The Oakland Institute, November 16, 2021

Stealth Game: “Community” Conservancies Devastate Land & Lives in Northern Kenya — reveals the devastating impact of privatized and neo-colonial wildlife conservation and safari tourism on Indigenous pastoralist communities. Although terms like “participatory,” “community driven,” and “local empowerment” are extensively used, the report exposes how the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) and the Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS), have allegedly dispossessed pastoralist communities of their ancestral lands, through corruption, cooptation, and sometimes through intimidation and violence, to create wildlife conservancies for conservation dollars.

Since its founding in 2004, NRT has set up 39 conservancies on over 42,000 square kilometers of land in Northern and Coastal Kenya — nearly eight percent of the country’s total land area. While NRT claims that its goal is to “transform people’s lives, secure peace and conserve natural resources,” the Oakland Institute’s report elevates voices of communities — predominantly pastoralists — who allege NRT dispossesses them of their land and deploys armed security units involved in serious human rights abuses. NRT is also involved in security, management of pasture land, and livestock marketing, which according to the impacted communities, gives it a level of control that surpasses even that of the Kenyan government.

Based on extensive field research, Stealth Game: “Community” Conservancies Devastate Land & Lives in Northern Kenya, is the first independent report to provide a comprehensive review of the evolution of Kenya’s land and wildlife conservation laws; the history, structure, and functioning of “community” conservancy model of NRT; as well as land and human rights issues surrounding the privatized model of conservation in Kenya.

Created by Ian Craig, whose family was part of an elite white minority during British colonialism, NRT’s origins date back to the 1980s when Craig’s family-owned, 62,000-acre cattle ranch was transformed into its first conservancy. Today, NRT receives millions in funding from donors such as USAID, the European Union, Danish and French development agencies and large environmental NGOs, including The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Space for Giants.

In recent years, impacted communities have held protests, signed petitions, and initiated legal action against the presence of NRT on their lands. Community members have repeatedly asked for justice after years of being ignored by the Kenyan government and by the police when reporting killings of family members and other human rights abuses. The findings of Stealth Game call for an urgent independent investigation into land and human rights related grievances around NRT’s community conservancies — including allegations of involvement of NRT’s rapid response units in inter-ethnic conflict, and of abuses and extrajudicial killings.

The report’s release comes as the international community is considering adopting the “30×30 initiative” under the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, which calls for 30 percent of the planet to be placed in protected areas or other effective area-based conservation measures by 2030. Stealth Game makes it clear that fortress conservation must be replaced by truly Indigenous-led conservation efforts to preserve the remaining biodiversity of the planet while respecting interests, rights, and dignity of the local communities.

To read the report, click here.

Navdanya International, October 2020.

By Zahra Moloo and Jim Thomas, ETC Group.

In 2016, at the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy in New York, Bill Gates was asked to give his opinion on gene drives, a risky and controversial new technology that could—by design—lead to the complete extermination of the malaria-carrying mosquito species, Anopheles gambiae. If it were his decision to wipe out this mosquito once and for all, given the risks and benefits being considered, would he be ready to do it? “I would deploy it two years from now,” he replied confidently. However, he added, “How we get approval is pretty open ended.”

Gates’s ‘let’s deploy it’ response may not seem out of character, but it was an unusually gung ho response given how risky the technology is widely acknowledged to be. Gene drives have been dubbed an “extinction technology” and with good reason: gene drive organisms are created by genetically engineering a living organism with a particular trait, and then modifying the organism’s reproductive system in order to always force the modified gene onto future generations, spreading the trait throughout the entire population.

In the case of the Anopheles gambiae project (that Gates bankrolls), a gene drive is designed to interfere with the fertility of the mosquito: essential genes for fertility would be removed, preventing the mosquitoes from having female offspring or from having offspring altogether. These modified mosquitoes would then pass on their genes to a high percentage of their offspring, spreading auto-extinction genes throughout the population. In time, the entire species would in effect be completely eliminated.

Although still new and unproven, gene drives have provoked significant alarm among ecologists, biosafety experts and civil society, many of whom have backed a call for a complete moratorium on the technology. By deliberately harnessing the spread of engineered genes to alter entire populations, gene drives turn on its head the usual imperative to try to contain and prevent engineered genes from contaminating and disrupting ecosystems. The underlying genetic engineering technology is unpredictable and may provoke spread of intended traits. The notion that a species can be removed from an ecosystem without provoking a set of negative impacts on food webs and ecosystem functions is wishful thinking and even taking out a carrier of an unpleasant parasite does not mean the parasite won’t just jump to a different host. Moreover, the implicit power in being able to re-model or delete entire species and ecosystems from the genetic level up is attracting the interest of  militarities and agribusiness alike and runs counter to the idea of working with nature to manage conservation and agriculture. 

That Gates is so enthusiastic about releasing this powerful genetic technology is not so surprising when one scratches the surface of the myriad institutions that have been researching and promoting gene drives for years. To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is either the first or second largest funder of gene drive research (alongside the shadowy U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) whose exact level of investment is disputed). Gates is not just another tech optimist standing on a business stage calling for gene drive release to be allowed—his foundation has poured millions of dollars into gene drive research for over a decade. Yet direct research funding is not the only way in which the BMGF has accelerated the development of this technology. They have also funded and influenced lobbyists, regulators, and public narratives around gene drives, in an attempt to push this dangerous sci-fi sounding technology into real world use, shifting research priorities on industrial agriculture, conservation and health strategies along the way.

Funding the Research

While the controversy around gene drives is recent, promoters like to emphasize that research towards creating gene drive technology has been in the works for many years. From its inception, much of this research has received direct funding from the BMGF, funneled through different academic institutions. The beginning of current research into genetically modified extinction technology can be traced back to 2003 when Austin Burt, a professor of Evolutionary Genetics at Imperial College in London, was working with yeast enzymes, noting how ‘selfish genes’ were able to reproduce with a greater probability than the usual 50-50 ratio that occurs in normal sexual reproduction. In a paper, he explained how these genes could be adapted for other uses, such as in mosquitoes, where the destruction of the insects could be embedded directly into their genes. Burt, along with Andrea Chrisanti, another biologist at Imperial College, applied for a US$8.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which they received in 2005) to take forward their theories and apply them in a lab, eventually creating an international project called ‘Target Malaria’. In an interview with Wired magazine, Chrisanti explained how this funding and the relationship with the BMGF was instrumental in the further development of gene drives technology. “If you need a resource, you get it, if you need a technology, you get it, if you need equipment, you get it. We were left with the notion that success is only up to us,” he said.

At the same time, in 2005, the BMGF was also channeling money into the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), as part of a larger US$436 million grant for a project called the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative. Through the FNIH, a biologist at UC Irvine, Anthony James, was injecting DNA into mosquito embryos to create transgenic mosquitoes resistant to dengue fever. These mosquitoes were able to reproduce which meant that normal mosquito populations could possibly be replaced by GM mosquitoes if only a way could be found to drive the engineered genes into populations. In 2011, James’ lab genetically engineered the mosquito species Anopheles stephensi with genes that made it resistant to malaria.

All these developments were significant, but they had not yet led to the creation of gene drives. That moment came in 2015, when two scientists at UC San Diego, California, Ethan Bier and Valentino Gantz, created a gene-construct that could spread a trait through fruit flies, turning the entire population yellow. The technology they had developed used a new genetic engineering tool called CRISPR-Cas9 which could cut DNA and enable genes to be inserted, replaced or deleted from DNA sequences. In effect Gantz and bier built the genetic engineering tool directly into the flies genome so each generation genetically engineered its offspring. CRISPR-Cas9 technology was instrumental in the creation of the gene drive and in late 2015, functional gene drive modified mosquitoes were created. This is what the Gates Foundation was waiting for. In 2016, an official with the Gates Foundation said in an interview that malaria could not be wiped out without a gene drive; all of a sudden this ‘extinction technology’ was considered not just desirable, but “necessary” in the fight to end malaria.

