction of legal infrastructures to support privatization of the technologies developed from such research BMGF. His initial software programs, for example, drew on technological advances made through research by the US Department of Defense. Prior to Gates, in fact, there was a significant debate over whether the code in software could be privately owned; the free and open-source software movement promoted the free sharing of software code as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable good (Kelty 2008). However, Gates actively sought to extend intellectual property rights and other patent protections to software, which he argued was necessary for technology innovation. He was a key contributor to the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works, which recommended amending national intellectual property laws to include software, which Congress did in the early 1980s. This reliance on public funds for technology innovation and their privatization through intellectual property rights is what Mariana Mazzucato describes as ‘the most modern form of rent-seeking’ – a process through which ‘risks in the innovation economy are socialized, while the rewards are privatized’ (2018, 191).

By the 1990s, Gates was the richest man in the world. However, he was also lambasted as a monopolist and technology pariah. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared that ‘People hate Microsoft more than they hate the government’ (quoted in McKenzie and Shughart 1998, 166). Gates turned to philanthropy at the height of the US government’s pursuit of Microsoft for both anti-competitive practices and worker misclassification. As a philanthropist, Gates has translated his vision of innovation into new domains of non-capitalist value relations and public goods. He founded the BMGF with his ex-wife and serves as co-chair of the Foundation. In 2008, at the height of the global food and financial crisis, Gates provided a roadmap for promoting innovation as a way of restoring global capitalism. In Time Magazine he argued that what was needed to address the crisis was ‘to bring far more people into the system – capitalism – that has done so much good in the world.’ To do so, he explains, ‘we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.’ Through his philanthropy, Gates has been able to transform his image from one of the most loathed corporate executives to what New York Times columnist Timothy Egan (2020) describes as ‘lavender-sweatered Mister Rogers,’ an altruistic global leader.

From this unique position, Gates has articulated innovation as a silver bullet, a principal for ameliorating inequality and producing economic growth. He contends that problems such as climate change, low educational attainment, public health and food insecurity can all be solved through technological advancement. He articulated this philosophy to a Rolling Stone interviewer in 2014, explaining that ‘our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn’t because we didn’t have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing – electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important – I’m not taking anything away from that – but innovation is the real driver of progress’ (Goodell 2014). Gates sees states’ primary role as incentivizing technological development and the entrepreneurial spirit of individuals by funding research and development, protecting proprietary intellectual property rights, and subsidizing markets for new technologies. He has sought to demonstrate this approach through his philanthropy, which has become the paradigmatic model of philanthrocapitalism (McGoey 2015).

The Gates Foundation has a multitude of programs, but Bill Gates has personally promoted this approach to innovation within three of the Foundation’s core grantmaking programs: education in the United States, global health, and global agricultural development.⁶ In each of these fields, the Gates Foundation has pursued two primary objectives: (1) funding new technologies, either through grants or investments; and (2) engaging in communications campaigns and policy advocacy to create an enabling policy framework that encourages adoption of new technologies. As he described on his GatesNotes blog, which is subtitled ‘Accelerating innovation with leadership,’ ‘When we innovate, we create millions of jobs, we build the companies that lead the world, we are healthier, and we make our lives more productive. And these benefits transcend borders, powering improvements in lives around the world. Our global culture of innovation has been most successful at those moments when science, technology, and great leadership come together to create miracles that improve modern life’ (Gates 2016).

In each of the three areas of the Foundation’s philanthropic portfolio, observers have raised significant concerns related to Gates’ technology-centric approach, his lack of consultation with affected communities, and the Foundation’s aggressive advocacy for public policies that support its own approach. In the United States, the Foundation’s work in education has been especially notorious for its consistent failures, which have not only upended students’ lives, but also drained public educational funding (see Ravitch 2013). More recently, the aggressive push by the Gates Foundation to promote the COVAX facility of the World Health Organization to develop COVID-19 vaccines over more equitable initiatives has enabled vaccine inequality and protection of intellectual property rights over publicly-funded vaccines. Yet while examples in the fields of education and public health reveal the inequalities that Gates’ approach to innovation often reproduces, it is within the context of agricultural development that the racialized meanings and continuities between the ideologies of innovation and improvement can be most clearly recognized.

