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ABSTRACT
From the ‘Green Revolution’ to the ‘Gene Revolution’, the ultimate aim of promoting new technologies on a colossal scale is to make agricultural inputs and outputs essential commodities, create the market-dependent agri-food system, and bring all farming operations into the capitalist fold. There is a plethora of literature on the capitalist strategies of the diffusion of new agricultural technologies, but little emphasis is placed on the motives and modus operandi of philanthropic organizations and their relationship with the state and corporate forces in promoting new seeds and agro-chemicals. This article critically examines the continuity of hegemonic and dispossessive strategies of philanthropic organizations (such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in establishing the philanthropic-corporate-state complex to control and exploit primary agricultural producers and their genetic wealth across the globe.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I thank Henry Veltmeyer and Paul Bowles for their encouragement. I am also grateful to Michael Gismondi, Pavan Kumar Malreddy and Chaitanya Chekkilla for several fruitful discussions about these and related aspects.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In this paper, I frequently use the geopolitical terms ‘North’ and ‘South’ and ‘Third World’. When I refer to global North, it includes industrial countries of Europe and North America and three countries south of the equator, China, Australia and New Zealand. Similarly, the global South includes a group of the less-developed or underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which are also collectively called the Third World. In critical development studies, the term ‘Third World’ (a Cold war term) often refers to the diversified collection of colonies, semi-colonies, and neo-colonies that are part of the world capitalist system (Berberoglu, Citation1992, pp. 169–170; Petras, Citation1981). Currently, in critical globalization studies, the ‘global South’ and the ‘Third World’ are considered as ‘largely equivalent’ terms (see, Dirlik, Citation2007). I also use these two terms interchangeably.
2 See Gates (Citation2011).
3 https://www.ft.com/content/dacd1f84-41bf-11e3-b064-00144feabdc0. Accessed on June 23, 2018.
4 See http://www.cgiar.org/research/res_genebanks.html. Accessed on 23 February, 2004.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ashok Kumbamu
Ashok Kumbamu is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Ethics at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, USA. His research interests include bioethics, science and technology studies, environmental sociology, development studies, knowledge translation, globalization, and qualitative methods. His recent work has appeared in Development, International Social Science Journal, Community Development Journal, and Capitalism Nature Socialism.