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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

I've grown a lot more skeptical of what Gates has been doing with his foundation after investigative journalists started reporting on it.

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The foundation issues grants, and all of this is public information. Can you point to which grants you have a problem with and why?

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/quick-links/gran...

Some of my friends working in the drug discovery domain are on that list and so I know for a fact that the money, or atleast some of it, is going towards a noble cause.

What reports are you referring to?

Here’s one: https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/...

This publication seems to be relying on the reader to have a preconceived negative bias on GMOs in order to establish some of their arguments. I understand why a casual reader who's been led to believe that GMOs are malicious or toxic would find this disturbing, but knowing that GMOs are basically how we are able to consume most if not all modern food safely, it's immediately sensationalist to me.

I don't know about the other two topics they address, but I kind of question the motive altogether.

Nothing wrong with choosing GMO seeds.

Definitely something wrong with trying to force farmers to use them.

Yes, Gates has done many good things, but the foundation makes a lot of calls, many of them bad. I don’t know why there’s an attitude of “Its philanthropic! It’s good!” Some of it is not. He’s older and kinder than he was before, but he still has many of the imperialist values that let him turn Microsoft into an empire.

Can you provide some more information instead of just muddying the waters? What are these "lot of bad calls". What are you referring to exactly?

>I don’t know why there’s an attitude of “Its philanthropic! It’s good!” Some of it is not.

Its not good just because its philanthropic, its good because they are investing money fighting diseases that nobody is interested in curing because there is no money in it (because the victims are from poor countries). A prime example is tuberculosis.

Trying to get small African farmers to grow monocrops with seeds from giant Ag companies and making it harder for them to do ecologically sensitive farming.

Okay, you got me. Farming and agriculture is not my wheelhouse, so I can't really discuss it with a high level of confidence or familiarity. But AFAIK the gates foundation doesn't make anyone buy anything, they issue grants. They have identified the root cause of yields in agriculture is the soil/seeds. Maybe the problem can be solved without pest/soil resistant GM seeds, but the fact remains that the food supply situation is getting worse on that continent. I'm sure there are other aspects to it like distribution/infrastructure/government investment/etc.

Also to your specific point - according to their own website https://agra.org/faqs/#1518765023405-cb110e47-d755

"AGRA has never taken a monocropping approach to agricultural development. We have invested millions of dollars in breeding minor crops grown by smallholder farmers in order to help them maintain diversity even as agricultural systems intensify."

I'm not going to blindly believe them, I'll give them a chance to make their case...

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