Since then, the push for further research and deployment of gene drives has gained considerable momentum—mostly propelled by Gates dollars. The BMGF has funneled even more funding into taking gene drive research forward. In 2017, UC Irvine received another US$2 million directly from the BMGF for Anthony James to genetically engineer the malaria-carrying mosquito species Anopheles gambiae, with a view to eventually releasing them in a trial. Meanwhile, Target Malaria, the flagship research consortium that came from Burt and Chrisanti’s work, has received US$75 million from the foundation. This has been used to create labs in Burkina Faso, Mali and Uganda in order to begin experimenting with gene drives in Africa, and in 2019 Target Malaria released 4,000 genetically modified (not gene drive) mosquitoes in Burkina Faso as a first step in their experiment. Their goal is to release the gene drive mosquitoes in Burkina Faso in 2024. BMGF has also bankrolled further gene drive research in Siena Italy, Jerusalem, Israel and Boston, USA.

Synthetic Biology and Agricultural Interests

Although mainstream media coverage of gene drive developments emphasizes Gates’s grandiose philanthropic intentions in eliminating malaria and saving lives in Africa, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to Gates’s direct funding of gene drive research.

Gene drives are classified as part of a controversial field of extreme genetic engineering known as synthetic biology (synbio) or ‘GMO 2.0’ in which living organisms can be redesigned in the lab to have new abilities. Synthetic Biology aims to redesign and fabricate biological components and systems that do not exist in the natural world. Today it is a multi-billion-dollar industry which creates compounds like synthetic ingredients (synthetic versions of saffron, vanilla etc), medicines and lab-grown food products. Gates’s ambitions for this radical biotech field extend beyond gene drives and malaria research and into the field of synbio. In an interview, he said that if he were a teenager today, he would be hacking biology: “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start—biological molecules.”

The Gates Foundation has had a substantial influence on the synthetic biology industry since its inception. In 2005, when the field was still relatively new, the BMGF gave a grant of US$42.5 million (and later more)  to the University of California Berkeley and Amyris, a startup synbio company, in order to produce the antimalarial drug artemisinin in a laboratory with genetically engineered microbes. The aim of this grant was not only to create the antimalarial drug, but also to create new biofuels, medicines and high value chemicals. The founder of Amyris, Jay Keasling, has told ETC Group that the Gates funds were contingent on finding other more profitable lines of business in addition to artemisinin and so initially the technology was simultaneously applied to biofuel production. Jack Newman, a scientist at Amyris explained that “the very same pathways” used in artemisinin “can be used for anticancer (drugs), antivirals, antioxidants.”

While using philanthropic funds to bankroll a private biofuel business might seem ethically questionable, the supposedly beneficial target of making an antimalarial molecule may not have been so positive either. In 2013, after many years of research by the UC Berkeley Laboratory and Amyris, it was announced that the French pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, would launch the production of synthetic artemisinin. Commercial production of the compound was hailed as more affordable than naturally grown artemisinin, which is farmed in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Vietnam and China. However, what was not mentioned during all the hype around the synthetic production of the compound was that artemisinin farmers in these countries would lose their livelihoods as a result of the sale of the synbio version. In the hype and supported by philanthropic money, prices for artemisinin crashed and some natural artemisinin extractors were shuttered. Eventually, even the synthetic product proved too expensive to sell.

The BMGF investments’ in syn bio go further still. The Foundation invested in a number of other synbio companies including Editas Medicine, a genome editing company that controls the CRISPR-Cas9 technology behind gene drives, and Ginkgo Bioworks, which creates microbes for application in fashion, medicine and industry. Gates is also keen on the so-called “cellular food revolution” which grows food from cells in a lab. His investments in the sector include Memphis Meat, a company that creates cell-based meat without animals, Pivot Bio, which creates engineered microbes for use in agriculture, and Impossible Foods, which makes processed meat-like burgers from a synthetic biology-derived blood substitute.

That Gates is pouring so much money into an industry that is oriented toward shifting agriculture and the food systems toward hi-tech approaches is no accident, given how influential the Foundation is in global health and agriculture policy generally, and in promoting industrial agriculture in the global South and especially Africa. In the case of gene drives, while most international debate has focused on their application in malaria and conservation, the industrial farm is where gene drives may first make their impact; the very foundational patents for gene drives have been written with agricultural applications in mind. In 2017, a secretive group of military advisors known as the JASON Group produced a classified study on gene drives commissioned by the US government which was tasked to address “what might be realizable in the next 3-10 years, especially with regard to agricultural applications.” The JASON Group was also informed by gene drive researchers who were present during a presentation on crop science and gene drives delivered by someone from Bayer-Monsanto. Other groups involved in gene drive discussions behind the scene include Cibus, an agricultural biotech firm, as well as agribusiness majors including Syngenta and Corteva Agriscience. The startup Agragene, whose co-founders are none other than the gene drive researchers Ethan Bier and Valentino Gantz of University of California at San Diego, “intends to alter plants and insects” using gene drives. The JASON Group and others have also raised the flag that gene drives have biowarfare potential—in part explaining the strong interest of US and other militaries in the technology.

Shaping the Narrative Around Gene Drives

Not only has the Gates Foundation funded the underlying tools of the syn bio industry and moulded gene drive research for years, it has also been quietly working behind the scenes to influence the adoption of these risky technologies. The way in which policy and public relations about gene drives research has been shaped by the Foundation becomes clear when one examines what happened immediately after the creation of the first functional gene drives with CRISPR Cas9 technology in late 2014.

In early 2015, the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine announced that they would have a major inquiry into gene drives—an unprecedented move for such a brand new (only months old) technology. The study did not explore just the science of gene drives, but also aimed to frame issues around policy, ethics, risk assessment, governance and public engagement around gene drives. It was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Several panel members were recipients of Gates funds.

The Foundation has also channeled money into the MIT media lab, home to Kevin Esvelt, who directs a group called Sculpting Evolution and was among the first people to identify the potential of CRISPR-based gene drive to alter wild populations.  Last year the MIT Media Lab was embroiled in a controversy when it was revealed that it had received donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Through Epstein, the media lab secured US$2 million from Gates although it is not clear for which project.

One of the most controversial findings which illustrate the extent to which the Gates Foundation is invested in influencing the uptake of gene drive technology was made in 2017 by civil society organizations following a Freedom of Information request. That process led to the release of a trove of emails revealing that a private PR firm called Emerging Ag, was paid US$1.6 million by the BMGF. Part of their work involved coordinating the “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents,” as well as running a covert advocacy coalition to exert influence on the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the key body for gene drive governance. After calls in 2016 for a global moratorium on the use of gene drive technology, the CBD sought input from scientists and experts in an online forum. Emerging Ag recruited and coordinated over 65 experts, including a Gates Foundation senior official, a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) official, and government and university scientists, in an attempt to flood the official UN process with their coordinated inputs.

Emerging Ag now manages an overt advocacy network also funded by the BMGF called the Outreach Network for Gene Drive Research whose stated intention is to “raise awareness of the value of gene drive research for the public good.” Its members include researchers and organizations that work on gene drive research, stakeholder engagement, outreach and even funders. Almost all of its members are separately funded by the Gates Foundation. In 2020, Emerging Ag received another grant from the Foundation for $2,509,762.

