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The revived dream of an African Green Revolution in the new millennium, however, is actually a much larger project to make Africa safe for capital.

It is difficult to disentangle the web of alliances between the Gates Foundation, USAID, and various U.S., African and pseudo-African biotech research institutions-but the motives are crystal clear. USAID is currently headed by Rajiv Shah, former director of agricultural development programs at the Gates Foundation. It has become one of the main agencies promoting the expansion of biotech crops in Africa. The push for GM crops received a boost from the Global Food Security Act (AKA the Lugar-Casey Bill) based on a suspiciously appropriate Gates Foundation report entitled "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty." The Lugar Casey bill would restructure aid funding to include over $7 billion for GM crops, giving Aid-dependent poor countries few options for formulating "home-grown" agricultural solutions.

The Gates Foundation recently donated US$ 270 million to CGIAR. According to Prabhu Pingali, head of agriculture policy and statistics at CGIAR, the plan is to double the organization's funding to $1 billion over the next four years. The Gates Foundation seems to have acquiesced to the reality that Africa is a complicated continent with myriad social networks, and that CGIAR's planned new consortium of research centers and it's decades of "Green Revolution" experience, might help him ramp up his own vision of a ‘modernized' and ‘marketized' African agriculture.

Elegantly simple in its proposal and presentation, AGRA is the global face of a renewed international effort to revive Africa’s sagging agricultural research institutions and introduce new Green Revolution products across the sub-Sahara. The complex array of institutional and financial interests lining up behind Gates and Rockefeller include multilateral and bilateral aid organizations, national and international research institutes, and the handful of powerful multinational seed, chemical, and fertilizer monopolies upon which the entire financial future of the new Green Revolution ultimately rests.

That same week in Davos, the soon-to-retire president of Microsoft put his money where his mouth was by giving another $306 million to AGRA. That’s a lot of recognition, by anyone’s standards. Clearly, the “halo effect” created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ altruism will benefit everyone associated with AGRA—from the CGIAR to Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta.

as a creative capitalist, what—or for whom—is AGRA’s market-based reward? Recognition for Microsoft? Undeniable, but not significant or necessary for a company who already has all the recognition it wants. Gates’ financial interests in genetic engineering? These investments pale behind AGRA itself. The answer is; there is no market-based reward. Rather, the prize is political. AGRA, backed by Gates’ enormous philanthropic power, bolstered by the best world-renown diplomats and CEOs money can buy, and driven by the sheer financial and institutional momentum of the industrial players within the Green Revolution, is a political machine of immense proportions. AGRA allows the Gates foundation unprecedented influence not only in setting the national food and agricultural policies of many African governments, but in the agenda-setting of continental agreements (like NEPAD), multilateral development institutions (e.g. FAO), the strategies of agricultural research centers (e.g. WARDA), and the political economic re-structuring of Africa’s food systems in general. The Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa is the Gates’ Foundations bold foray into big philanthropy’s latest incarnation: philanthro-capitalism.