BMGF and global agricultural development

The BMGF began its program in Global Development in 2006. The Foundation began to get involved in issues related to food systems earlier through its work on nutrition and public health. In 2002, it helped to launch Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). The next year, it began funding Golden Rice, a genetically modified crop that was first developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for the Philippines. By 2006, it launched a large-scale program focused on agricultural development and founded the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) with the Rockefeller Foundation. Today, the Gates Foundation’s Global Development program focuses primarily on Africa. It has now spent nearly $6 billion on its agricultural development programs, focusing on market-centered, technology-driven solutions to agricultural development (GRAIN 2021). As the former Deputy Director of agricultural development at BMGF explained, ‘Our approach to improving lives at scale embodies the concept of catalytic philanthropy, which seeks to identify market and government failures and address those gaps. Since our inception, we have focused on supporting the provision of international public goods and on catalyzing the invention of innovative, high-leverage solutions’ (Pingali 2012).

Through its funding and policy advocacy in the field of global agricultural development, the Gates Foundation recalibrates the ideology of improvement through three dimensions of its approach to innovation – funding the development of proprietary technologies and knowledge production in the Global North; lobbying for regulatory reform that institutionalize liberal intellectual property rights through policy advocacy and programs that stimulate demand for proprietary technologies; and reforming international institutions to naturalize this global order. Each of these dimensions, I argue, serve to (re)construct racialized regimes of ownership in the information age.

The supremacy of Northern knowledge

Like the ideology of improvement, which assigned greater value to English practices of land use to justify European expansion and colonial appropriation, the ideology of innovation attributes greater value to Northern forms of scientific expertise to legitimate the export of proprietary technologies to the Global South. Gates deploys this ideology of innovation in his advocacy and funding for a ‘second’ Green Revolution on the African continent. In doing so, Gates builds on the first Green Revolution, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in the mid-twentieth century to expand cereal production as well as pacify rural classes and threats to the capitalist order during the Cold War (Patel 2013). The first Green Revolution exported American agricultural science – rooted in a vision of dominating nature – to countries in Latin America and South Asia where they claimed no agricultural science existed (Perkins 1997; Shepherd 2005).

The Green Revolution, from its start in the 1950s, was rooted in racialized, settler-colonial agricultural practices and knowledge. In his analysis of the Rockefeller-run Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP), Aaron Eddens (2017) describes how the Program collected indigenous landrace varieties of maize, which were then distributed to American seed companies and international research institutions for the development of commercial varieties. He describes how the Program’s ‘extensive efforts to collect, catalogue and distribute hundreds of varieties of maize relied upon racial logics in which whiteness was equated with the ability to control nature, and indigeneity was viewed as ‘not yet’ developed and thus incapable of managing nature’ (3).

The Gates-funded second Green Revolution reproduces these racialized and capitalist logics of the Green Revolution. Like the first wave of the Green Revolution, it too is rooted in an approach to agricultural development that exports Western models of commercial agricultural production and seeks to deepen dependence on proprietary agricultural inputs. However, Gates has intensified the top-down nature of this process. In her analysis of the Gates Foundation’s organizational culture, Rachel Schurman describes how the Gates Foundation has adopted the corporate culture from which its personnel are drawn. She explains how ‘the Agricultural Development program became populated by individuals who applied their business thinking and analytical skills to ‘fixing’ rural Africa and rural Africans’ (2018, 181). Program staff of the Gates Foundation are drawn from corporations and academia of the world’s wealthiest countries. Schurman argues that they have developed a culture of ‘managing up’ to the expectation and desires of their boss, Bill Gates, rather than attending to contextual knowledge of those whom they seek to assist – small-scale food producers. As she explains, ‘Aside from possessing little experiential knowledge of a smallholder farmer’s realities, the fact that these individuals feel compelled to impress the foundation’s leadership leads them to focus on what are acceptable ways of thinking in Seattle rather than in a Tanzanian village’ (2018, 183).