Emerging Ag Inc.	2020	Malaria	Global Health	$2,509,762
Emerging Ag Inc.	2017	Malaria	Global Health	$1,603,405

Source: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Governance and Lobbying at International Fora

During the international negotiations of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP14 in Sharm el Sheikh in 2018, the influence of the Gates machinery was on clear display. The multiple initiatives in which the Foundation had invested beforehand ended up having important consequences. Not only had the Foundation sought to influence the expert panels that inform the Convention before the actual negotiations took place, but they had also managed to ensure that political support for gene drives in Africa, where the first gene drive mosquitoes are due to be released, was established well before the official negotiations, countering civil society concerns about and resistance to this highly risky technology.

About six months prior to COP14, the African Union’s technical arm, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) released a report in support of gene drive mosquitoes for malaria eradication. A year prior to the report, NEPAD was awarded $2,350,000 from the Open Philanthropy Project, a major co-funder of Target Malaria alongside BMGF, to support the evaluation, preparation and possible deployment of gene drives. Open Philanthropy’s funding priorities often move in lockstep with BMGF priorities and they are part of the same’effective altruism’ movement of technocratic billionaires. Additionally, a new crop of African negotiators, new to the CBD, arrived at the Sharm-el-Sheikh negotiations vocally arguing in favour of gene drives. Many of this new cohort were drawn from ABNE, the African Network on Biosafety Expertise—a Gates funded biotech policy network on the African continent that is at the heart of BGMF influence on African biotech policy. It was no surprise then when, at the CBD, the consensus position of the African group of delegates was one that was in favour of gene drives, and they blocked a moratorium on the release of gene drive organisms which was requested by African civil society groups. 

So embedded were the individuals from institutions funded by the BMGF in the official negotiations that even certain people serving as official government delegates were found to have been paid or employed by Target Malaria. On the sidelines lobbyists from other Gates funded outfits, such as The Cornell Alliance for Science also railed against the moratorium proposal.

From bankrolling the technology development and creating the underlying tools, to shaping the narrative, picking the policy negotiators and even paying the lobbyists, Bill Gates and his Foundation have so far been tightly interwoven into every part of the story of gene drive extinction technology. However, although the Foundation has been highly successful in influencing the technology’s future deployment, they have not been able to suppress the global movements which have sprung up in resistance to gene drive technology. And just as health activists and food sovereignty activists have pushed back against the white saviour complex of philanthro-capitalists, so movements in West Africa have been quick to point out the racism and injustice of Gates-backed groups such as Target Malaria, who are using African people and ecosystems as experimental subjects for gene drive technology. In June 2018, over 1,000 farmers and activists protested against gene drive technology in the streets of Ouagadougou. Many are concerned about the eventual agricultural applications of gene drives and in the case of malaria, they believe that indigenous medicine and existing methods are better suited to fight the disease, particularly given the increasing number of countries which have completely eradicated it. In the words of food sovereignty activist Ali Tapsoba, with the organization Terre à Vie, “The best way to fight against malaria remains to put in place a good sanitation policy for our habitats and our environment. It is out of the question for us to let these scientists continue to conduct dangerous experiments outside their laboratories.” It is perhaps at its intended point of experimentation, in Burkina Faso, that the Gates machinery will finally be forced to grind to a halt.

Africa is a Country, April 2019.

Judi Rever’s account of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath challenges the official narrative.

At the end of May 1997, one week after President Mobutu was toppled in a military coup, Judi Rever, a Canadian reporter for RFI, arrives in the Democratic Republic of Congo—then Zaire—to cover the unfolding humanitarian crisis. She travels south of Kisangani to refugee camps where Hutu refugees have sought safety after a series of attacks. Here, in the eery quiet of a clearing in the forest, she comes across “dozens and dozens” of survivors. Some have lost their families and others look as though they are “on the verge of death.” They all say they are escaping attacks by the RPF, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, part of the rebel alliance that has overthrown Mobutu (today, the ruling party in Rwanda). Across the border in Rwanda, in a transit camp where Hutus returning from Congo are being registered by the UN, refugees say the same thing: that they fled Rwanda to Congo because the RPF was killing Hutus.

Back in Paris where she lives, Rever tries to piece together what she has seen. In the media and in political and humanitarian circles, there is one narrative: that “an African renaissance” is beginning in the Congo, heralding a “new age of peace and security.” Rever herself believes, like most people, that during the Rwandan genocide the RPF “swooped in and routed Hutu extremists responsible for killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus.” Yet this narrative is “diametrically opposed” to what she has seen in both Congo and Rwanda. Her interviews lead her to question everything she has read about the genocide. What unfolds in the remainder of her book, In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, is a detailed account of the RPF and their crimes before, during and after the Rwandan genocide.

Drawing from reports by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which was set up in the aftermath of the genocide to try Rwandans accused of human rights violations, as well as from select interviews with former intelligence officers and RPF defectors who used to work for Kagame, Rwandans in exile, survivors of massacres, former investigators, academics, and others, Rever’s account reveals the RPF’s methods of operation. It says how they carried out massacres against Hutu civilians “with great precision,” “leaving barely a trace,” what motivated them, and how they managed to evade justice for so many years. Although these crimes have been documented for many years and as early as 1994 by groups including The Human Rights Commission on Rwanda, Amnesty International, the UN, MSF, and a number of notable scholars, In Praise of Blood is notable for providing more information, both “qualitative and quantitative,” about the RPF’s crimes.

A key element to understanding the RPF’s operations during and after the genocide, is its intelligence wing, the DMI (Directorate of Military Intelligence), which Rever describes as the “main instrument through which crimes were inflicted on Rwandans during the genocide” and the “continuing source of control and violence against Rwandans and Congolese.” Investigators for the ICTR found that while the RPF had killed civilians, it was DMI representatives under orders from Kagame who initiated massacres. A controversial revelation in the book, based on the ICTR report and on interviews with former RPF officials, is that a covert group of “technicians” trained by DMI before 1994 were trained to, among other things, infiltrate Interahamwe Hutu militias and incite them to commit massacres against Tutsi civilians. In some cases, she writes, the RPF even actively killed Tutsi villagers in staged attacks that were blamed on Hutu mobs.

Byumba, Giti and ‘claiming land’

Among the many grisly incidents of violence that Rever documents in her book is one which became the “trademark” method that RPF used for killing Hutus: the massacre at Byumba stadium in April 1994, two weeks into the genocide. Thousands of Hutu refugees had fled to Byumba from camps bombarded by Kagame’s forces. After three days without food, RPF soldiers urged them to go to the football stadium of the town, promising food, drink and cooking supplies. After the peasants filed into the stadium and settled down for the night, RPF officers opened fire, killing everyone inside. Bodies were buried, but later dug up and incinerated under Kagame’s orders; Kagame feared that France’s satellite surveillance would find evidence of mass graves. Rever writes that this method of controlling access to an area, luring in large groups of Hutus with promises of food and safety, and then killing them or taking them away to be killed elsewhere, was used across the country during the genocide. The RPF’s success in hiding these crimes depended on concealing the “the evidence by turning human beings into ash.” Sometimes, she writes, the RPF “buried the Hutu dead in graves with Tutsis who had been murdered by Hutu militia.”

In Praise of Blood details several other massacres by the RPF, including at Karambi trading center, where the RPF killed an estimated 3000 people before President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, at Ruhengeri where DMI units with civilian cadres massacred Hutus in July and August of 1994, at Gabiro in a guest lodge that had once been the home of Rwanda’s king, and at Giti. Giti stands out as a “startling use” of RPF “propaganda” where RPF forces massacred Hutu civilians at a primary school in Giti and then agreed with the town’s mayor that in return for RPF protection, he would be known as the only mayor in Rwanda who had ensured that no genocide against Tutsi took place in his commune.

