In Episode 2 of this podcast, Julie Guthman talked about how market-driven fixes and “techno-solucionist” approaches have fallen short of creating a fair and sustainable food system. In this episode, we turn to how these same ideas lie at the heart of modern philanthropy—initiatives that claim to fight food insecurity in the Global South.
To explore this, I invited Matthew Canfield. Matthew is a cultural anthropologist and socio-legal scholar whose work looks at the laws and governance structures shaping food security. His research sits at the crossroads of human rights, global governance, and environmental politics, and he pays particular attention to how grassroots movements and civil society groups use rights to influence the way food systems are organized.
While Matthew’s research spans a wide range of issues, our conversation today focuses on how the vision of philanthropists like Bill Gates is shaped by racialized assumptions—and how those assumptions reinforce patterns of racial capitalism and agrarian dispossession.
Hi Matthew, it’s great to have you on the podcast. To begin, could you introduce yourself and tell us about the focus of your research?
Hi Thomas, Thanks for having me. My background is in cultural anthropology and sociolegal studies, and my work really sits at the intersection of food system transformation and human rights.
For the past 15 years, I’ve been closely involved with transnational agrarian movements that are fighting for food sovereignty, their right to produce and consume their own food. My goal has been to understand the political and legal barriers to building more sustainable and equitable food systems, and how food sovereignty movements, small-scale producers, and Indigenous peoples are working to reorganize the legal, political, and economic structures to support their vision.
More recently, I’ve focused on one specific area: the role of digital technologies in agriculture. That includes mobile apps, remote sensing, and newer tools like machine learning and AI.
These technologies are being introduced with the promise of making agriculture more efficient. Right now, I’m studying what effects they have on small-scale food producers, and how those producers are mobilizing to make sure that the digital food systems emerging are not only efficient, but also sustainable and equitable. I’m especially interested in how they’re beginning to articulate new forms of digital practices and rights.
Among other topics, and that's how I learned about your work, you studied how the ideology of technology-driven innovation is promoted by philanthropists, often as a supposed solution to food insecurity. One of its main proponents is Bill Gates, who most people know as the co-founder of Microsoft and one of the richest people on the planet.
What is Bill Gates' vision or ideology for solving social and environmental issues, especially in relation to agriculture and food insecurity?
Bill Gates is a fascinating and important figure in global food systems, but also in global health and education in the United States.
He’s the world’s largest philanthropist, and his impact on food systems since 2006, when he began funding global agricultural systems, has been immense.
Gates is particularly interesting because in the 1990s, he was widely seen as a tech monopolist and pariah. He was universally criticized for the monopoly he sought to establish with Microsoft’s operating system. Around that time, he began moving into philanthropy, which transformed his reputation.
He shifted from being a global tech mogul to a global leader through his philanthropic work. Gates has been very explicit about his vision for what the foundation does.
It’s all centered on the idea that saving lives requires pushing for innovation for the poor while also increasing demand for it. Innovation is really at the core of everything the Gates Foundation does. You can see this across the foundation’s portfolio, whether funding vaccines and new global health technologies or new technologies in agriculture.
In agriculture specifically, Gates focuses on seed systems, the incorporation of agrochemicals, and synthetic fertilizers. Essentially, it’s about updating the technological fixes of the Green Revolution for a new era.
Of course, Gates is not alone. Innovation is promoted worldwide. The Canadian sociologist Benoit Godin has called it a panacea for almost every social problem. But Gates has a particular vision of innovation that he seeks to promote. It’s about technological innovation developed by private corporations in the global North.
He believes that innovation can really only be pursued by the private sector, and most of it comes through Western scientific knowledge. He also emphasizes innovation produced under proprietary legal protections.
We can think about innovation in two ways: culturally and legally.
Culturally, it promotes certain visions of what counts as innovation. Science and technology scholars have shown that what is recognized as a novel technology is often entwined with racialized assumptions about creatorship. To have something recognized as innovative, it often requires performance and validation in specific contexts. For example, an AI-based technology for detecting soil moisture might be widely recognized, whereas the embodied knowledge of peasant producers about soil microbes, fungi, earthworms, and other interrelations in the soil is less likely to be recognized. These Northern, corporate-developed ideas are prioritized as innovative.
