March 5, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
While the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has plenty of critics, its efforts to help farmers in Africa seems to be getting more hits than a boxer on fight night.
The Oakland Institute, a left-leaning think tank in California, this week released a report highly critical of the Gates-led Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. While the Community Alliance for Global Justice, a grass-roots group in Seattle, formed AGRA Watch, which, like other critics, “demands that the Gates foundation be more transparent in its endorsements of policies and more accountable to its stated goals.”
What’s more, a $23-million Gates grant to the World Cocoa Foundation is under fire from the International Labor Rights Forum, which says that chocolate companies associated with the effort have not fulfilled agreements to reduce child labor.
According to The Seattle Times, the Gates foundation said for the program to be successful and reduce poverty among small-holder farmers, it needed to work closely with corporations.
The anonymous author of Gates Keepers, a blog dedicated to questioning the Gates foundation’s work, welcomes these new “watchdogs.” “They are not the ones that meet and greet Bill and Melinda on their junkets to Africa,” the writer says.
To be sure, Gates officials have said they are listening to their critics and have made changes to their programs. For example, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa has done more to include women in response to concerns it was ignoring female farmers, who by one estimate grow up to 80 percent of the crops used for food in Africa.
Read The Chronicle’s article about the formation of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a profile of its leader, and the recent grant to aid cocoa farmers.
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