Why would Kagame’s forces undertake such widespread, targeted and horrific killings? Concerning Byumba, a number of people in the book assert that the RPF’s actions were about “claiming land in Byumba, the breadbasket of Rwanda,” for thousands of Rwandan Tutsis who had grown up in Uganda. Indeed, the narrative thread of RPF’s crimes must be placed in the context of their origins in Uganda, their invasion of Rwanda in 1990 and the decision to shoot down the plane of Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, widely seen as the event that sparked the beginning of the genocide. Although most mainstream accounts of the genocide attribute Habyarimana’s death to Hutu extremists, In Praise of Blood explains through first hand testimonies how RPF engineered the downing of the plane. As soon as it was shot down, between 25,000 and 30,000 RPF troops moved into position to launch an offensive “which would have required weeks of preparation.” Several people interviewed in the book believe that the RPF had one main objective which was to “seize power” and use the “massacres as stock in trade to justify its military operations.”

If indeed that was true, it worked: while international organizations and the UN were aware of some of the massacres by RPF, including at Byumba, the international community viewed these events through a “different moral lens” than they applied to the Hutu génocidaires. Kagame’s killings were seen as “reprisal killings” or “collateral damage.”

Counter insurgency and justice denied

While one might categorize the 1994 killings by the RPF as specific to the violence unfolding in the context of genocide, what happened after the genocide during the counter-insurgency when Kagame sent his troops into the DRC under the pretext of hunting down Hutu génocidaires is arguably more disturbing, perhaps for the simple reason that unlike the genocide, Rever states, it went on with “little outcry from the world,” reaching its peak in 1997.

The 1996 invasion of Zaire forced hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees to return home and “face a new round of ethnic cleansing.” Rever writes how during this period, RPF killed Hutu civilians in areas under their control “hill by hill,” including near military bases, and in caves where thousands were hiding from Kagame’s soldiers. Meanwhile, Hutu officials who were unwilling to support the Hutu insurgency and joined the RPF were also killed, along with their families. Some of these massacres have been confirmed in reports by Amnesty International.

Among the RPF’s actions in this period included “false flag” operations. In one incident, based on interviews with former RPF intelligence officers, Rever describes how RPF staged an attack on a refugee camp in Mudende, killing hundreds of Tutsis. This helped to demonize Hutus by putting the blame for the attack on Hutu guerrillas and persuaded the US to “continue training RPF soldiers and supplying Rwanda with military material.”

Although the killings in these years targeted not only Hutu and Tutsi civilians, but also UN observers, Spanish aid workers and a Canadian priest, no action was taken against the RPF internationally. As early as May 1994, during the genocide, a UN refugee agency report documented killings by the RPF. After the genocide, in 2006, a French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière issued arrest warrants against those involved in the shooting down of Habyarimana’s plane and in 2008, Spain issued arrest warrants for 40 of Kagame’s senior commanders, but these did not result in any arrests. Rever writes that authorities in Europe, North America and Africa refused to extradite those implicated. In 1997, when the Canadian priest was killed by RPF and a witness flew to Nairobi to give a statement to the Canadian embassy, there was no follow up.

The latter chapters of In Praise of Blood offer startling explanations of what was happening in the higher echelons of institutions tasked with pursuing the RPF and the “enormous lobbying, money and influence” Kagame used to “penetrate institutions and people in power.” Rever exposes how a clandestine unit, the Special Investigations Unit, which was set up by the ICTR in 1999 specifically to investigate crimes by Kagame’s army and relied on testimonies from Rwandan witnesses in exile, found that their sources were being intimidated and disappeared. The ICTR suspended investigations against Kagame’s commanders in order not to lose the cooperation of the Rwandan government in investigating Hutu génocidaires. Eventually, Rever writes, the SIU was hijacked by Paul Kagame himself, and the Chief Prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte removed from her position “at the behest of the US” after she made it clear that she intended to indict RPF commanders.

In a stunning revelation that demonstrates just how intertwined the relationship between Rwanda and the US was, In Praise of Blood demonstrates how Kagame and the US Ambassador at the time agreed to a deal whereby, rather than going through the ICTR process, the government of Rwanda would have the “opportunity” to prosecute massacres by the RPF. In other words, “the killers would investigate themselves.” Rever writes that the ICTR became essentially “a surrogate of Washington and by extension, Kagame.” The UN tribunal closed in 2015, having convicted 61 people, all of them linked to the former Hutu regime. The trial that Rwanda eventually carried out on its own was seen as a “political whitewash,” even by Human Rights Watch, which Rever demonstrates was primarily interested in massacres of Tutsis in the genocide.

It was not only international institutions and western governments that became intertwined with the powerful interests of the RPF, but also NGOs—specially the London-based organization African Rights which defended the RPF against reports that they had engaged in violence, and was eventually found, according to the book, to be on the RPF payroll. The other organization singled out for their refusal to give adequate weight to the RPF killings is Human Rights Watch which documented RPF killings, but downplayed them as “generalized violence.”

For those implicated in massacres, not only were they not prosecuted, but several moved onto high positions in UN peacekeeping operations; Patrick Nyamvumba who allegedly gave the orders for massacres during the genocide and was in charge of creating units to “screen, mop up and otherwise rid the hillsides of Hutu civilians,” was appointed as Head of UNAMID, the UN-African Union peacekeeping operation in Darfur in 2009. Another man, Jean Bosco Kazura, allegedly in charge of soldiers who killed civilians east of Kigali at the height of the genocide and at Gabiro, became the peacekeeping chief of the UN’s force in Mali in 2013.

The struggle of memory against fear

Any attempt to uncover the carefully buried secrets of a powerful regime is likely to result in reprisals. In Praise of Blood describes what happened to Rwandans who came forward to testify against Kagame and the RPF. While some managed to escape into exile, others were killed, disappeared or imprisoned. Rever writes how she too became a target, not only in Europe where she travelled for interviews, but also in Canada where she received threatening calls singling out her children.

At the end of her book, Rever writes that she chose to focus on the crimes of the RPF and not on the genocide against Tutsis since there already exists a plethora of material about Hutu-on-Tutsi violence. However, for this reason, it is sometimes difficult while reading In Praise of Blood to keep the two narratives in mind and to understand how both unfolded simultaneously within the same time period. Some parts of the book raise questions. For instance, Rever writes that eight per cent of the Hutu population actively engaged in killings against Tutsi and that “the majority of Hutu civilians did not kill their neighbours.” Others, including Mahmood Mamdani, whose book When Victims Become Killerstries to make sense of the killings, assert that contrary to Rever’s claim, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people participated in the genocide.

Other claims in the book which may require further substantiation include a citation from the University of Rwanda which estimates that forty thousand civilians had been killed by the RPF in two regions of the country by early 1993. That is a colossal number by any standard and difficult to understand how such a large number of killings could go unnoticed well before the genocide began. Disputes over numbers are common in the divergent accounts of the Rwandan genocide. Rever estimates that based on her evidence and that of the ICTR investigators, the RPF killed between several hundred thousand and one million people.

In Praise of Blood claims that a parallel genocide against Hutus took place in Rwanda, a claim which has elicited substantial debate from scholars including Claudine Vidal and Filip Reyntjens. Vidal argues that Rever’s book “blurs the line between investigation and indictment” and describes the massacres in such a way as to “classify them as genocide.” Rather than “doing the work of judges” and trying to apply the legal classification of genocide onto the crimes of the RPF, she writes that “journalists and social scientists should be calling for investigations equivalent to those carried out into the Tutsi genocide.” In other words, “There is no need for it to be genocide to justify investigation into these massacres.”