Legally, Western law protects creators’ rights through intellectual property, giving them limited monopolies to control access to their knowledge. Gates has been central not only in promoting these technologies but also in shaping a policy environment that strengthens intellectual property, plant breeders’ rights, and other proprietary protections.
We have to see this in a global political economy context. Much production has been outsourced to the majority world, while the global North maintains economic control partly through intellectual property rights. I see Gates’ ideology of innovation as a contingent, very particular ideology, rooted in racialized assumptions and aimed at maintaining Northern control over the global economy.
You’ve mentioned a lot of topics that we’re going to explore in more detail. Can you start by explaining what you think are the main motivations for philanthropists like Bill Gates to get involved in agriculture, particularly in the Global South?
I don’t know Gates personally, so I can’t say exactly what his motivations are. But one thing that was clearly important in the early founding of the foundation was to change—or really, to launder—his reputation and assert influence on a global stage through his wealth and intelligence.
If we look back at how he aggressively sought to protect intellectual property rights, maintain a monopoly through the Windows operating system, and limit the free and open-source software movement, we can see patterns that also appear in his philanthropic work. His broader promotion of intellectual property rights gives us clues about how he operates in this sphere.
Right now, we’re confronting how men with extreme wealth are shaping global political and economic systems, and Gates was an early pioneer of this trend, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s. He has clearly sought to establish himself as a world leader.
In agriculture, one influential move for him was taking over the legacy of the Green Revolution, originally led by the Rockefeller Foundation. In the early 2000s, the Rockefeller Foundation sought to re-energize the Green Revolution, calling it “doubly green” by emphasizing sustainability—though we should question what that actually means.
Gates saw an opportunity to use his massive wealth to expand his global influence, building on the technology-focused approach of the earlier Green Revolution. This time, he rebranded it under his own name, funding, and reputation.
Philanthropy is already controversial for several reasons, and “philanthrocapitalism” is even more so, which is a term you use in your writing. Could you explain what you mean by philanthrocapitalism, and discuss its impacts and limitations?
Philanthrocapitalism is a relatively recent term that activists and scholars use to describe the integration of market-based strategies and methods into charitable giving, particularly by high-net-worth individuals.
One thing to note, though, is that philanthropy has always played a structural role in reproducing capitalism. We can look back to the oil moguls of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who played a major role in reshaping the corporate state and the development of liberal capitalism.
What really distinguishes philanthrocapitalism is its reliance on market-based methods—for example, the promotion of public-private partnerships as a way of addressing global challenges. In the context of food systems, this means that instead of promoting social equity through redistribution, problems like poverty are reframed as market opportunities. Critics argue that this constrains redistributive social change and exacerbates inequality.
For Gates, this approach is especially important because we’re in a moment of structural transformation in capitalism in terms of what we might call the regimes of accumulation, essentially, how capitalism is functioning. Increasingly, the focus is on digital technologies and technological solutions, which Gates knows best. If corporations alone were to bring their technologies into regions like Africa, where the Gates Foundation operates, they would likely fail. In fact, they already have—for instance, efforts to promote genetically modified crops in the global South have largely fallen flat.
But with the façade of altruism provided by the Gates Foundation, Gates plays a crucial role in enabling these markets.
Linsey McGoey, a leading scholar of philanthrocapitalism and the Gates Foundation, captures this dynamic well in her book There’s No Such Thing as a Free Gift. With immense funding comes expectations. In Gates’ case, those expectations often involve the introduction of new technologies as well as policy changes that create favorable conditions for corporations.
So philanthrocapitalism is central to what we’re currently seeing in agriculture: increasing corporate consolidation and growing corporate control across global food systems.
To better understand Bill Gates’s current influence on agriculture, I’d like to ask: what is his actual power and reach? Who listens to him, and why?
It’s really hard to overstate how influential Gates has become within the global agricultural ecosystem. That includes the private sector, governments, and international institutions—largely because he is one of the major players funding all of these actors.
Generally, if we think about the Gates Foundation in the context of global food systems, it pursues two primary objectives. The first is funding technologies, either through grants or investments. It’s important to note that the Gates Foundation is just one part of what Gates does. In addition to philanthropic funding, he has a number of venture capital initiatives, particularly related to climate change.
