Bill Gates' donation of USD 25 million for 'biofortification'—breeding crops with higher levels of micronutrients—is an effort to provide a life-saving shot to the dying family of public-sector international agricultural research institutes. Ironically, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the much heralded institution responsible for ushering in the green revolution technology, is now seriously struggling to keep itself alive. Faced with huge staff layoffs, drastic reductions in research programmes, declining research output and vanishing financial commitments, the CGIAR is contemplating a series of mergers to stay afloat. Gasping for breath, the institute is even considering the merger of two of its premier institutes—the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) at Los Banos, in the Philippines, and the International Crop Research Centre for Wheat and Maize (CIMMYT), in Mexico City.
Such has been the level of desperation that the CGIAR has deviated from its stated position of working for the public good when in 2002 it decided to take on board Syngenta Foundation – an agency established by Syngenta, a global leader in agribusiness. The company's primary business is crop protection bio-technology and high-value commercial seeds, whose sales in the year 2000 were USD 6.9 billion. This major shift in CGIAR's known public image had prompted the group's committee of non-government organisations to freeze its relationship with the organisation. The NGOs believe that the CGIAR has abdicated its responsibility of ensuring food security for the world's poor by bringing in technologies that lead to economically viable and sustainable farming systems. Instead, the CGIAR is evolving into a service centre for corporate interests.
The decade of the 1970s was the period when CGIAR's green revolution technology, supported by appropriate national farm policies, ushered in food self-sufficiency for many of the chronically food deficit countries. Two decades later, in the 1990s, intensive agriculture had begun to take its toll. Apart from the deterioration of the environment that it unleashed, there were other consequences too. Thousands of farmers all over the world, from the technology-sophisticated and subsidy-rich United States, European Union, Japan and Canada to the poor and marginalised majority of the world in India, China, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Mexico, the Philippines and many other countries, have been plunged into a crisis of sustenance. In the poorer countries, the commercial control that agribusinesses have established over the production process has pushed small and medium farmers over the brink of security and into a vortex of mounting debt, leading eventually to the loss of their meagre pieces of land.
All the while, the CGIAR has remained a mute spectator. Not even once did it find it worthwhile to look into the real causes behind this spate of agrarian bankruptcies. If anything it is tainted by association, because the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), one of the organisations funded by CGIAR and which was a beneficiary of Bill Gates' largesse, has concentrated its energies on pushing market reforms in the guise of "sustainably meeting the food needs of the developing world" (as its mission statement says). IFPRI is at the forefront of the frantic campaign to dismantle national policies that had propelled countries to take advantage of the green revolution technology. Such has been its descent into business fetishism that it even wants to bring relief within the purview of the market.