A proper judicial investigation would be required to determine whether or not a genocide against Hutus did take place. Filip Reyntjens at the University of Antwerp argues that although he is not one to advance the thesis of double genocide, the massacres may indeed demonstrate an intention to destroy Hutu, a strong indicator being the separation of Tutsis and Hutus, and the use of help from Tutsis in killing Hutus and sparing Tutsis. Given that the crimes of the RFP will likely go unpunished, and that the judicial truth will not be established, he says, “the historical truth can and must be sought.” To this end, Rever’s work remains significant.

In his book, Mamdani writes that “Violence cannot be allowed to speak for itself, for violence is not its own meaning. To be made thinkable, it needs to be historicized.” In her final chapter, Rever quotes an opposition Tutsi activist who argues that the RPF killings are not reprisals for the 1994 genocide against Tutsis, but rather, revenge for 1959, when waves of Tutsi were forced to flee during the 1959 revolution and the country transitioned from a Belgian colony with a Tutsi monarchy to an independent Hutu dominated Republic. Likewise, in Mamdani’s work, he makes the claim that “The failure to address the citizenship demands of the ‘external’ Tutsi marked the single most important failure of the Habyarimana regime.” There is no doubt that understanding the deeper roots of RPF violence, and by extension, the regime in place today, requires venturing back into the complex and difficult history of Rwanda and the region.

The official narrative of the genocide, which claims that Tutsi victims were rescued from Hutu killers by the RPF, has persisted for decades, rendering the stories of one side continuously visible and subject to official commemoration while actively silencing the memories and stories of the other. This narrative has no doubt served Kagame’s regime extremely well as he continues to receive awards, adulations, over 984 million dollars in aid in 2015/2016 and unwavering support from the likes of Howard Buffet and Tony Blair. Even his decision to rule until 2034, Rever notes has drawn “only tepid criticism” from Washington and London.

In the words of Theodore Rudasingwa, Kagame’s former Chief of Staff, who spoke in the BBC documentary, Rwanda, The Untold Story, “Kagame’s impunity has reached scandalous proportions,” and the cost in terms of lives destroyed in both Rwanda and the DRC has been colossal. In Praise of Blood is a courageous, powerful and meticulously documented work that counters the narrative on which Kagame’s impunity rests, resurrects the memories of countless people, and brings their stories out from the silence and the intricate machinery of fear that the Rwandan regime has worked so hard to maintain.

Project Syndicate, December 2018. 

A new UN agreement requires organizations seeking to release gene-drive organisms – which will fundamentally change or even eliminate entire populations of that species – to obtain the “free, prior, and informed consent” of potentially affected communities. But what that requirement implies needs to be spelled out – before it’s too late.

MONTRÉAL – On November 29, after two weeks of contentious negotiations at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, 196 countries agreed to stringent rules on the use of so-called gene drives. Given the far-reaching consequences of a technology that causes a particular set of genes to propagate throughout a population – fundamentally changing or even eliminating it – such rules are badly needed. But are they enough? 

Some countries would have preferred a full moratorium on the release of gene-drive organisms – a view shared by many indigenous peoples, food sovereignty activists, and African civil society organizations. The UN’s final agreement met them halfway, recognizing the “uncertainties” inherent in the use of gene drives – which opponents call “exterminator drives” – and calling upon governments to exercise great caution in releasing drive-modified organisms for experimental research. 

According to the agreement, such experiments should be carried out only when “scientifically sound case-by-case risk assessments have been carried out,” and “risk management measures are in place to avoid or minimize potential adverse effects.” Moreover, organizations seeking to release gene-drive organisms should obtain the “free, prior, and informed consent” of potentially affected communities.

As it stands, none of this seems to be happening. Consider the record of Target Malaria, the world’s largest organization undertaking gene-drive experiments, whose employees were included in the official negotiating teams of at least two African countries to push back against excessive limitations.

Target Malaria is soon scheduled to begin implementing a plan in West and Central Africa to release genetically modified “male sterile” (non-gene-drive) mosquitoes in the villages of Bana and Sourkoudingan in Burkina Faso, as a first step toward eventually releasing drive-modified mosquitos. The goal is to reduce the population of the species that transmit the parasite that causes malaria.

But it remains far from clear that Target Malaria has acquired anything close to the villages’ “free, prior, and informed consent.” To be sure, Target Malaria has issued videos of local people who support the project and introduced reporters to them. But when I traveled independently of Target Malaria to meet local communities that would be affected, I heard a very different story, which I recount in a short film.

On my two trips to discuss the project with locals in the affected areas of Burkina Faso – first accompanied by two activists, and then by a translator – a clear pattern emerged. Those with political authority in the center of Bana were aware of Target Malaria and surprisingly hostile toward us. Célian Macé, reporting for the French newspaper Libération, encountered similar problems when attempting to access Bana and Sourkoudingan.

On the outskirts of the villages – still well within the range of the mosquito release – people tended to be more comfortable being interviewed. They were also far less knowledgeable about Target Malaria’s project and gene drives in general. And information about both is available to them from only one source: Target Malaria.

Nearby villages also seemed inadequately informed. Gene-drive organisms are intended to spread indefinitely, and mosquitoes, especially females, can surf air currents at relatively high altitudes (40-290 meters, or 131-951 feet), where winds can blow them hundreds of miles. This means that consent would have to be secured significantly beyond the release point.

Yet, in the village of Nasso, near Bana, authorities told us that, despite meeting with Target Malaria, they still had questions and concerns about the potential adverse effects of the mosquito release. Civil-society groups operating in and around the test-site villages have also not been adequately consulted about Target Malaria’s work.

The more interviews I conducted, the clearer it became that local people had not been involved in a genuinely participatory debate on the Target Malaria project, let alone extended their informed consent. On the contrary, several people I interviewed called for the experimental release of genetically modified mosquitoes to be halted until the risks and effects had been adequately investigated, and civil society across Burkina Faso had been fully informed.

Target Malaria’s lack of commitment to consent is reflected in its own rhetoric, which eschews the unequivocal word “consent,” but regularly uses terms like “engagement” and “community acceptance.” This choice may indicate that the organization’s leaders have already decided to proceed with the release.

Reinforcing this conclusion, after the UN convention, Target Malaria attempted to draw a distinction between the requirement of free, prior, and informed consent in the context of medical research on individuals (where it is demanded) and in a public-health context. According to the organization, “it’s not logistically possible to obtain consent from each and every person affected” by the release genetically modified mosquitoes.

But the reason it is difficult to acquire informed consent from all people affected by gene-drive experiments is the same reason that doing so is absolutely critical. This is a highly controversial technology, with potentially far-reaching ecological effects and as-yet-unknown health consequences. Securing the consent of only a handful of local residents simply is not good enough.

Because Target Malaria’s Burkina Faso experiments are among the first of their kind, they will serve as a powerful precedent for similar experiments worldwide. With proposals for the release of gene-drive organisms in indigenous territories in New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii on the agenda in the coming years, there is a need to establish a clear threshold for what informed consent means and how to secure it.

 

 

 

 

Target Malaria plans to introduce genetically modified mosquitoes to a remote village in Burkina Faso. Why do we need to be concerned?

Africa is a Country, August 2018

Few people need convincing that malaria is a deadly and terrible disease. The World Health Organization estimates that half of the world’s population is at risk, with 445,000 deaths recorded in 2016, most of which were in Sub-Saharan Africa. Young children and pregnant women are particularly at risk in areas with high transmission, and, although malaria has been on the global radar for decades, the World Health Organization recently noted a “troubling shift in the trajectory of the disease” with progress in reducing transmission and fatalities having stalled at the end of 2016.Prevention and treatment methods have included insecticide treated mosquito nets, sprays, and anti-malarial drugs. 

