The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  As it happens, one such legitimate 2010 Guardian story – a blog post framed politely in relation to Gates, wondering if the foundation might be a tad, er, ‘hopelessly naive’ – discussed how Gates had clearly and deliberately got into bed with two of the world’s nastiest multinational agribusiness giants: Monsanto, which sells agrichemicals and is a leader in the development of genetically modified (GM) crops, and Cargill, a vast conglomerate involved in the production and distribution of food and fertiliser. The foundation was apparently working with Cargill on ‘developing the soya value chain’ in Mozambique, a phrase that the journalist recognised from corporate rhetoric about introducing GM seed; and the foundation had bought $23 million-worth of Monsanto shares, adding to its existing shareholding. Guardian environment editor John Vidal couldn’t help but ask:

  Does Gates know it is in danger of being caught up in their reputations, or does the foundation actually share their corporate vision of farming and intend to work with them more in future?

  The foundation has never been upfront about its vision for agriculture in the world’s poorest countries, nor the role of controversial technologies like GM. But perhaps it could start the debate here?

  In the meantime, it could tell us how many of its senior agricultural staff used to work for Monsanto or Cargill?109

  Vidal’s question about the possible direct personal connections between the foundation and agribusiness was not meant to be rhetorical, but it was never directly answered, nor was it taken up elsewhere.

  Philanthropic foundations get an extraordinarily uncritical press – not surprising, perhaps, when they may splash some cash around a struggling newspaper; but given that a US foundation such as Gates keeps vast amounts of its namesake’s fortune out of the public tax coffers, and is in a position to advance its pet policy agendas to an extent that would be the envy of most governments, you might imagine it would be more closely scrutinised. In general, media commentary may gripe about where Bill Gates got his money – through a ruthless monopoly on computer operating software – but it rarely does anything other than praise how he has spent it.

  The Gates Foundation’s agenda, its vision, on agriculture has emerged clearly enough for those who choose to look for it. In 2006 it joined forces with the Rockefeller Foundation to establish the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), promoting scientific and technological solutions to increasing agricultural production, very much in partnership with companies such as Monsanto. Gates has also funded GM and other agri-science research in Western universities and institutions.110

  So-called ‘green revolutions’ have been hotly debated in terms of their impact in countries such as Mexico and India, where they may have boosted production but also driven poor farmers into debt and off the land – in India, notoriously, into suicide by their thousands – because of the expense of repeatedly having to purchase the new high-tech inputs to seed and nourish increasingly exhausted soil. The respected Indian journalist P. Sainath has documented an incredible 270,940 farm suicides between 1995 and 2011, even while India’s farm population has been falling, and ‘despite an orchestrated (and expensive) campaign in the media and other forums by governments and major seed corporations to show that their efforts had made things a lot better’.111 A 2005 American PBS documentary looked at the incredible spate of ‘suicides by pesticide’, and linked the phenomenon to GM promotion by, yes, Cargill and Monsanto.112

  This has not deterred the foundations from pursuing more of the same in Africa, encouraging farmers to invest to produce higher yields of cash-crops that will integrate them into local and global markets. Even the idea, and reality, of Western companies buying African agricultural land meets with the approval of Bill Gates himself: ‘Many of these land deals are beneficial, and it would be too bad if some were held back because of Western groups’ ways of looking at things.’ (It is a familiar and clever rhetorical strategy to attribute resistance to western corporate interference to ‘Western groups’, suggesting that Africans themselves have no problem with such ‘progress’ – though this is untrue, as we shall see.) Gates continued: ‘When capital is put into Africa, that’s a good sign.’113 Even, that is, when the capital is ‘put in’ to take land out of African hands, forcing local farmers into dependence on Western owners and Western-supplied technology.

  Make no mistake, this development has not escaped Bono’s attention. On the contrary, he and ONE have embraced the AGRA ‘sustainable agriculture’ agenda, and Bono himself was one of the initiative’s frontmen at the G8’s latest re-branding exercise, a ‘Global Food Summit’ hosted by the US at Camp David in May 2012. Employing the techno-positivism beloved of Gates and their like, Bono told an interviewer: ‘You know, no one wants to see those extended [sic] bellies … Hunger is a ridiculous thing. And we know what to do in order to fix it. There’s, you know, these whole new approaches to agriculture to increase productivity.’114 Bono was not called upon to specify what ‘these whole new approaches’ might be; his task, in any case, is not to make the technical case for GM and chemical-laden farming, but to mutter the emollient words that will assure audiences that such developments must surely be for the good of Africa’s poor.