The Foundation’s approach to innovation is primarily oriented around the export of Northern techno-science, particularly agricultural biotechnology. This is reflected in its distribution of funding. One analysis of the Foundation’s agricultural grants between 2003 and 2020 found that 47% of all the Gates Foundation’s agricultural development funding goes to research institutions, most of which are based in the United States and Europe (GRAIN 2021). In addition, more than 20% has been disbursed to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an international organization consisting of fifteen centers that was founded at the height of the Green Revolution. The Gates Foundation has not only funded particular controversial CGIAR programs, such as the controversial Golden Rice program, drought tolerant varieties of maize for Africa, and biofortification, but it has also sought to reshape the entire CGIAR system. The Gates Foundation joined the Board of CGIAR in 2010 and has since spearheaded a reform to centralize the organization. This initiative has raised concerns from civil society because of Gates’ focus on Green Revolution technologies and has also generated opposition from countries and CGIAR programs in the global South.⁷ At the UN Climate Change Conference in 2021, Gates announced an additional $315 million in funding to CGIAR for ‘climate-smart’ agriculture, as part of a broader initiative, the ‘Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate’ which will focus almost exclusively on technological solutions to climate change through public-private partnerships (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2021). Of the remaining funding, less than twenty percent is directed to organizations based on the African continent (GRAIN 2021).

Like the MAP program during the first wave of the Green Revolution, Gates also funds an extensive network of seed and genetic resource collection. In addition to funding the CGIAR system, which maintains the largest collection of biodiversity through its Genebank platform, the Gates Foundation has funded the collection of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture through the ‘Securing the Biological Basis of Agriculture’ program of the CropTrust (Halewood et al. 2020). In addition, the Gates Foundation has provided the funding for GeneSys, ‘a global web portal bringing together different genebank databases with the aim of eventually providing a one-stop shop for potential users of conserved germplasm.’⁸ The Foundation’s more recent support for the digital sequencing of plant genetic resources have led some civil society organizations to raise concerns that the Foundation is supporting the commercialization of the knowledge embedded in plant genetic resources without proper consent (Navdanya International 2020).

Gates’ support for research institutions in the Global North and proprietary technologies such as genetically modified seeds, gene drives, and gene editing reflects his belief that innovation will come largely from the corporate sector. As he remarked in his 2008 Time article, ‘It is mainly corporations that have the skills to make technological innovations work for the poor. To make the most of those skills, we need more creative capitalism: an attempt to stretch the reach of market forces so that more companies can benefit from doing work that makes more people better off’ (Kiviat and Gates 2008). For Gates, innovation is thus a framework that attributes higher social and economic value to Northern and proprietary forms of knowledge, even as the plant genetic resources on which Northern actors depend are extracted primarily from communities in the global South that have developed these resources over generations based on local and indigenous knowledge.

Regulatory reform and intellectual property protection

Like the ideology of improvement, the ideology of innovation is centrally concerned with the extension of private property rights. However, whereas improvement assigned juridical personhood and property-owning capacity based on contingent visions of physical labor and cultivation of the natural world, innovation assigns value and thereby property rights to those that engage in intellectual labor and produce information about nature in ways that can be alienated and enclosed through intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights were developed to incentivize innovation and creation, and thereby grant limited monopoly rights to novel inventions. However, that which is recognized as novel and innovative is highly contingent on recognizing the value of those claiming creatorship. As Lilly Irani describes in her ethnography of social entrepreneurs in India, ‘those who pulled off the performance of innovation had to do enormous cultural work to establish the uniqueness and then authenticity of their productions’ (Irani 2019, 175). Critical intellectual property scholar, Anjali Vats, suggests that this is because ‘embedded in understandings of Romantic creatorship are intersectionally inflected racial and colonial presuppositions about the value of white male knowledge and the value of people of color knowledge’ (2020, 6). Science and technology scholars have repeatedly shown that the recognition of what constitutes a novel technology or innovation is intertwined with racial assumptions about creatorship (Oldenziel 1999; Fouché 2006; Irani 2019).

In the context of food and agriculture, despite the fact that most biodiversity and plant genetic resources are in the Global South, most patents and intellectual property rights over agricultural technologies and plant genetic resources are held in the Global North. As Gates and other actors mobilize the ideology of innovation to extend intellectual property rights across the Global South, they reproduce racial regimes of ownership over knowledge. Indeed, across the African continent, the Gates Foundation and its grantees mobilize the ideology of innovation to promote regulatory reform to protect intellectual property rights to facilitate the development and marketing of proprietary technologies that will ‘modernize’ underdeveloped economies. To do so, they draw on two strategies. First, the Gates Foundation and its grantees directly promote the institutionalization of the intellectual property regime embedded within a network of transnational legal mechanisms, such as the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and other international treaties aimed at commercializing seed systems and the recognition of plant breeders’ rights (Pechlaner 2012). Second, they seek to stimulate demand for proprietary technologies by financing the development of these technologies and facilitating public-private partnerships to encourage the adoption of commercial inputs.