Now, proponents of a new technology claim they can supposedly eliminate the disease at its source, in the very DNA of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. It sounds fictitious, but that is the objective of Target Malaria, a research consortium that receives its core funding, $92 million, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and from the Open Philanthropy Project, funded largely by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.Target Malaria claims that there is a consensus “that new tools are needed to eliminate malaria.” Their “new tool” is a gene drive, a speculative technique intended to engineer the genetics of entire populations of the malaria-transmitting Anopheles gambiae species by a single release of an organism with engineered genes. Target Malaria aims to create strains of genetically modified female mosquitoes: essential genes for fertility are cut, preventing them from having female offspring or from having offspring altogether. These modified mosquitoes will be rigged to then pass on their genes to a high percentage of their offspring, supposedly spreading auto-extinction genes throughout the population.

Target Malaria’s project focuses on four countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Uganda and Kenya. The project is most active in Burkina Faso: in 2016, genetically modified mosquitoes were exported to the country from Imperial College in London for contained experiments, with approval from the National Biosecurity Agency. The Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (IRSS) in Burkina Faso, part of the Target Malaria consortium, plans to release the GM mosquitoes into the environment between July and November 2018 in one of three villages of Bana, Pala ou Sourkoudiguin.

The consortium says it is planning a phased approach; in the first phase, it will release 10,000 “male-sterile” (non-gene drive) mosquitoes; in the second, another non-gene drive mosquito will be released into the open, to bias the mosquito population to be male only; in the third and final phase, the gene drive mosquitoes will be released, involving either male bias or female infertility.

Behind gene drive technology

International media coverage of Target Malaria’s project has been substantial, revealing the ubiquitous technophilia that characterizes so much of today’s responses to these kinds of new innovations. Little of this coverage however, has looked at who is behind research on gene drives or questioned their premise.

The gene drive files, a trove of emails and records discovered by civil society organizations and released in December 2017, reveal that it is in fact the US Military that has taken the lead in pushing forward research on gene drives. According to the records, The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given approximately $100 million for gene drive and related research, making it the largest funder of gene drive research, and it “either funds or coordinates with almost all major players working on gene drive development as well as the key holders of patents on CRISPR gene editing technology.” The files also uncovered “an extremely high level of interest and activity by other sections of the US military and intelligence community” in gene drives. 

It’s not just the US Military that was subjected to scrutiny: the gene drive files found that a gene drive “advocacy coalition,” was run by a private PR firm that received $1.6 million in funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and seem to have used covert lobbying tactics to influence UN discussion on gene drives. And while Target Malaria has emphasized their independence from any military agendas, it has since become apparent that Target Malaria’s Andrea Crisanti, who developed the modified mosquitoes at Imperial College is also funded by DARPA’s Safe Genes project.

(Un)Intended consequences?

If the  source of funding for Target Malaria’s experiments and their relationship to DARPA is not worrying enough, there are myriad other reasons to be wary of gene drive technologies, however well-meaning the target. For one thing, gene drives rely upon the new and poorly understood gene editing technique CRISPR-Cas9. Many of the consequences of such gene editing techniques are yet unknown.

The short sighted hubris of altering wild insects populations is also cause for concern. It is a tendency of science and research in the Western world to treat issues in isolation, as if one part has no relationship to larger webs of complex interconnection. Although controlling mosquitoes is supposedly about one strain of a single species, scientists have warned that there are dangers in the unintended consequences of altering one part of a complex ecosystem—a decrease in one species for instance often leads to an increase in another or a loss of important functions (such as pollination), or alternatively, a gene drive could spread between species causing potentially devastating effects. 

These are not just hypothetical concerns. In Panama for instance, following programs that targeted Aedes agyptae mosquitoes using fumigation methods and limited releases of GM mosquitoes by UK Biotech company Oxitec, there was a rise in numbers of the Asian Tiger mosquitoes.

Simple evolution is very likely to outwit too-clever-by-half schemes. Edward Blumenthal, the Chair of Biological Sciences at Marquette University has noted that the anopheles mosquito species may develop a mutation (a phenomena known as ‘gene drive resistance’ is already being noted), preventing the gene drive method from working, or the malaria parasite could find a different host. Researchers have also warned that “a gene drive would be remarkably aggressive,” likely giving rise to invasive species and that real world experiments are “extremely risky.” And, even when a gene drive is applied in one country, neighboring countries would become part of the experiment, “whether they like it or not.” Gene drives and winged insects do not respect national borders.

In addition to impacts on natural ecosystems, there are the very real fears of how gene editing technologies will fare in a world characterized by widening inequalities, violence and warfare in many countries, ecological crises, and a rise in far-right and fascist movements. In today’s social and political climate, being able to genetically engineer undesired species seems just a few steps away from the possibilities of eugenics and certainly opens the way to hostile uses against food sources. The US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology warned the White House directly about the possibility of editing genes and turning viruses or infectious agents into diseases for which no treatment exists.

Burkina Faso as a ‘Guinea Pig’ for experimentation

Within Burkina Faso, a number of groups have been mobilizing in opposition to Target Malaria’s project. This is not the first time Burkina Faso has experimented with genetic modification: In 2008, when the country’s cotton crop was being devoured by pests, it introduced GM seeds for BT cotton produced by Monsanto (now Bayer). The resulting cotton was pest free but of lower quality. As the GM cotton lost its premium pricing, the impact was a drop in the value of its output.

On June 2, 2018, the organization Collectif citoyen pour l’agro-écologie, together with hundreds of peasants and farmers gathered in Ouagadougou, holding banners that said: “Stop and desist: GMO, BT cowpea, genetically modified mosquito,” and “Monsanto, Target Malaria and Bill Gates: respect Africa’s right to self-determination.” These groups want the risks of GM technologies to be properly evaluated and a moratorium on gene drives put in place in the meantime.

Leaving aside the problem of the unintended consequences of the released mosquitoes, there are also enormously unequal power dynamics at play in which a consortium funded mostly by powerful foreign institutions is introducing a new technology developed in a lab in the UK to be released in a rural community in West Africa. It is not surprising that the group COPAGEN, (Collective pour la protection du patrimoine génetique Africain), has publicly denounced Target Malaria’s use of Burkina Faso for its experiments saying that “Burkinabes are being used like guinea pigs” and has appealed to the National Centre for Biosecurity not to authorize the release of the mosquitoes.

Indeed, although Target Malaria has insisted that it works with local communities and obtains their consent before releasing the mosquitoes, it is difficult to see how is possible if, as a few people have pointed out, there reportedly exists no word for a “gene” in local languages. Interviews with inhabitants of the targeted villages indicate that their inhabitants do not really understand how the gene drives work. Gene drive technology is already very difficult for a general public to understand, let alone rural communities who may not have sufficient information about the origins and details of malaria transmission. What in that case constitutes consent? Groups including Third World Network, the African Centre for Biodiversity and ETC Group state that this is a particularly important issue given that Burkina Faso’s biosafety regulation does not have specific guidance for conducting risk assessment for GM mosquitoes, and it is unclear what kind of public consultation is required.

Bringing these concerns to the forefront of high level negotiations around gene drives has been challenging for civil society groups. Last month in Montreal, at the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-22), where government delegates from around the world meet to discuss key issues on biodiversity, the Target Malaria consortium had a representative, Elinor Chemonges, whose role was simultaneously to represent the government of Uganda in a clear conflict of interest.