  And what’s good for Africans, Bono added in the same interview, is good for America. Africans ‘are future consumers for the United States. The president [Obama] is talking business. This is good.’115 The idea of ‘trade not aid’ to help the ‘entrepreneurial poor’ is of course attractive on the face of it. As Bono said, echoing almost word for word his earlier recollection of Obama’s rhetorical priorities: ‘It’s partnership, it’s not the old paternalism. These are sort of horizontal relationships, not vertical ones.’116

  Unsurprisingly, given the resources available, there are a great many Africans willing to be horizontal partners in this new ‘revolution’ with Gates, Bono and Western states and companies. But what is more surprising, and inspiring, is that so many people are willing to stand against it. When that same G8 meeting announced a ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ – an alliance that included the G8, African governments, and forty-five companies ranging from Unilever to the alcoholic drinks giant Diageo to Monsanto – a number of campaigners were quick to spot what was going on. Oxfam, which had been such a reliable ally of Bono in 2005, was no longer on board: its press release was headlined, sarcastically, ‘G8 food security alliance answers question hungry people have not asked’ – the new ‘answer’ being heightened involvement by multinational companies. Oxfam saw the ‘new alliance’ not only as a way of getting corporations in on the act, but as a diversion, as the G8 continued to ignore old promises it had made of providing aid: the 2009 G8 meeting at L’Aquila, Italy, had promised $22 billion in increased aid, much of which still hadn’t appeared. Now, in a crisis-ridden global economy, aid pledges were being sidelined in favour of this new ‘partnership’. Oxfam’s Lamine Ndiaye was critical of the corporate agenda: ‘Smallholder farmers need the freedom to pursue their own growing strategies, not take overly-prescriptive tips on farming from G8 leaders, or one size fits all technologies from far away CEOs.’117 Other groups and alliances from African civil society had already joined in the condemnation, with an ‘open letter’ statement in advance of the summit:

  If the private sector is to play a productive role, there needs to be strong evidence that these kinds of partnerships can actually deliver for small-scale producers. For the initiative to truly be an alliance, women small-scale producers, youth, and pastoralists should have been consulted in the drafting of the plan. Instead, G8 leaders are merely asking African governments for a rubber stamp. Donors increasingly claim to target the small-scale producers who make up the majority of the world’s poor, but they are rarely consulted, and these resources seldom actually reach them.118

  As with other issues, there is room for legitimate disagreement about the role of GM and increased market integration in the development of African agriculture and the relief of hunger. It is striking,
however, that yet again Bono finds himself on the side representing Western ‘philanthrocapitalism’ and the interests of multinational companies seeking to expand their businesses, and their profits, in the fertile soil of the global poor.

  Even some of those who give Gates and Bono the benefit of the doubt believe they are getting it wrong when pursuing a new Green Revolution in the wake of the failure of previous ones. Kavita N. Ramdas is an Indian-born researcher in ‘social entrepreneurship’ at Stanford University who has worked with the Gates Foundation – her CV, indeed, is a resumé of good causes that even Bono would envy. Ramdas has said that the foundation’s ‘good intentions’ are turned into bad policy in this area because of the obsession with ‘measurable impacts’, and certain ideological blinkers:

  At the root of the difference in approach is what we believe causes hunger or poverty. If you think that people are poor because there is not enough food, then you will concentrate on making measurable gains, in growing more food, and more nutritious food, more efficiently. But if you think that people are poor because of problems with equality, with access, with education, then developing a concrete strategy is far more difficult; these things are not readily measurable.119

  The emphasis on production, efficiency, things you can measure, is in some ways understandable. How else can you know what you are achieving? When Bono spoke at the World Bank in November 2012, he was asked what was the most important thing ‘we’ could do to end extreme poverty; he replied, ‘We need open data … We need better data.’120 But the problem with ‘measurable impacts’ is the things that are left out – not only the factors Ramdas mentions, but also all the alternative approaches that are ignored.121 As researchers such as those at the Institute of Food and Development Policy have long argued, the problem in Africa is not a shortage of food, but food systems that have been distorted by the push to export crops, by the needs of local and foreign elites, and by promotion of technological solutions that push farmers and their knowledge out of decision-making.122

  Why, in this context, and keeping Ramdas’s words in mind, do Gates and Bono ‘believe’ that the problem is too little food, and ‘think’ that agriculture-on-steroids is the answer? To which one might answer, people mostly ‘believe’ what they want to believe, and ‘think’ what it suits them to think. For Bono to continue to ally himself with the sorts of government and company with which he had stood side-by-side since the late 1990s, and for him to continue to be a useful front to their interests, he had to speak the language of equality, access and education, but also to ‘think’ that the interests and desires of the rich and powerful happily coincide with the making of a better world that would finally deliver upon those values.

  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU: BONO TODAY

  In truth, in recent years Bono may have begun to outlive his usefulness as a fashionable accessory to power. If anything, he has probably been too loyal to the forces and figures that were so widely discredited in the post-2007 global crisis – to the Rubins, Clintons and Browns who opened the door to the financial catastrophe, to the Bushes and Blairs who unleashed hell on Third World countries. A little more distance, even in retrospect, might have preserved some of his credibility. But then he wouldn’t be Bono. A decade ago, one might arguably have suggested that he stood outside the system, bringing some moral authority to bear on questions of global poverty and disease and what to do about them. Today, as a high-profile multimillionaire investor, as part of a band of notorious tax-avoiders who assured us that financial innovation was the route to success, as the man who dressed a bunch of multinational corporations in his favoured shade of (RED), as the Blairite who applauded when the world’s war-mongers pretended to lavish some relief on a few poor countries while saddling them with more neoliberal conditions – today, he is hard to see as anything other than one of Them, the elite 1 per cent of 1 per cent.

