Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill

Bill Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.

by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Defender
February 4, 2021

“Gates has a Napoleonic concept of himself, an appetite that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.”
— Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding judge in the Gates/Microsoft antitrust-fraud case

The global lockdowns that Bill Gates helped orchestrate and cheerlead have bankrupted more than 100,000 businesses in the U.S. alone and plunged a billion people into poverty and deadly food insecurity that, among other devastating harms, kill 10,000 African children monthly — while increasing Gates’ wealth by $20 billion. His $133 billion fortune makes him the world’s fourth wealthiest man.

Gates has been using that newfound cash to expand his power over global populations by buying devalued assets at fire-sale prices and maneuvering for monopoly control over public health, privatizing prisons, online education and global communications while promoting digital currencies, high tech surveillance, data harvesting systems and artificial intelligence.

For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.

According to the newest issue of The Land Report, Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. Gates’ portfolio now comprises about 242,000 acres of American farmland and nearly 27,000 acres of other land across Louisiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Arizona, Florida, Washington and 18 other states.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the success of America’s exemplary struggle to supplant the yoke of European feudalism with a noble experiment in self-governance depended on the perpetual control of the nation’s land base by tens of thousands of independent farmers, each with a stake in our democracy.

So at best, Gates’ campaign to scarf up America’s agricultural real estate is a signal that feudalism may again be in vogue. At worst, his buying spree is a harbinger of something far more alarming — the control of global food supplies by a power-hungry megalomaniac with a Napoleon complex.

Let’s explore the context of Gates’ stealth purchases as part of his long-term strategy of mastery over agriculture and food production globally.

Beginning in 1994, Gates launched an international biopiracy campaign to achieve vertically integrated dominion over global agricultural production. His empire now includes vast agricultural lands and hefty investments in GMO crops, seed patents, synthetic foods, artificial intelligence including robotic farm workers, and commanding positions in food behemoths including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Philip Morris (Kraft, General Foods), Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble and Amazon (Whole Foods), and in multinationals like Monsanto and Bayer that market chemical pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers.

As usual, Gates coordinates these personal investments with taxpayer-subsidized grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest and most powerful organization in all of international aid, his financial partnerships with Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Food, and his control of international agencies — including some of his own creation — with awesome power to create captive markets for his products.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé and partner to David Rockefeller, observed that, “Who controls the food supply controls the people.” In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations launched the $424 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) promising to double crop productivity and boost incomes for 30 million small farmers by 2020 while cutting food insecurity in half.

Characteristically, Gates’ approach to global problems put technology and his chemical, pharmaceutical and oil industry partners at the center of every solution. As it turned out, Gates’ “innovative strategy” for food production was to force America’s failed system of GMO, chemical and fossil fuel-based agriculture on poor African farmers.

African agricultural practices have evolved from the land over 10,000 years in forms that promote crop diversity, decentralization, sustainability, private property, self-organization and local control of seeds. The personal freedom inherent in these localized systems leaves farm families making their own decisions: the masters on their lands, the sovereigns of their destinies. Continuous innovation by millions of small farmers maximized sustainable yields and biodiversity.

In his ruthless reinvention of colonialism, Gates spent $4.9 billion dollars to dismantle this ancient system and replace it with high-tech corporatized and industrialized agriculture, chemically dependent monocultures, extreme centralization and top-down control. He forced small African farms to transition to imported commercial seeds, petroleum fertilizers and pesticides.

Gates built the supply chain infrastructure for chemicals and seeds and pressured African governments to spend huge sums on subsidies and to use draconian penalties and authoritarian control to force farmers to buy his expensive inputs and comply with his diktats. Gates made farmers replace traditional nutritious subsistence crops like sorghum, millet, sweet potato and cassava with high-yield industrial cash crops, like soy and corn, which benefit elite commodity traders but leave poor Africans with little to eat. Both nutrition and productivity plummeted. Soils grew more acidic with every application of petrochemical fertilizers.

As with Gates’ African vaccine enterprise, there was neither internal evaluation nor public accountability. The 2020 study “False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)” is the report card on the Gates’ cartel’s 14-year effort. The investigation concludes that the number of Africans suffering extreme hunger has increased by 30 percent in the 18 countries that Gates targeted. Rural poverty has metastasized dramatically, and the number of hungry people in these nations has risen to 131 million.

Under Gates’ plantation system, Africa’s rural populations have become slaves on their own land to a tyrannical serfdom of high-tech inputs, mechanization, rigid schedules, burdensome conditionalities, credits and subsidies that are the defining features of Bill Gates’ “Green Revolution.”