Target Malaria resembles many of the technical “solutions” that western philanthropists and multinational corporations come up with to solve the social and environmental problems facing our world: from schemes like carbon credits designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, to geoengineering projects to solve climate change (which Bill Gates has also incidentally invested in), there is no shortage of speculative technical fixes presented to solve myriad serious problems that we are faced with today, and which obviate the need to deal with their structural causes.

It is noteworthy that Paraguay, and before that, Sri Lanka, eliminated malaria entirely without western scientists in lab coats fidgeting with mosquito DNA. The World Health Organization predicts that Algeria, Argentina and Uzbekistan could be malaria-free later this year. If such strides are currently being made, imagine what possibilities exist if an equivalent sum to $92 million were spent strengthening public health care systems in West Africa, as well as tracking malaria cases and preventing outbreaks, as was done in Paraguay.

If there are any lessons that as Africans we should learn from the past, it’s to be wary of technological interventions that claim to be saving African lives, especially when they are supported and funded by, among others, wealthy western philanthrocapitalists and the US Military.

The hubris of western neoliberal capitalism and its attendant belief that we can master and control nature without end is in large part to blame for the current social and ecological crises we are in today. The only way out of these crises, whether it is climate change or malaria, is to dismantle this very ideology, to create space for indigenous science and knowledge in the path we forge toward the future, and to consider the existing solutions that have been there all along.

La colonisation n’en finit pas de sévir, et si l’occupation militaire des territoires n’est plus en vogue pour les pays occidentaux, d’autres moyens leur sont offerts pour asseoir leur position sur nombre de pays. La philanthropie, que l’on pourrait croire armée des meilleures intentions, fait partie des nouvelles formes de ce libéralisme postcolonial : en inondant les États et les structures locales de dollars, les grands investisseurs capitalistes noient dans l’œuf toutes les initiatives pour l’autonomie et la résistance des peuples autochtones. Pour exemple, voici le cas du businessman Howard Buffett, fils de Warren Buffett (troisième fortune mondiale), qui joue un rôle non négligeable dans le « développement » de la République démocratique du Congo et vient influencer les récits des journalistes ou des ONG là où aboutit son financement.

Texte original : « The Problem With Capitalist Philanthropy », Jacobin le 6 février 2018.
Traduction par Édouard Batot

Télécharger l’article en PDF.

Jef Klak, Mai 2018

Philanthropists like Howard Buffett are the darlings of journalists and the NGO world — but are they really helping Africa?

Jacobin Magazine, February 2018

In 2015, while on a reporting trip with the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a local journalist told me, “It is difficult to go anywhere in the east of the country without touching one of Howard Buffett’s projects.”Indeed, having invested in a range of initiatives including hydroelectric power plants, road development, and eco-tourism, Howard Buffett is considerably involved in the east of the country. The photographer, farmer, sheriff, former director of the Coca-Cola Company, and son of the third richest man in the world, has poured millions into the region.The hydroelectric project was the first stage in an investment program the Congolese national parks authority (ICCN) and the Virunga Foundation, a British charity, drew up together. In 2015, Buffett reportedly pledged an additional $39 milliontoward two more power generation facilities, and the Virunga Foundation plans to fund more plants, hotels, and infrastructure projects around the park over the next years. In an interview with Reuters, the park’s director, Emmanuel de Merode, said that these initiatives, especially the power plants, will create employment opportunities for communities surrounding the park.And Buffett’s investments don’t stop there; across the border in Rwanda, his foundation stated in 2015 that it was investing $500 million over ten years in order to “transform” the country’s agriculture “into a more productive, high-value, and market-oriented sector.” So far, the foundation has focused on food security projects, with 67.5 percent of its 2015 contributionsfunding this sector.

These investments seem laudable. Who can object to improving food security in rural Rwanda or building hydroelectric plants in the DRC’s Kivu region, where basic infrastructure is limited and only about 3 percent of population has electricity? What better way to support the region than by funding power plants and preventing people from cutting down trees for charcoal?

To answer these questions, one must first ask: who exactly is Howard Buffett?

Capitalist Philanthropy and Its Discontents

Howard Buffett, like Bill Gates, belongs to the exclusive club of “capitalist philanthropists” who invest their wealth in solving the world’s major problems in areas like health and agriculture. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation’s mission statement explains that its investments “catalyze transformational change, particularly for the world’s most impoverished and marginalized populations.”

Although philanthropists say they’re helping the powerless, Jens Martens and Karoline Seitz have documented how charitable giving benefits the rich as well. Wealthy businessmen set up the very first American foundations at the beginning of the twentieth century to shield themselves from taxation, build prestige, and gain a voice in global affairs. Since then, philanthropists have come to occupy an increasingly dominant position in economic development, influencing governments and international organizations alike.

Capitalist philanthropists operate at the nexus of charity, capitalism, and development. As Behrooz Morvaridi writes, they are “politically and ideologically committed to a market approach.” By investing vast sums of money in solving complex historical problems, expanding the private sector, and investing in technical fixes, they advance the idea that capitalism is not the cause, but the solution, to the world’s troubles. In the words of historian Mikkel Thorup, capitalist philanthropy obscures the conflict between rich and poor, asserting instead that the rich are “the poor’s best and possibly only friend.”

But the problems capitalist philanthropists claim to be solving are rooted in the same economic system that allows them to generate such enormous wealth in the first place. Martens and Seitz showthat charitable giving represents “the other side of the coin of growing inequality between rich and poor”: they uncover a direct correlation between “increased wealth accumulation, regressive tax measures, and funding toward philanthropic activities.”

In her book No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein writes that over the last two decades, elite liberals have been “looking to the billionaire class to solve the problems” that were formerly addressed “with collective action and a strong public sector.” Indeed, the solutions capitalist philanthropists propose in areas like health care, education, and agriculture erode public sector spending and shift the focus away from structural causes of poverty. In agriculture, structural barriers include trade-liberalization agreements that remove import tariffs and enable rich countries to buy products at a low cost, as well as the global rush for farmland, which, in 2016, translated into almost five hundred deals affecting thirty million hectares of land.

Buffett has criticized the imposition of the American model of industrial agriculture in Africa, which fellow philanthropists, like Bill Gates, advocate. Nevertheless, his investments in eastern Congo and Rwanda are designed to support market-oriented systems. He’s collaborated with Partners for Seed in Africa (PASA) and the Program for Africa’s Seed Systems (PASS), both of which support private seed companies that sell hybrid seeds and fertilizers to farmers, a process that has been criticized for undermining farmers’ age-old practices of openly saving, sharing, and exchanging seeds, and promoting seed diversity. Both programs are part of the controversial Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which smallholder farmers and livestock keepers from different African countries have criticized for promoting big business and “using intellectual property to establish corporate control over seeds.”

Along with Gates, Buffett has invested $47 million toward a project in partnership with Monsanto to develop water-efficient maize varieties for small-scale farmers. Critics have argued that the agro-giant is trying to shift the ownership of “maize breeding, seed production, and marketing … into the private sector,” thereby ensnaring “small-scale farmers into the adoption of hybrid maize varieties and their accompanying synthetic fertilizers and pesticides” that ultimately benefit seed and agrochemical companies.

Putting aside the irony of having someone who served on the board of directors of Coca-Cola — which funded researchers to downplay its dangerous health effects — decide how farmers in Africa should grow food, it’s worth remembering that Buffett also served on the board of directors for the food giant Conagra Foods, which has faced accusations of abusing labor and environmental codes.

Conservation is the other major priority area for Buffett. Some have described the Virunga National Park, a media darling that has an ongoing partnership with the Buffett Foundation, as a “state within a state”; although it protects the region’s biodiversity from poaching and oil exploration, it has also dispossessed the area’s original inhabitants of their land, and its paramilitary-trained rangers have reportedly mistreated indigenous communities on the park’s outskirts.