  This perception of him is increasingly widespread, which means that, from the point of view of those who would use him, Bono has perhaps become a too-easy target, the villain of a thousand online comment threads. For every Mike Huckabee – who cited Bono’s great work, and his great love for the USA, from the platform at the 2012 Republican National Convention – there’s a Sinead O’Connor mocking his tax status and calling him “Bozo”.

  It probably doesn’t help that as of early 2013 he appears to have run out of steam artistically. Bono‘s pet musical-theatre project with The Edge, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, was a logistical fiasco, pilloried especially for its music – and will need to run for several years on Broadway (its only home thus far) just to pay its debts.123 It may eventually achieve such a run, thanks to its special effects and the touristic pull of the spidery franchise, but it is unlikely ever to be removed from its already-honoured place, earned via accidents, injuries, at least one major lawsuit and month after month of ‘previews’, as one of Broadway’s greatest ever messes.

  It would be unwise, a dangerous hostage to fortune, to rule out an artistic comeback for Bono. Sensible people may legitimately differ on how long it has been since a good U2 album – is the time best measured in years or decades? – and indeed on the question of Bono’s contribution to the band’s best material. (In his recent lyrics, a noted critic writes, ‘every platitude yields to an obscurantist pretension and back again’.124) In mid 2012 he appeared on an Irish television talk-show and suggested that new U2 music was being delayed from reaching the public by Edge’s unjustified doubts about his own genius; Bono added, with typical (if somewhat wearing) self-deprecating charm, that he himself suffered from the opposite flaw, excessive confidence in his genius. It is very difficult to spend any extended time wading through his interviews and writings and then to disagree with the latter assessment: for all his reflexive self-put-downs, Bono is, in his own mind, part of an exceedingly small rock pantheon of true greatness. There is every possibility that, in his early fifties, he still has work ahead of him, with or without U2, that will compel many others to agree.

  A renewal of his artistic standing might also improve his political profile. But it’s not like he hasn’t been working on the latter: he remains, despite his setbacks, a favoured symbol of soft power for the global elite when it gathers. His campaign, ONE, is nothing like the mass movement that it pretends to be, but it is present and visible, getting signatures on petitions and lobbying not only in Washington or at the G8, but in various lower-level parliaments and councils in Europe and Africa, where it now boasts offices in Nigeria and South Africa. Politically, Bono is not a ‘fraud’, not in the sense that word is usually understood. The oft-heard assertion that his humanitarian work is a means of garnering free publicity for his profitable music is a half-truth, at best, that significantly underestimates the scale and below-the-radar detail of his advocacy. He is not lacking in genuine commitment, even if the demands of his half-billion-dollar rock band and two-billion-dollar private-equity fund may intrude on his campaigning. (His physical frailty, in the form of back problems, has also intruded on all these activities.) He has given a lot of his time and built up political and organisational nous: his work and his campaigns are linked to real achievements, from marginal debt relief to AIDS drugs to the high visibility of African poverty in Western celebrity circles. It is not the existence of those achievements that is questioned in these pages: it is their meaning, and the interests they represent.

  Bono and his supporters have, for example, pointed proudly to the rather dramatic rates of economic growth taking place over the last decade in several poor African countries where his agenda has been active.125 (You might imagine the fate of the Celtic Tiger would make them wary of very rapid growth rates, but apparently not.) However, the vision of Afro-optimism is punctured once you look closely at those numbers, as even the UN acknowledges: a 2012 report shows that ‘the current pattern of growth is neither inclusive nor sustainable’ – that it is growth that is unequally shared and largely fuelled by the extraction of quickly depleting natural resources.126 That sor
t of ‘development’ is good news for someone, but that someone is not the vast majority of Africa’s poor.

  The phenomenon of Bono is profoundly linked to efforts over recent decades by Western leaders, both in and out of political office, to project themselves as humanitarian visionaries. (Two of Bono’s best political pals, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, both have global charitable foundations in their names; both have got money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.) Various endeavours, from violent interventions in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia to the neoliberal restructuring of whole economies in the developing world, have been portrayed as arising from a desire to better the lives of various poor and oppressed peoples, while in fact serving the strategic and economic goals of the West. This is not to be conspiratorial, nor to fail to recognise that there are internal divisions among Western elites, so that they don’t always speak with one voice on such matters. Nonetheless, it has become an important part of the legitimation of the neoliberal project, often as destructive to the lives, circumstances and democratic voices of people in ‘rich’ developed countries as in the global South, to portray it as a drive for a more just globalised system that will value, include and reward the very people who were beggared by previous versions of imperialism. That’s where Bono comes in.