The Gates Foundation-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) works to promote both these goals. Founded in 2006 with the Rockefeller Foundation, the BMGF has provided AGRA with $638 million dollars, about two-thirds of its total budget (GRAIN 2021). AGRA was founded on the premise that the Green Revolution had ‘missed’ the African continent. Recognizing some of the problems of the first wave of the Green Revolution, Gates and Rockefeller argued that the ‘new’ green revolution would need to be ‘doubly green’ by focusing on smallholders and more sustainable forms of agriculture (Conway 1998). Over time, the programs of AGRA have changed, but its basic strategy has remained consistent.

To promote the first goal of expanding protections for intellectual property rights, AGRA engages in policy advocacy. Between 2006 and 2015, AGRA’s Program for Africa’s Seed Systems lobbied governments to liberalize and commercialize the seed sector (AGRA 2017). It promoted changing state legislation in line with the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV). While UPOV has gone through several revisions since it was first developed in 1961, its 1991 framework is particularly restrictive, serving primarily to expand the protection of plant breeders’ rights and limit the ability of farmers from selling their saved seeds (Kloppenburg 2004; Peschard and Randeria 2020). Despite its restrictive nature, AGRA has actively pursued regulatory reform in line with model offered by UPOV 1991 (Aijuka et al. 2021).⁹

In addition to directly lobbying for protecting intellectual property rights, Gates has funneled significant resources into the development of proprietary technologies developed for the African continent. Though AGRA itself does not promote genetically modified seeds, the Gates Foundation spends significant resources on developing and promoting agricultural biotechnology. First, it funds research and development for these crops.¹⁰ The Foundation has funded the development of genetically modified cowpeas, pigeon peas, sweet potatoes, cassava, bananas, sorghum, maize, and rice. These crops have a variety of traits. For example, the Gates Foundation has funded bananas enhanced with Vitamin A to address micronutrient deficiencies’ as well as bananas that resist soil pathogens. Second, it funds organizations on the African continent that lobby governments to adopt permissive biosafety standards to enable the commercial production and sale of agricultural biotechnology. Between 2006 and 2020, the Gates Foundation committed $172.1 million to the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) based in Nairobi – ’the single most important, pan-African institution working to ensure that GM crops can and will be used on the continent’ (Schurman 2017, 442). AATF works in twenty-three countries across sub-Saharan Africa to facilitate partnerships for the sharing of proprietary GM technologies on the African continent, engages in policy advocacy to promote new agricultural technologies, and encourages public demand for biotechnology. AATF has received almost half of all funding that went to African-based organizations (‘Money Flows’ 2020). Third, the Gates Foundation has worked to set up a global network of ‘science communicators’ to promote acceptance of agricultural biotechnology. In 2014, Gates funded the establishment of the Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS) with a $5.6 million grant ‘to promote access to scientific innovation as a means of enhancing food security, improving environmental sustainability and raising the quality of life globally.’ CAS funds a class of fellows each year who are provided with training and a platform to promote biotechnology in their home countries. Since 2017, Gates has given an additional $16.4 million CAS. Through these fellows, ‘BMGF has strategically inserted itself in key institutions across a variety of sectors, both inside and outside Africa, to increase the acceptability of its desired policy ends’ (AGRA Watch 2020, 5).

AGRA also seeks to stimulate demand and access to commercial agricultural inputs (notably seeds and fertilizer) by funding and facilitating public-private partnerships. AGRA has worked to expand agro-dealer networks across the target countries in which it operates as well as encourages public expenditure on input subsidy programs. These subsidies and the agro-dealer networks are intended to provide a form of extension and knowledge transfer to local communities. Thus, rather than focusing on farmer field schools that promote co-learning, AGRA emphasizes downward technology transfer through the marketing of commercial inputs and proprietary technologies.

The Gates Foundation refused to release an evaluation of its programs until external research demonstrated that these input-subsidy programs not only offered limited gains in productivity, but also failed to improve farmer welfare (African Centre for Biodiversity 2016; Wise 2017; Jayne et al. 2018). In fact, there has been an increase of 30% of malnutrition in the countries that AGRA has targeted (Wise 2020). These findings were confirmed by AGRA’s own internal evaluations which were released in mid-2021 (Aijuka et al. 2021).