The park’s much-hyped hydroelectric plant, too, has stirred significant controversy lately, with some complaining that the price of electricity from the plant has exploded from $5 to $50 for basic household usage. These claims have been disputed by Save Virunga, a group that supports the Virunga National Park.

Buffett also financed peace talks between M23 rebels and the Congolese government in Uganda, a level of meddling that reveals how much influence philanthropists wield over political outcomes. When a UN Group of Experts report found that the Rwanda government was supporting the M23 rebels, Buffett argued against suspending aid to the country. Despite describing itself as a “non-political entity,” his foundation published a reportthat discredited the Group of Expert’s findings and questioned its experts’ reliability.

Indeed, David Rieff highlights how the philanthro-capitalist project is “irreducibly undemocratic,” if not “antidemocratic.” In his analysis of Bill and Melinda Gates, he notes that there is no check on what they can do, besides “their own resources and desires.” Joanne Barkan points out the problems with private philanthropic foundations: “they intervene in public life but aren’t accountable to the public; they are privately governed but publicly subsidized by being tax exempt” and “they reinforce the problem of plutocracy — the exercise of power derived from wealth.”

That Howard Buffett can invest so freely in the DRC is a product of the country’s devastating colonial past as well as its currentsubjugation to the neoliberal system. The DRC’s economy has been ravaged by thirty-two years of Mobutu’s Western-backed kleptocracy, World Bank–imposed structural adjustment policies, extraction by transnational mining companies and the Congolese political elite, and a war that took the lives of millions of people.

Buffett argues that his investments are necessary “because no one else is interested in doing it.” But there are numerous Congolese citizens who would like to see a strengthened public sector rather than private investment in services. Many have joined the social movement Lucha (“Lutte pour le changement”) which has been calling on the government to provide the eastern DRC with basic services like running water and proper infrastructure. In their struggle to see Congolese citizens’ material needs met and ensure they can participate in political decision-making, many of their members have faced repression and arrest.

The Power of Narrative

The Howard G. Buffett Foundation has presented its work carefully. Articles from the region published in reputable media agencies, including the Guardianand Al Jazeera, have received support from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), which in turn received funding from Buffett. His foundation directly contributes to the organization’s Great Lakes Reporting Initiative, which supports female journalists who work in the DRC, South Sudan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Central Africa Republic on issues related to “empowerment, democracy, food security, and conservation efforts.”

This seems like a much-needed project: at a time when media outlets face growing budget shortfalls, the IWMF provides cash-strapped journalists with generous grants. I myself was grateful for the support I received from the Great Lakes fellowship to report from eastern Congo, but I also felt uncomfortable with the knowledge of who finances the organization.

The IWMF stresses that it does not influence its grant recipients’ stories, and in an interview said that they find it “unacceptable for a funder to influence the editorial content of the stories [they] facilitate.” However, their preferred areas of focus, particularly food security and conservation, are chosen in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

Ironically, Buffett’s investment in the IWMF exists alongside his support for a dictatorship that has decimated its local press. As Anjan Sundaram documents in Bad News, Rwandan president Paul Kagame has killed, tortured, exiled, and imprisoned journalists across the country. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented that seventeen journalists have been killed in Rwanda since 1992. Yet Buffett has called Rwanda “the most progressive country on the continent,” and, like many Western donors, enjoys a cozy relationship with its leader.

So far, none of the IWMF articles published from Rwanda offer a critical perspective on the Kagame regime. Jennifer Hyman, the organization’s communications director, said that their support for foreign journalists reporting from Rwanda was not contradictory given the organization’s mandate to promote press freedom and that the organization conducts in-country training for local reporters in the countries where they work. Yet, although the organization has been vocal in condemning the treatment of journalists in Colombia, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan, Hyman was unable to state the IWMF’s position regarding Rwanda’s treatment of its own journalists.

A closer look at the IWMF’s funders offers further insights. On its website, the organization’s 2013 donors include multinational companies like pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which has faced charges of labor, human rights, and environmental abuses, including using Nigerian children to test an anti-meningitis drug that led to the deaths of eleven children. Walmart — notorious for its exploitative labor practices — also contributed, as did Dole Food Company, accused of enforcing inhumane working conditions and exposing Nicaraguan plantation workers to a banned pesticide. Oil giants Occidental Petroleum and Chevron, as well as Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, also appear on the IWMF’s list of supporters.

The IWMF clarified that this list does not constitute major donors, with the exception of Chevron, Bank of America, and the Buffett Foundation. In response to queries about the apparent contradiction in accepting support from these entities, while at the same focusing on issues around empowerment and democracy in the Great Lakes Region, Hyman responded that IWMF’s mission is to “unleash the potential of women journalists as champions of press freedom … we welcome the support of corporations, foundations, and individuals who believe in that mission.”

In Morvaridi’s words , organizations, including the media, promote the priorities of “elite capitalist philanthropists” and thereby “contribute to the building of the political agenda they support.” The IMWF has successfully reshaped mainstream media narratives in the Great Lakes region, diversifying the range of stories that emerge from that area and influencing international opinion. However, in partnering with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, it has legitimized Buffett’s activities in the region and his support for the Rwandan government.

Recent revelations from the Paradise Papers demonstrate the extent to which vast sums of wealth are being siphoned from countries like the DRC. It is up to journalists to interrogate the money that enters the country from the billionaire philanthro-capitalist class, and in particular, from men like Howard Buffett, whose vision for regional development — privatization as a path to growth — undermines the ongoing struggle of ordinary Congolese to shape their own future.

Book Chapter: ‘All that Glitters: Neoliberal Violence, Small-Scale Mining and Gold Extraction in Northern Tanzania’

In Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa. Ed Dip Kapoor.

August 2017

Overview

Under the guise of ‘development’, a globalizing capitalism has continued to cause poverty through dispossession and the exploitation of labour across the Global South. This process has been met with varied forms of rural resistance by local movements of displaced farm workers, small and landless (women) peasants, and indigenous peoples in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa, who are resisting the forced appropriation of their land, the exploitation of labour and the destruction of their ecosystems and ways of life.

Continue reading “Book Chapter: All that Glitters” →

EJOLT, 2012

Role: Research

Across the world communities are struggling to defend their land, air, water, forests and their livelihoods from damaging projects and extractive activities with heavy environmental and social impacts: mining, dams, tree plantations, fracking, gas flaring, incinerators, etc. As resources needed to fuel our economy move through the commodity chain from extraction, processing and disposal, at each stage environmental impacts are externalized onto the most marginalized populations. Often this all takes place far from the eyes of concerned citizens or consumers of the end-products.

The EJ Atlas collects these stories of communities struggling for environmental justice from around the world. The atlas is a visually attractive and interactive online mapping platform detailing environmental conflicts. It allows users to search and filter across 100 fields and to browse by commodity, company, country and type of conflict. With one click you can find a global snapshot of nuclear, waste or water conflicts, or the places where communities have an issue with a particular mining or chemical company.

Global Atlas of Environmental Conflicts

CODESRIA Newsletter, January 2014

In November of last year, civil society organizations hosted a seminar on the extractive industries in Kenya. Titled ‘Kenya’s New Natural Resource Discoveries: Blessing or Curse?’ and organized with the aim of addressing potential opportunities, challenges, impacts and policy implications of Kenya’s newly discovered resources, including oil, this was a rare opportunity to have an open and informed debate about the implications of mining, oil and resource extraction in the country.

Continue reading “Kenya’s Civil Society & Extractive Industries: Buying into Neoliberalism?” →