American Democracy At The CrossroadsAuthoritarianismClimate Change

Gates To A Global Empire: A Global Citizen’s Report

By Vandana Shiva

Read the report here.

About the report

The report gathers evidence and throws light on the dangers of philanthrocapitalism, which is boosting the corporate takeover of our seed, agriculture, food, knowledge and global health systems, manipulating information and eroding our democracies.  Over the last 30 years it has emerged as a major force, able to derail the international agenda and push our future and the future of our planet towards extinction and ecological collapse.

Throughout the   report, we see how the patterns of technocratic solutionism, powered by an unholy alliance between big-capital, science and technology institutions and states, are embodied by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and  put into accelerated action through philanthropic development. Through its various initiatives, sub-organizations, development schemes and funding mechanisms, the Gates weave an intricate web of wide-ranging power and influence, obscured through all its separate strands. The report addresses a large part of this web of power. A power which deliberately ignores the past failures of the very technologies they wish to push, and which disregards any potential problem their initiatives might yield, power focused primarily on profit and market expansion.

This democratic emergency is analysed in detail by leading experts and civil society movements’ leaders, such as Vandana Shiva, Farida Akhter, José Esquinas Alcàzar, Nicoletta Dentico, Fernando Cabaleiro, Seth Itzkan, Dru Jay, Satish Kumar, Jonathan Latham, Aidé Jiménez-Martínez, Chito Medina, Zahra Moloo, Silvia Ribeiro, Adelita San Vicente, Ali Tapsoba, Jim Thomas, Timothy A. Wise. The report counts on the participation of international organisations and national movements, such as ETC Group, Community Alliance for Global Justice/AGRA Watch, Soil4Climate, Bioscience Resource, GM Watch, Naturaleza de Derechos – Argentina, Masipag – Philippines, Terre à Vie – Burkina Faso, UBINIG – Bangladesh.

RESOURCES

Kindred’s Food and Farming resource list

Kindred articles on FOOD are here.

Kindred articles on sustainable living are here.

Kindred articles on farming are here.

WHY USE ORGANIC SEED? A Kindred feature listing our top ten organic seed catalogs/companies.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker, activist,
feminist, philosopher of science, writer and science policy advocate, is the founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in India and President of Navdanya International.

Trained as a Physicist at the University of Punjab, she completed her Ph.D. on the ‘Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory’ from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India.

In 1982 she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), an independent research institute that addresses the most significant problems of ecology of our times, and two years later, Navdanya (‘nine seeds’) the movement in defense of biodiversity and the contributions made to the climate, environment and society by small farmers.

The recipient of many awards, including the Right Livelihood Award, (the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) and the Sydney Peace Prize, she has been named among the top five “Most Important People in Asia” by AsiaWeek.

She is a prolific writer and author of numerous books and serves on the board of the International Forum on Globalization, and member of the executive committee of the World Future Council.

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