International Public Policies: Challenging Philanthrocapitalist Food Systems?
The ‘green revolution’ food model — a push for new technologies to increase agricultural production — has reached its limits because of huge environmental costs. Now, nourishing people must go hand in hand with nursing the planet.
Jose Graziano da Silva, Director General
UN Food and Agriculture Organization
Chatham House, November 27, 2017
Philanthrocaptialism picks up where structural adjustment policies (SAPs) of the International Monetary Fund left off. With the IMF now criticizing its own policies of ‘one size fits all’, philanthrocapitalists have stepped in to advance the monoculture interests of large cartels. For example, they are buying out the national, indigenous seed companies in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia (and beyond), in order to privatize that immense genetic wealth. More serious than patenting, the private corporation, not the national public sectors nor indigenous farmers, will decide what varieties to make available, or to ignore.
This paper addresses first, the food system that philanthrocapitalists are advancing with their allies; it offers explanations for why they continue to advocate the monocultures of industrial agriculture. Second, the paper examines the international institutions that AGRA promotes to ‘leverage’ public finance for private interests to legitimate those goals. Third, it analyses both international laws and trans-national social movements resisting that endeavor by advocating for smallholder (< 5 ha) farmer seed systems sustaining biodiverse food crops, the future of food for the planet.