Out of its total portfolio of grantmaking, the Gates Foundation provides little direct funding to African farmers and organizations. Instead, its approach to ‘catalytic philanthropy’ leverages its influence to marshal public resources as well as foreign aid toward its own vision rooted in the ideology of innovation. The BMGF has therefore sparked a significant countermovement to the Green Revolution on the African continent through the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). As one longtime activist in AFSA told a crowded Seattle auditorium, in 2014, ‘We see the Green Revolution as another form, another phase of colonialism that’s coming to take over the last parts of what is really African – our food, our land, and our sovereignty. We need people-to-people solidarity, not corporate takeover.’

Reforming multilateral institutions

The final feature of the ideology of innovation operates at the global level. Just like the ideology of improvement, the ideology of innovation is also being deployed to transform the international order. As described earlier, the ideology of improvement was embedded into international law and the system of unequal integration that enabled the colonial domination of subaltern states through ‘differentiated modes of sovereignty’ from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century (Getachew 2020; Tzouvala 2020). While neoliberalism became the reigning ideology in the aftermath of decolonization, growing discontent with neoliberal inequalities has created threats to the legitimacy of the multinational corporations that are now the face of global capitalism. COVID-19 has further exposed the precarities and vulnerabilities created by neoliberalism. In response, powerful actors such as the World Economic Forum and Gates Foundation have increasingly called for new ‘institutional innovations’ in global food governance that not only legitimate their vision of private sector-led development, but also their leadership within international institutions (McMichael 2021).

The primary institutional innovation promoted by Northern states, corporations and their allies are ‘multistakeholder’ forms of governance (often described as ‘initiatives,’ ‘partnerships,’ or ‘platforms’). The concept of the ‘stakeholder’ was developed by management theorists who sought to reconceptualize the relationship between corporations, the state, and civil society as interdependent ‘creators’ of value (Freeman 1984). During the neoliberal era the concept of stakeholder management migrated from the boardroom to public policy. Command and control forms of state regulation were ‘rolled back,’ new forms of networked, multi-stakeholder governance were ‘rolled out’ that blurred the boundaries between public and private (Peck and Tickell 2002). Multi-stakeholderism has since become a proliferating form of governance promoted by powerful actors (Gleckman 2018). By drawing on the language of ‘inclusivity’ that was once mobilized by less powerful actors to assert their voices in policymaking, corporations and their allies have advocated for regulatory reconfigurations that include the private sector, civil society, and governments. More multistakeholder initiatives have proliferated in the context of food, agriculture, and mining than in any other sector (MSI Integrity 2017).

Empirical and theoretical scholarship suggest that multistakeholder forms of governance reproduce hierarchies of power and unequal integration by treating stakeholders as formally equal without addressing power asymmetries between actors (Cheyns 2011; Müller 2011; Cheyns and Riisgaard 2014). A recent survey of multistakeholder initiatives across sectors has found that they fail to protect human rights (MSI Integrity 2020). These empirical findings affirm arguments by critical theorists that multistakeholder governance operates as a form of neoliberal governmentality by ‘ground[ing] social relations in the economic rationality of markets’ (Shamir 2008, 4; Brown 2015). Yet despite these findings, powerful actors such as the Gates Foundation continue to promote multistakeholder arenas, partnerships, and forms of governance as a ‘win-win’ solution to address contentious conflicts (Canfield 2020).

The Gates Foundation has been at the forefront of promoting multistakeholder initiatives in the place of multilateral responses across all the areas in which it works (Seitz and Martens 2017). It has a long history of developing multistakeholder partnerships to promote public health (Birn 2014; Krattiger, Bombelles, and Jedrusik 2018). By emphasizing innovation as the primary value of global health governance, it has established several multistakeholder initiatives that incorporate the private sector directly in policymaking (Stevenson and Youde 2021). The result is not only the erosion of the state-centered framework of public multilateral governance, but also a changing agenda in which private-sector led technological solutions become the primary focus for global health governance. Perhaps the most significant example is the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 response. The Gates Foundation and its grantees were among the primary drivers of the establishment of the ACT Accelerator, a multistakeholder process that placed WHO’s COVID-19 response outside of its multilateral framework. The Foundation also took a leading role in vaccine development through the establishment of COVAX – the ACT Accelerator’s facility for vaccine development and distribution. Two Gates-funded organizations, the Global Vaccine Alliance and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, lead COVAX. Critics charge that the shift from the multilateral to the multistakeholder framework has resulted in a lack of transparency, which prevented many countries in the global South and civil society from meaningful participation (Patnaik 2021). Moreover, the COVAX facility’s protection of intellectual property rights at the expense of technology sharing, capacity building, and vaccine delivery has led to the inequitable delivery of vaccines (Amnesty International 2020).