The second objective is engaging in communication campaigns and policy advocacy to create an enabling policy framework for the adoption of new technologies and innovation. These two strategies operate simultaneously.
For example, on the African continent—which has been the main focus of Gates’ interventions—the foundation helped found the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006 and provided it with $638 million, roughly two-thirds of its budget.
Since 2006, the Gates Foundation has devoted about $6 billion to addressing food insecurity, again primarily in Africa. More recently, he has pledged an additional $200 billion for the continent. These are immense sums of money, and they help explain why Gates is able to fund almost every major actor within the agricultural development ecosystem, allowing him to exert influence in many ways.
One major organization that he funds is the CGIAR system, the global system of agricultural research. The Gates Foundation has pledged over $1.4 billion to this organization. This funding also contributed to the reorganization of its 15 decentralized centers into a single, unified “One CGIAR” system, which is now effectively led by Gates’ initiatives.
Gates also plays a major role on the global stage. For instance, in 2021, the UN Secretary-General organized the first UN Food Systems Summit, presided over by Agnes Kalibata, the president of AGRA. The summit has been hugely influential in shaping the agenda and the meaning of food systems transformation, at a time when there is widespread recognition that dominant approaches to agriculture have failed to produce food security and have had massive impacts on climate change.
So his influence extends across the global, national, and research levels, and through funding for nearly every major organization working on agriculture. It is truly immense.
You mentioned the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which I believe is based in Kenya. But how do local populations in the Global South, particularly in the African countries where Gates is active, view his actions? And how are peasant voices taken into account?
I think that’s actually a complicated question because Gates has done a really good job with public relations. A lot of his philanthropy functions as PR to extend his influence. I would say he’s been effective in framing himself not only as a genius expert, but also as someone who is deeply generous and cares about the African continent.
That said, while there is some support among local populations for Gates—particularly his successes as a business person, which many people see as something to emulate—small-scale farmers and those directly affected by his interventions have mobilized to challenge his power.
The African Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is at the forefront of resisting his vision of promoting commercialization and industrialization among African small-scale farmers.
And they’re very clear about the reasons. One of the main problems with this vision is that it is unsustainable. It promotes practices that make small-scale farmers more vulnerable—for example, to climate change—and that embed them in cycles of debt.
It also dispossesses local and Indigenous communities of their own knowledge—the peasant knowledge systems they’ve developed over generations.
There is also widespread concern about genetically modified crops. Gates has promoted GM crops as a “silver bullet” solution to sustainability, food insecurity, and nutritional deficits. But there is broad skepticism that this kind of solution can actually solve these issues, and many of these initiatives have failed.
On top of that, the approach is undemocratic, promoted from the top down. This is an area where there is broad consensus and concern among local populations directly affected by his interventions.
Since seeds and genetics are areas where Gates has invested heavily, could you give some examples of genetically modified crops he has funded? And could you discuss a bit about the results—not only in Africa, but also in Asia, for instance?
That’s actually where it started for Gates. He began funding Golden Rice back in 2002 and has given millions of dollars since then. In 2011, he provided a $10 million grant for Golden Rice.
Golden Rice has been a long saga for those who follow it, focused on genetically modifying rice to address vitamin A deficiencies. This has been a major theme for Gates—biofortification.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, promoters of genetically modified foods argued that one reason countries weren’t creating biosafety laws to enable GMOs was that consumers didn’t see a benefit. So there was a major push to develop genetic modifications that would directly benefit consumers, like addressing vitamin A deficiency.
Golden Rice faced many battles, particularly around biosafety—whether it was actually safe to consume. Eventually, safety tests suggested it was, though there remained concerns about how those tests were conducted, who conducted them, and potential conflicts of interest.
Another recurring issue with genetically modified crops is that they often don’t perform as well as local varieties. Farmers weren’t particularly interested in growing Golden Rice. We’ve seen similar patterns with BT cotton, Africa’s so-called GM success story, adopted in Burkina Faso.
Brian Dowd-Uribe has written extensively about this, showing that BT cotton was actually inferior. Small-scale farmers stopped growing it because it wasn’t profitable on the market and required significant agrochemical inputs and yearly purchases of proprietary seeds.
