The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the necro-populationism of ‘climate-smart’ agriculture

Abstract

Agricultural and reproductive technologies ostensibly represent opposing poles within discourses on population growth: one aims to ‘feed the world,’ while the other seeks to limit the number of mouths there are to feed. There is, however, an urgent need to critically interrogate new discourses linking population size with climate change and promoting agricultural and reproductive technologies as a means to address associated problems. This article analyses the specific discourses produced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in relation to these ‘population technologies’ and ‘climate-smart’ agriculture in particular. Drawing on concepts and approaches developed by Black, postcolonial and Marxist feminists including intersectionality, racial capitalism, social reproduction, and reproductive and environmental justice, we explore how within these discourses, the ‘geo-populationism’ of the BMGF’s climate-smart agriculture initiatives, like the ‘demo-populationism’ of its family planning interventions, mobilises neoliberal notions of empowerment, productivity and innovation. Not only do these populationist discourses reinforce neoliberal framings and policies which extend existing regimes of racialised and gendered socio-spatial inequality, but they also underwrite global capital accumulation through new science and technologies. The BMGF’s representations of its climate-smart agriculture initiatives offer the opportunity to understand how threats of climate change are mobilised to reanimate and repackage the Malthusian disequilibrium between human fertility and agricultural productivity. Drawing upon our readings of these discourses, we critically propose the concept of ‘necro-populationism’ to refer to processes that target racialised and gendered populations for dispossession, toxification, slow death and embodied violence, even while direct accountability for the effects of these changes is dispersed. We also identify a need for further research which will not only trace the ways in which the BMGF’s global policies are materialised, spatialised, reproduced and reoriented by multiple actors in local contexts, but will also recognise and affirm the diverse forms through which these ‘necro-populationist’ processes are disavowed and resisted.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers, and Anne Hendrixson for her very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Amanda Shaw is an associate member of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics (LSE). She recently completed her PhD in Gender Studies at LSE on the intersecting politics of agrifood labour in Hawaii. Her research interests include questions of race/gender and migration in relation to agriculture, food work and settler colonialism/colonialities in the Pacific and North America.

Kalpana Wilson is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London. Her research explores questions of race/gender, rural labour, neoliberalism, reproductive rights and reproductive justice in international development, with a particular focus on South Asia. She is the author of Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice, Zed Books, 2012 and co-editor (with Sumi Madhok and Anne Phillips) of Gender, Agency and Coercion, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Notes

1 We refer here not only to the term coined by Crenshaw (1989) but to the much longer history of praxis developed in the context of Black women's struggles in relation to race, gender, class and sexuality in North America and Europe. More recently feminist critics have noted the appropriation of the concept in ways which displace a focus on racism (Collins and Bilge 2016); legitimise 'funding driven agendas…for the Global South' (Menon 2015:41); and marginalise structural critiques of capitalism (Salem 2016).

2 BMGF funds go to several prominent media organisations, such as the Guardian, ABC and All Africa (Global Justice Now 2016, p. 15). Indeed, such funding of media organisations appears to be raising increasing ethical questions (see American Press Institute 2016 for more).

3 For example, in Arcos Dorados, a major franchise holder for MacDonalds (Global Justice Now 2016, p. 22).

4 Recipients of BMGF grants in this area include the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (Trieste, Italy) (13 million USD over nine grants), the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (100 million USD) and The Queensland University of Technology (14 million over six grants), the John Innes Centre in Norwich (10 million USD) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (Swindon, UK) (8 million USD) (Gates ‘Annual Report’).

5 Theorists of racial capitalism are among those who have explained how capitalism cannot exist without race and racialisation, which ‘enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires’ (Melamed 2015) on a global scale. Of particular relevance to BMGF discourses is Melamed’s insight that ‘contemporary racial capitalism deploys liberal and multicultural terms of inclusion to value and devalue forms of humanity differentially to fit the needs of reigning state-capital orders’ (Melamed 2015, p. 77).

6 In particular, in Africa through the Alliance for (a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and support for the International Fertiliser Development Centre. While nominally recognising seed diversity, AGRA has in fact lobbied heavily to change seed policies on the continent (SEC Filings 2015; Global Justice Now 2016). In 2017, AGRA received 200 million from BMGF  “to undertake agricultural interventions to increase the productivity and incomes of at least 30 million smallholder farming households, and use data, evidence and technical capacity to support African countries to trigger and sustain inclusive agriculture transformation” (Gates Foundation, ‘How we work’, n.d.).

7 Support for the extension of the “fertilizer supply chain^” has taken place through support for the African Fertiliser Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) through grants of at least 25 million USD.

8 Hydrocarbons form the basis of some active pesticide ingredients, while petroleum-based products are also used to facilitate spraying.

9 There are indications that the genetically modified versions of maize being promoted in Southern Africa have not been specifically developed for smallholders (ACB 2017) and thus may involve unsustainable increases in input costs such as certified seed, synthetic fertilizers and other infrastructure. Not only may such technologies be costly for small farmers (Fernandez-Cornejo et al. 2014, p. 13: Tandon 2010, Bonny 2014): in India, high costs have been associated with farmer indebtedness and subsequent suicides (Gruère and Sengupta 2011; Desmond 2016).

10 This mirrors the critique of the Gender Equality as Smart Economics approach which similarly focuses on integrating women into global labour markets without questioning the unequal terms on which this integration occurs (Chant and Sweetman 2012). As has been noted extensively, it is the unequal terms of this ‘integration’, rather than exclusion from global markets, which must be problematised (Taylor 2018, p. 16; Stone 2007, p.144; Taylor 2013; Akram-Lodhi 2013).

11 US-backed Green Revolution policies during the Cold War era had the explicit goal of ‘preventing a Red one’ in South Asia and Latin America; pesticides were simultaneously used in agricultural and military programmes (Vergès, 2017). They were accompanied by extensively funded ‘population control’ programmes (Rao, 1994) which were similarly informed by fears of a racially embodied threat to the existing distribution of resources, while intersecting in spatially diverse ways with elite nationalist projects relating to population and fertility in the Global South (see for example Hodges 2017; Briggs 2002). Both these forms of intervention arguably extended and reworked colonial forms of populationism.

12 Increased sterilisation abuses in India have been directly linked to the Indian government's commitments to get 48 million more women to use contraception by 2020 under the BMGF-led global Family Planning 2020 initiative (Human Rights Watch 2012; Singh 2014).