Gates has established many multistakeholder partnerships in the context of food and agriculture. The first initiative that the Gates Foundation launched in the food and agricultural sector was the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). GAIN was initially planned to be a project of the Foundation, but it was founded during a Special Session of the UN General Assembly on Children in 2002 as a multistakeholder initiative with $50 million from the Gates Foundation. As Regina Moench-Pfanner and Marc Van Ameringen explain, ‘the overarching founding vision for the organization viewed the international institutional framework of the day as deeply fragmented, uncoordinated, and based on delivery models that were both inadequate to the magnitude of the need and inherently unsustainable. The vision held that it would be necessary to establish new institutional arrangements that would mobilize the energies and resources of the private sector, establish innovative public–private partnerships, and catalyze the adoption of new and sustainable delivery systems’ (2012, S375). Rather than working with existing multilateral institutions that had been dedicated to food and nutrition – such as the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition – the Gates Foundation chose to establish a new institution. GAIN promotes the Gates Foundation’s technology-driven approach to food fortification that favors the private sector over a more holistic approach to addressing children’s diets and agricultural development. Gates continued to provide additional funding through 2014, spending a total of $284 million on GAIN.

The Gates Foundation also funds another multistakeholder initiative to address nutrition – Scaling-Up Nutrition (SUN). The SUN ‘Movement,’ as it is called, was established with financial backing from the Gates Foundation in 2010 under the aegis of the UN Secretary General. Though the SUN Movement avoids the language of partnership, it is organized as a multistakeholder initiative that aims to develop country-led programs and policymaking to address nutrition. In its early years it legitimated itself through its ‘innovative and informal structure’ (Lie 2021). SUN’s ‘Lead Group’ is composed of multinational corporations that promote market-driven responses to nutrition. Like GAIN, it has been criticized for focusing on technology-driven quick-fixes that favor corporations and shifting the global agenda to ‘short-term medicalized nutrition interventions’ (Michéle, Rundall, and Prato n.d., 2; Schuftan and Holla 2012; Clapp and Scrinis 2017). Moreover, what has been clear in the context of SUN is that the multistakeholder model is designed to evade issues of conflicts of interest, by framing all stakeholders as having an interest in the governance of food and nutrition. In her analysis of the SUN Movement’s challenges to legitimate itself as an institution of global nutrition governance, Lie concludes that,

The fact that SUN legitimizes itself as something it is not, is misleading and arguably contributes to reinforce existing power asymmetries within nutrition governance. Not only does SUN gloss over the fact that its governance remains dominated by powerful Western donors and UN agencies, it also diverts attention away from how it has contributed to opening up national and global nutrition governance to private sector actors – whose interests are not necessarily in line with public nutrition goals or broader societal values like human rights and equity. (2021, 249)

SUN offers yet another example in which multistakeholder partnerships have been constructed to enable a ‘regime shift’ to institutions and arenas in which private actors have more power to set the agenda (Helfer 2004).

The Gates Foundation together with the World Economic Forum have continued to promote ‘innovative’ forms of multistakeholder governance to address problems of hunger and malnutrition at the global scale. The most recent example is the UN Food Systems Summit, which was initiated by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, six months after forming a partnership with the World Economic Forum in 2019. Guterres named Dr. Agnes Kalibata, President of AGRA, as his Special Envoy to lead the Summit. Envisioned as an inclusive and multistakeholder process, civil society organizations vigorously critiqued the Summit for failing to provide opportunities for meaningful participation by self-organized social movements and its lack of transparency and accountability.¹¹ Critics have suggested that its ultimate goal – like other multistakeholder initiatives – is to override multilateral institutions now responsible for food and agricultural governance, such as the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), replacing them with a new model of market-driven mode of governance that legitimates the corporate sector (Montenegro de Wit, Canfield, et al. 2021).

The ideology of innovation thus plays a transformative role at the global level. In responding to neoliberal discontent, the Gates Foundation has promoted the reconstitution of global governance through the multistakeholder format. This new arrangement legitimizes the participation of the private sector in public governance under the banner of ‘inclusivity’ and enables the private sector to dominate these institutions by failing to address inequalities of power within these arenas. Furthermore, the reform of multilateral institutions through multistakeholderism erodes key principles of accountability inherent in state-centered forms of regulation and multilateral governance and paradoxically marginalizes less powerful voices through the language of ‘inclusivity.’ In effect, ‘innovative’ forms of multistakeholder governance effectively transform political institutions into technical processes of negotiation that serve to legitimate market-driven solutions to global problems.