The Gates Foundation has promoted many other genetically modified crops: virus-resistant cassava, TELA Maize (resistant to stem borer and fall armyworm), BT cowpea. I’ve written a lot about the biofortified bananas in Uganda—the so-called “super banana” or “golden banana” with increased vitamin A. For a long time, these crops largely failed. Gates realized that simply funding the technologies wasn’t enough. That’s when he began supporting entire communications and policy apparatuses to promote them.
For example, he funded the Cornell Alliance for Science, which conducts what they call “science-based communication.” They train networks of journalists to aggressively promote GM crops worldwide, particularly in African countries where the Gates Foundation operates. They also actively challenge individuals and organizations they see as anti-technology.
The Gates Foundation is also a major funder of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), a key policy advocacy organization supporting biosafety laws for GM crops, as well as associated intellectual property and plant breeder protections. In 2024, I attended a Gates-funded conference called the African Conference on Agricultural Technologies in Nairobi. What struck me—both impressively and shockingly—was that every single speaker and organization at the conference was somehow connected to the Gates Foundation. This shows the existence of an entire apparatus promoting a very particular vision of agricultural innovation.
Finally, the Gates Foundation has been very aggressive in challenging critics. This is unfortunate because these debates—about which crops and technologies countries should adopt—are important. These tactics demonstrate how assertive the foundation is in promoting its vision. While it is increasingly successful, it has taken a long time to achieve this level of influence.
Would you say there are any initiatives that have actually been successful in lifting farmers out of poverty or improving food security, at least in the short term?
I think one of the challenges with genetically modified crops is this “silver bullet” techno-solutionist mentality—they address a single problem.
But agriculture and food systems are highly interconnected. Production is tied to ecological and agroecological contexts, and those are connected to the markets for the products.
For example, BT cotton produced more, but it was inferior, and there weren’t markets for it, so it wasn’t successful. Similarly, the biofortified banana promoted by the Gates Foundation never succeeded in getting the Ugandan government to deregulate or allow GM crops. Part of the problem is that bananas are the staple crop and hold significant cultural importance. Introducing a genetically modified banana could have serious impacts on biodiversity, especially in Uganda, which is a center for many indigenous banana varieties.
Another example is BT cowpea. This has been one of the Gates Foundation’s most “successful” GM crops because it helped Nigeria adopt GM crops more broadly.
However, there are many contestations about the science, since much of it is conducted by researchers associated with Gates or corporate interests, raising conflict-of-interest concerns. Cowpea is traditionally intercropped with cereals like millet, which helps reduce soil erosion and supports polycultures that provide multiple food sources and reduce pest pressures.
BT cowpea, however, shifts production toward monocropping. This makes farmers reliant on a single crop and dependent on buying the full package of seeds, fertilizers, and agrochemicals each year—often putting them into debt.
So it’s hard to say these initiatives have been successful. While the Gates Foundation has been effective at promoting policy change, most of the projects have failed to achieve their stated objectives. They’ve succeeded in creating markets for corporations and influencing policy, but not in delivering meaningful impacts for small-scale food producers.
Could you expand a bit on the impact of Gates’ agenda—and philanthrocapitalism more broadly—on food sovereignty? And could you especially elaborate on the response of food sovereignty movements?
I want to start with the point about failure, because in many contexts the Gates Foundation has faced both failure and resistance from the populations intended to benefit from its funding.
We can see this in education in the United States, where Gates promoted small schools and an extremely rigorous regime of standardized testing—both of which provoked strong parental opposition.
In global health, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he exerted significant control over the system, shifting it from one that could have enabled global sharing of vaccine research to one dominated by intellectual property rights.
In agriculture, the reactions to his failures have been particularly strong. Independent research shows that the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has failed to meet its goal of doubling production. In fact, in some target countries, food insecurity has increased by 30%. This is fascinating because the Gates Foundation does not provide transparent data or evaluations of its own projects, yet it aggressively promotes data collection from governments.
These failures have had a significant impact on populations. Food sovereignty, as a concept, is about the right of small-scale farmers to determine their own food and agricultural systems—it is a democratic right. This is in direct opposition to the Gates Foundation model, which is top-down, donor-driven, and shaped by corporate logics and Gates’ own ideas.