The only entities benefiting from Gates’ program are his international corporate partners — and particularly Monsanto, in which the Gates Foundation Trust purchased 500,000 shares worth $23 million in 2010 (but later divested those shares after pressure from civil society groups). Gates himself even filmed commercials for Monsanto’s GMOs, touting them as the “solution” to world hunger.

In a typical example of Gates’ strange largess, his foundation apparently made his taxpayer-subsidized “charitable” grants amounting to $10 million to the Big Ag behemoth, Cargill, to build his supply chains for GMO soy in South Africa. Africans call Gates’ program “Neocolonialism” or “Corporate Colonialism.”

The AGRA Watch initiative of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice follows Gates’ agricultural and food policies. According to Heather Day, an AGRA spokesperson, AGRA is a trojan horse for corporate kleptocracy.

“The Gates Foundation and AGRA claim to be ‘pro-farmer,’ ‘pro-poor’ and ‘pro-environment,’” Day told me. “But their approach is closely aligned with transnational corporations, like Monsanto, and foreign policy actors like USAID [United States Agency for International Development].They take advantage of food and global climate crises to promote high-tech, centralized, industrial agriculture that generate profits for Gates’ corporate partners while degrading the environment and disempowering farmers. Their programs are a dark form of philanthrocapitalism based on biopiracy and corporate biopiracy.”

Gates’ climate activism (A memo to my environmental colleagues)

To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.” These causes are all grim realities that pose existential threats to our children and require urgent attention. However, Gates’ record exposes his benevolent intentions as masquerades for his agenda to maximize personal profit and control.

It’s baffling to me how so many of my friends in the environmental movement have swallowed Gates’ chicanery. In my 40 years as a climate activist, I saw zero evidence of Gates’ funding of genuine climate advocacy; the Gates Foundation is AWOL in the climate wars.

The leading climate groups, National Resource Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Waterkeepers, etc., receive virtually nothing from the world’s largest philanthropy. His investment history suggests that the climate crisis, for Gates and his cronies, is no more than an alibi for intrusive social control, “Great Reset”-scale surveillance, and massive science fiction geoengineering boondoggles, including his demented and terrifying vanity projects to spray the stratosphere with calcium chloride or seawater to slow warming, to deploy giant balloons to saturate our atmosphere with reflective particles to blot out the sun, or his perilous gambit of releasing millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in South Florida.

When we place these nightmare schemes in context alongside the battery of experimental vaccines he forces on 161 million African children annually, it’s pretty clear that Gates regards us all as his lab rats.

Gates has also heeded Kissinger’s advice, “Control oil and you control nations;” his energy holdings nowhere reflect his expressed antipathy for greenhouse gases. Gates’ personal investments in hydrocarbons include massive stakes in all the oil majors: Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell. He owns the world’s largest private jet company. His outsized commitment to coal includes giant investments in the dirtiest coal-generating fleets including the Canadian National Railway and CSX Richmond which is the largest coal transporter east of the Mississippi River. Gates is betting big on the future of carbon.

Gates’ energy-hungry data harvesting, processing and analytics centers are among the world’s fastest-growing sources of exploding energy demand. And, of course, Gates’ chemical/industrial agriculture enterprises are the antithesis of climate-friendly. His GMO corn requires heavy applications of fertilizers, pesticides, agro-chemicals made from natural gas and other fossil-fuel inputs. He effectively forced Africans, in Michael Pollan’s words, to “eat oil.” African farmers call Gates’ program “climate-stupid agriculture.”

Gates has learned to fatten himself on global crises, whether it’s pandemics, climate, famine or mass extinction. Climate change has given Gates an excuse to create monopolies over seed, food and agriculture.

In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $306 million in grants to promote high-yield sustainable agriculture among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The foundation’s plans included creation, through genetic manipulation, of high-production, drought-resistant dairy cows, and the development and proliferation of super crops resistant to climate change.

In other words, climate change was the guise for more mischievous geoengineering. Meanwhile, Gates’ ag policies are destroying our planet’s climate systems, pushing millions of species to extinction, desertifying the soil, destroying water systems and enriching the Poison Cartel.

So, a note to my fellow environmental leaders: Bill Gates is not our amigo! Furthermore, Gates has put climate reform in malodour with millions of Americans, who see his climate pretenses in context of his ambitions to control humanity and put an end to economic activity and personal freedom.

It’s largely Gates’ doing that half of America sees climate change as either a “Great Reset” flimflam to shift wealth upward, or a geoengineering boondoggle. It’s on them that they don’t recognize the serious peril of climate change. It’s on us that we seem deliberately blinded to the peril of Bill Gates.

Gates profits from all this confusion; the polarization of the climate debate paralyzes reform efforts thereby preserving the value of his carbon stakes. We all need to recognize who is really behind that Green mask!