Conclusions

The ideology of innovation has proliferated as the ‘triple crisis’ of hunger, malnutrition, and climate change grows increasingly apparent (Swinburn et al. 2019). Although peasant and social movements have been sounding the alarm for decades, powerful actors are now facing a legitimacy crisis that neoliberal discourse alone cannot solve. Hegemonic actors in global food governance are therefore turning to the ideology of innovation in a bid to reassert their authority. Indeed, Gates and other powerful actors are no longer simply using the language of innovation to promote agricultural biotechnology or digitalized agriculture, they are mobilizing it as an ideology of social and ecological transformation through technological development in response to more radical calls for agroecology and climate justice.

The mobilization of ‘innovation’ to suppress calls for agroecological transition was clear during recent negotiations within the CFS. There the United States and other powerful agricultural exporters demanded that policy recommendations on agroecology be reframed as ‘Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition.’ In a statement issued at the conclusion of the negotiations, the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism of the CFS explained that ‘the process became completely distant from our initial proposal … In the policy recommendations, agroecology is combined with exactly opposite approaches, forcing a combined discourse.’ This ‘combined discourse’ was a result of the fact that innovation became the primary evaluative framework for transformation. Although civil society organizations and social movements struggled to resignify the meaning of innovation in order to achieve recognition of their own agroecological practices as innovative, they faced powerful actors with vast material resources that sought to impose their own meanings of innovation in the process (Anderson and Maughan 2021). Given the racialized and modernist meanings embedded within the dominant ideology of innovation, social movements faced significant difficulties in achieving recognition of agroecology as an ‘innovative’ practice.

Attending to the racial dimensions of this ideology is critical. The ideology of innovation marginalizes peasants and Indigenous peoples by discrediting the knowledge they have developed through their relations with nature. Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002) who describes racial capitalism as a technology of antirelationality, Jodi Melamed describes racial capitalism as the ‘production of social separateness – the disjoining or deactivating of relations between human beings (and humans and nature) – needed for capitalist expropriation to work’ (2015, 78). In the context of food systems, severing the relations between food producers and nature not only enables the alienation and commodification of land and knowledge, it operates as a tool of racialization to legitimize the expansion of capitalism. As Melamed explains, the expansion of capitalism requires ‘loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires’ (2015, 77). The racial regimes of ownership on which capitalism is based also ‘require continual renewal and reinstantiation to prevail over other ways of being and living’ (Bhandar 2018, 9). The ideology of innovation, which Gates has articulated through his work on the African continent, operates to renew these racial regimes of ownership in the information age. Indeed, the ideology of innovation recognizes only certain forms of knowledge as innovative and only certain subjects as value creators thereby justifying capitalist expansion into the agricultural knowledge economy.

For food sovereignty movements this raises a dilemma. As they seek to frame their own knowledge practices as innovative, they risk unintentionally reproducing the racialized assumptions embedded in this discourse. Activists and scholars have therefore called to decolonize the concept of innovation and creatorship. Anjali Vats, for example, argues that decolonizing intellectual property law requires ‘deracializing knowledge production as well as conceptions of citizenship, nation, and personhood, through the embrace of language and practices that are delinked from modernity’ (2020, 198). Through the framework of agroecology, food sovereignty activists are already seeking to do just that. As social movements emphasized in the ‘African Response to the UN Food Systems Summit,’ ‘Our vision is grounded in family and community farming and peasant agroecology, sustainable small-scale fisheries, and pastoralism, going far beyond a package of techniques to put the control of seeds biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of the peoples who feed the world.’¹²

Agroecology is premised not on proprietary technologies, but rather relies on local, indigenous, and traditional knowledge shared through horizontal co-learning among food producers as well as scientists and academics (‘Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology’ 2015; Wezel et al. 2020). By embracing a plurality of knowledges, agroecology works to decolonize modernist and mechanistic embedded in the ideologies of improvement and innovation. As Michael Pimbert describes agroecology is a ‘a radical shift away from the existing top-down and increasingly corporate-controlled research system to an approach which devolves more responsibility and decision-making power to farmers, indigenous peoples, food workers, consumers and citizens for the production of social and ecological knowledge’ (2006, x).