Scholar Rachel Sherman has conducted excellent research showing that much of the foundation’s staff often work primarily to please Gates rather than address local needs and priorities.
This is where the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) comes in. Founded in 2008–2009, AFSA has emerged as a pan-African network of small-scale farmer organizations advocating an alternative approach based on local and peasant knowledge, autonomy, and agroecologically driven food systems. This vision encompasses not just agricultural production but entire food systems, including territorial markets that promote biodiverse foods and polycultures, reducing dependence on external inputs.
AFSA has been very active in mobilizing against the Gates Foundation. In 2024, the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI) issued an open letter calling for reparations from the Gates Foundation for its impact on food systems. AFSA and SAFCEI continue to advocate not only for the cessation of industrial agriculture promotion but also for reparations for the changes the foundation has imposed.
I think now’s a good moment to dive into one of the main arguments from your paper on Gates. Can you explain how his vision of innovation is shaped by racialized assumptions, and how that ties into racial capitalism and agrarian dispossession?
That’s an important question. I touched on it earlier when I mentioned how his ideology of innovation already carries racialized dimensions—particularly in terms of what kinds of knowledge he considers valid.
I link this ideology of innovation to another ideology that was central to colonialism: the ideology of improvement. Improvement was an idea developed by thinkers like John Locke, William Petty, and other English theorists and bureaucrats, who used it to justify European expansion and the appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ lands.
It was a very explicitly racialized ideology. It assigned greater value to Northern forms of scientific expertise and to particular kinds of land use. For example, Locke argued that Indigenous people were “wasting” the land, while the British—through the British Agricultural Revolution and their “scientific” approaches to farming—were better equipped to cultivate it. That logic was then used to justify the appropriation of land and the establishment of private property rights.
So improvement was central to the creation of private property and the expansion of European land control. I see the ideology of innovation functioning in a similar way today.
Whereas the ideology of improvement justified the dispossession of Indigenous and colonized peoples of their land, the ideology of innovation now serves to enclose knowledge and extract rents through intellectual property rights and privatized data infrastructures. In this sense, the same racialized logics of ownership are at work—only now the focus has shifted from land to intellectual property and data.
I’m particularly interested in these privatized data infrastructures: all the data collected through mobile applications, remote sensing, and other technologies, which are increasingly controlled by private companies.
This is crucial for thinking about contemporary forms of colonialism. Many call it “data colonialism,” and critiques of it are growing, especially within African movements. These movements are asking: how do we confront not only the ongoing issue of land grabbing—still very present across the continent—but also the newer forms of dispossession, such as the capture of knowledge and resources through intellectual property rights, data collection, and the erasure of local and Indigenous knowledge systems?
You mentioned that big corporations are clearly benefiting from this. You also pointed out in your paper that some public funds support these activities as well, which essentially socializes the funding while privatizing the rewards.
That ties directly into everything you discussed about intellectual property. Could you tell us a bit more about who actually benefits from these agricultural technology developments, and any potential conflicts of interest?
I think one of the things that’s really important to understand is that the Gates Foundation sees its role as providing catalytic funding. That’s the term it uses. The idea is that the Foundation puts in initial money, but the real goal is to drive policy change and get governments—often very resource-scarce governments—to take over the funding.
A key example of this is input subsidy programs. Through AGRA, and across its target countries, the Foundation has pushed governments to fund subsidies for agricultural inputs, particularly fertilizer. The Gates Foundation may contribute some funding, but the bulk comes from public budgets. These programs end up consuming large portions of scarce public resources, and where do those funds go? They flow to the private sector—the fertilizer industry, which is where the Foundation has put enormous emphasis. Just recently, for instance, the Gates Foundation was a main funder of the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit.
So one role the Foundation plays is to channel public funds into supporting private agro-capital.
The second role is pushing legal and policy reforms, especially around plant breeder rights and intellectual property protections. The economist Mariana Mazzucato has described this as the modern form of rent-seeking: the risks of innovation are socialized, while the rewards are privatized. Public funds are used to support innovation, but the benefits flow to private companies.