Scholars and practitioners are increasingly elaborating agroecology as an anti-racist practice. As Blain Snipstal, a farmer and food sovereignty leader, has pointed out, the industrial agricultural system was built upon ‘the dispossession and forced resettlement of native Americans and Africans; the exploitation of enslaved peoples (Africans); the widespread use of monocultures; and the use of racism and white supremacy as the aids to create social justification and stratification of such a system’ (Snipstal 2015, 169). Given its role as a framework of division and separation, racism continues to legitimate stratification, racialization, and colonial expropriation. By contrast, agroecology offers a framework to challenge the racialized meanings embedded in the ideologies of improvement and innovation as a holistic science, a social movement, and a practice of connection. As scholars and practitioners develop agroecology as a practice of care, anti-racism, and political sovereignty (Figueroa 2015; White 2018; Montenegro de Wit 2021), they are advancing a powerful framework through which to decolonize and deracialize the ideology of innovation.

Acknowledgements

The research from this paper is drawn from a long engagement with the organization AGRA Watch. It was prepared for the Panel ‘Contending Forces in Food System Governance: Globalized Corporate Supply Chains vs Re-localized Food Systems. Can COVID Help to Tip the Balance?’ at the International Studies Association Conference in 2020. The author thanks Nora McKeon and Phil McMichael for substantive comments on the previous drafts as well as the comments of two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Canfield

Matthew Canfield is Assistant Professor of Law & Society and Law & Development at the Van Vollenhoven Institute of Leiden Law School. His research examines the intersection of global governance and human rights in the context of global food security. His book, Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Transnational Governance from Below, was published by Stanford University Press in Spring 2022.

Notes

1 This figure was calculated based on the Gates Foundation’s Committed Grants database. See: (https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants) [Accessed 11 January 2022].

2 Recordings of the People's Autonomous Response to the UN Food Systems Summit can be found at https://www.foodsystems4people.org [Accessed 10 January 2022].

3 Similar ideologies motivated the Rockefeller Foundation when it served as a key intellectual and financial underwriter of the Green Revolution (Smith 2009; Nally and Taylor 2015).

4 The enclosure of knowledge builds on previous forms of dispossession. However, territorial enclosures have not abated; land grabs have proliferated over the past fifteen years (Zoomers 2010; Borras et al. 2020). Moreover, proprietary technologies can also lead to dispossessing small-scale food producers from their land by enrolling them in debt. The enclosure of knowledge is deeply dependent on and related to land, but it is also focused on information as a new site of accumulation.

5 Tom’s speech was delivered on 6 February 2020 at the US Department of Agriculture ‘Agricultural Outlook Forum.’ The full text was removed from the Department’s website, but can now be found here: https://taa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Kip_Tom-Ag-Outlook-Speech.pdf

6 Much of Gates’ funding for climate related innovation comes from his private investment fund, Breakthrough Energy.

7 See IPES-Food’s open letter to the CGIAR: http://www.ipes-food.org/pages/OneGGIAR [Accessed 11 January 2022]

8 ‘Two contributions to an integrated, global, accession-level information system for ex situ conservation’ Compilation of Submissions Received from Contracting Parties, Non-Contracting Parties and International Relevant Organizations. First Meeting of the Expert Consultation on the Global Information System on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. 7–8 January 2015. (https://www.fao.org/3/be678e/be678e.pdf) [Accessed 11 January 2022].

9 Recent research has suggested that powerful national elites on the African continent may avoid intellectual property rights reform given their politicized nature. Instead they may seek to exercise control over agricultural markets through other channels that generate less public contestation (Van Dycke 2021).

10 BMGF has also funded some national agricultural institutions. However, as Matthew Schnurr (2019) has documented, this earmarked funding has also changed the priorities and focuses of national agricultural research organizations because it is aimed at generating expertise in agricultural biotechnology.

11 The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) have sent numerous letters to the UN Secretary General and the Chair of the CFS articulating their grievances. The most recent of these was sent in February 2021. See: http://www.csm4cfs.org/letter-csm-coordination-committee-cfs-chair/ [Accessed 11 January 2022]

12 ‘Africa Response to the UN Food Systems Summit’ 12 August 2021. (https://www.foodsystems4people.org/africa-responds-to-the-un-food-systems-summit/) [Accessed 11 January 2022].