And it’s not just the giants like Bayer or Syngenta, though those are certainly central. Local seed companies also benefit, but many of them are tied in some way to global agribusiness. All of this is happening in a moment of increasing corporate control and consolidation of the food system globally—and the Gates Foundation is helping accelerate that trend.
What I think is particularly shocking—and hasn’t gotten enough attention—is the Foundation’s role in brokering agreements that directly benefit Microsoft. With the rise of digital technologies in agriculture, Gates has supported memorandums of understanding between Microsoft and African governments to build massive data projects. This gives Microsoft access to huge amounts of data while embedding the company deep into state digital infrastructures.
Previously, there was already concern about conflicts of interest. For example, in the 2000s it was revealed that Gates, or the Gates Foundation, held significant shares in Monsanto while at the same time promoting industrial agriculture. That generated a lot of outrage, and they eventually divested.
What we’re seeing now feels even more blatant. The Gates Foundation is actively promoting Microsoft across the African continent, encouraging governments to work with the company on massive data projects. That gives Microsoft privileged access to valuable agricultural and state data, embedding it deeply into states digital infrastructures.
The conflict of interest here is clear. Gates used to be Microsoft’s largest shareholder, and while he has donated many of those shares to the Foundation, as of 2024 the Gates Foundation itself still held more than 39 million Microsoft shares.
So when the Foundation promotes Microsoft’s role in African agriculture while also directly profiting from those shares, it represents a new level of philanthropic capitalism—one in which the foundation effectively operates like a corporation.
Another topic I want to discuss in this podcast is greenwashing and fairwashing. Agro-industry corporations are highly skilled at communication and very good at shaping and countering narratives.
What are some key terms that listeners should be aware of in order to identify problematic discourse or ideology?
Over the past 10 years, as agroecology has emerged as the primary alternative to industrial agriculture and as a different model of food systems, we’ve seen the Gates Foundation and private corporations really work to create any other term to promote their vision—anything that isn’t agroecology but still sounds appealing. For a long time, that term was climate-smart agriculture.
At the UN Climate Change Conference in 2021, Gates announced $315 million for CGIAR, largely to expand climate-smart agriculture, and tied it to a broader Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate. Much of the Gates Foundation’s agricultural funding now flows into this framework.
The issue is that climate-smart agriculture can mean many things. Sometimes it may include agroecology, but more often it emphasizes the interventions the Gates Foundation has long supported: precision agriculture, drought-tolerant hybrid seeds, and particular agrochemicals—all approaches that are not agroecology. In practice, climate-smart agriculture became an umbrella term, a way to shift the conversation away from agroecology. A whole Climate-Smart Agriculture Alliance was even built around this framework.
More recently, we’ve seen nature-positive production promoted, especially at the UN Food Systems Summit, as yet another alternative to agroecology. The term regenerative agriculture has also gained traction. But regenerative agriculture is highly contested: sometimes it overlaps with agroecology, and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, in my fieldwork in eastern Kenya, I saw the Gates Foundation promoting regenerative agriculture in ways that looked a lot more like industrial agriculture. Many in the regenerative movement would argue it wasn’t regenerative at all.
All of these terms—climate-smart agriculture, nature-positive production, regenerative agriculture—function as flexible alternatives that avoid using “agroecology.” Meanwhile, agroecology itself continues to be driven by the visions and protagonism of food sovereignty movements and small-scale food producers.
What role do multilateral organizations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, play in both encouraging this system and, at the same time, placing limits on it?
I think the UN Food and Agriculture Organization plays a really important role—both as a convener of member states within the UN system and through its on-the-ground work as a development and scientific body.
After the 2008–2009 global food crisis, there was a kind of reckoning with the global food system. Out of that came a revitalization of the UN Committee on World Food Security, or CFS. For years it had been a fairly dormant body within FAO, but it was reformed into a much more dynamic, multi-actor, and politicized arena—one where small-scale food producers and the food sovereignty movement actually had a direct voice. The CFS became a rare political space where competing visions of food system transformation could be surfaced, debated, and defended in front of governments and other actors.
But that began to shift with the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, which was announced two years earlier. Part of the change was due to the new FAO Director General, but it was also connected to a broader push from the World Economic Forum to reconfigure multilateral institutions toward what they call a multi-stakeholder model. As Klaus Schwab, the Forum’s founder, has put it, states are not the only actors—and maybe not even the most important actors. Corporations, in this view, should play a central role.
This multi-stakeholder turn has significantly reshaped how the UN operates in agriculture, pushing it toward market-based, private-sector-driven solutions for food security. That’s why global food sovereignty and agrarian movements mobilized so strongly against the 2021 Food Systems Summit. They were alarmed not only by its format, but also by conflicts of interest—its scientific advisory committee was chaired by a former AGRA leader, and AGRA’s president also served as president of the Summit itself.
Even though the Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, promised no new institutions would be created from the UN Food Systems Summit, it has continued to operate. And that UN Food Systems Coordination Hub has played a major role in reshaping the global agenda on food systems transformation and global food security, making it more voluntary, more fragmented, and much more aligned with private-sector investment.
So yes, institutions like FAO can play a critical role. But as they adopt this multi-stakeholder, investment-driven model, they risk eroding their legitimacy as neutral conveners of member states.
I would say things are moving in the wrong direction right now. That said, there’s still plenty of room for contestation and challenge—especially at the national level. Multilateral organizations do play an important role at the global level in giving legitimacy to different actors and approaches. But if we look on the ground—particularly in the African contexts I know best—small-scale food producers ultimately want autonomy. They want to be able to feed their families, to have secure access to land, resources, and markets, and they’re mobilizing to demand these things from their governments.
So the momentum doesn’t necessarily have to be at the international level—where opportunities are narrowing—but at national and regional levels, where there may be more space for advocacy and action.
Is there anything you wish decision-makers, especially in the Global North, the minority world where most of these philanthropists are based, would support more actively in the political arena?
I think it’s actually pretty simple: small-scale food producers need to be at the center of decision-making. That’s what food sovereignty is all about.
One of the most problematic aspects of the shift toward multistakeholderism is that, in some sense, international organizations and governments have adopted the lesson—but they’ve cherry-picked the organizations they want to engage with.
We know from over a hundred years of research on agrarian transformation that the agricultural sector is highly diverse, both in terms of class orientation and in its interests. Listening to multiple voices is crucial. But cherry-picking organizations that share your ideology and calling that “inclusive” is not inclusive.
This is essentially a watering down of democratic structures, which we are seeing happen worldwide alongside democratic backsliding. What’s most important is that self-organized farmers are at the table and driving the changes that affect them.
It’s also important to recognize historical responsibility: after centuries of colonialism, countries in the Global North should continue providing foreign aid and reparations to the countries from which they extracted wealth. Unfortunately, we’re seeing a decline in this commitment. Beyond funding, what’s crucial is that these countries—and philanthropies—actually listen to the communities they claim to help. The Gates Foundation, in particular, has resisted this. Its top-down “I know what’s best for you” mentality reproduces colonial structures, now layered with new forms of extractivism, including intellectual property rights, proprietary inputs, and digital technologies.
I think we’re heading toward a reckoning with these new forms of colonialism. At the same time, this is an important moment for movements to demand that their governments listen to them. Many democratic movements face intense pressure and even violence, but small-scale food producers and their allies around the world continue to mobilize—and that mobilization is essential.
Do you have any recommendations for our listeners who want to explore the topics of technology-driven innovation in agriculture, philanthrocapitalism, and food sovereignty further?
There’s a lot written on this topic. I think one of the most important places to start is following the work of AFSA, the African Food Sovereignty Alliance. They provide critical perspectives on food sovereignty, small-scale farmers, and the impacts of technology-driven innovation in agriculture.
Another important resource is the CSIPM, the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism, which is part of the Committee on World Food Security. Their reports provide insights directly from the voices of small-scale and indigenous farmers.
I would also encourage people to look at analyses from IPES-Food, which produces a lot of valuable research on global food systems. Beyond these organizations, there are many other food sovereignty movements worth exploring.
Finally, there’s the scholarly work being done by researchers—myself and many colleagues—trying to understand global political-economic changes, power relations, and emerging rights frameworks in agriculture and food systems. Combining these perspectives—grassroots, organizational, and academic—offers a fuller picture of the forces shaping our food systems today.
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Interview conducted by: Thomas