[News] Bill Gates is the biggest private owner of farmland in the United States. Why?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Othern 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Othern> 



  Bill Gates is the biggest private owner of farmland in the United
  States. Why?

Nick Estes - April 5, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub 
<https://landreport.com/2021/01/bill-gates-americas-top-farmland-owner/> 
him “Farmer Bill” this year? The third richest man on the planet 
doesn’t have a green thumb. Nor does he put in the back-breaking labor 
humble people do to grow our food and who get for far less praise for 
it. That kind of hard work isn’t what made him rich. Gates’ 
achievement, according to the report, is that he’s largest private 
owner of farmland in the US. A 2018 purchase of 14,500 acres of prime 
eastern Washington farmland – which is traditional Yakima territory 
– for $171m helped him get that title.

In total, Gates owns approximately 242,000 acres of farmland with assets 
totaling 
<https://www.agriculture.com/farm-management/farm-land/bill-gates-is-about-to-change-the-way-amer-ca-farms> 
more than $690m. To put that into perspective, that’s nearly the size 
of Hong Kong and twice the acreage of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, where 
I’m an enrolled member. A white man owns more farmland than my entire 
Native nation!

The United States is defined by the excesses of its ruling class. But 
why do a handful of people own so much land?

Land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race 
and class. The relationship to land – who owns it, who works it and 
who cares for it – reflects obscene levels of inequality and legacies 
of colonialism and white supremacy in the United States, and also the 
world. Wealth accumulation always goes hand-in-hand with exploitation 
and dispossession. In this country, enslaved Black labor first built US 
wealth atop stolen Native land. The 1862 Homestead Act opened up 270m 
acres of Indigenous territory – which amounts to 10% of US land – 
for white settlement. Black, Mexican, Asian, and Native people, of 
course, were categorically excluded from the benefits of a federal 
program that subsidized and protected generations of white wealth.

The billionaire media mogul Ted Turner epitomizes such disparities. He 
owns 2m acres and has the world’s largest privately owned buffalo 
herd. Those animals, which are sacred to my people and were nearly 
hunted to extinction by settlers, are preserved today on nearly 200,000 
acres of Turner’s ranchland 
<https://www.tedturner.com/turner-ranches/turner-ranch-map/bad-river-ranch-south-dakota/> 
within the boundaries of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty territory in the 
western half of what is now the state of South Dakota, land that was 
once guaranteed by the US government to be a “permanent home” 
<https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=42&page=transcript> 
for Lakota people.

The gun and the whip may not accompany land acquisitions this time 
around. But billionaire class assertions that they are philosopher kings 
and climate-conscious investors who know better than the original 
caretakers are little more than ruses for what amounts to a 21st century 
land grab – with big payouts in a for-profit economy seeking 
“green” solutions.

Our era is dominated by the ultra-rich, the climate crisis and a 
burgeoning green capitalism. And Bill Gates’ new book How to Avoid a 
Climate Disaster positions himself as a thought leader in how to stop 
putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and how to fund what he has 
called elsewhere <https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=162153235282577> a 
“global green revolution” to help poor farmers mitigate climate 
change. What expertise in climate science or agriculture Gates possesses 
beyond being filthy rich is anyone’s guess.

When pressed during a book discussion on Reddit about why he’s 
gobbling up so much farmland, Gates claimed 
<https://agfundernews.com/bill-gates-tells-reddit-why-hes-acquired-so-much-farmland.html>, 
“It is not connected to climate [change].” The decision, he said, 
came from his “investment group.” Cascade Investment, the firm 
making these acquisitions, is controlled 
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-mans-job-make-bill-gates-richer-1411093811> 
by Gates. And the firm said 
<https://www.agriculture.com/farm-management/farm-land/bill-gates-is-about-to-change-the-way-amer-ca-farms> 
it’s “very supportive of sustainable farming”. It also is a 
shareholder in the plant-based protein companies Beyond Meat and 
Impossible Foods as well as the farming equipment manufacturer John 
Deere. His firm’s largest farmland acquisition happened in 2017, when 
it acquired 61 farming properties from a Canadian investment firm to the 
tune of $500m 
<https://landreport.com/2021/01/bill-gates-americas-top-farmland-owner/>.

Arable land is not just profitable. There’s a more cynical 
calculation. Investment firms are making the argument farmlands will 
meet “carbon-neutral” 
<https://www.ft.com/content/d158779e-368b-482b-9734-b06cf7fde382> 
targets for sustainable investment portfolios while anticipating an 
increase of agricultural productivity and revenue. And while Bill Gates 
frets about eating cheeseburgers in his book – for the amount of 
greenhouse gases the meat industry produces largely for the consumption 
of rich countries – his massive carbon footprint has little to do with 
his personal diet and is not forgivable by simply buying more land to 
sequester more carbon.

The world’s richest 1% emit double the carbon of the poorest 50%, an 
2020 Oxfam study 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/21/worlds-richest-1-cause-double-co2-emissions-of-poorest-50-says-oxfam> 
found. According to Forbes/, /the world’s billionaires saw their 
wealth swell by $1.9tn in 2020 
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/12/16/the-worlds-billionaires-have-gotten-19-trillion-richer-in-2020/?sh=3fe26be87386>, 
while more than 22 million US workers 
<https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/17/economy/job-losses-women-pandemic/index.html> 
(mostly women) lost their jobs.

Like wealth, land ownership is becoming concentrated into fewer and 
fewer hands, resulting in a greater push for monocultures and more 
intensive industrial farming techniques to generate greater returns. One 
per cent of the world’s farms control 70% of the world’s farmlands, 
one report found 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/24/farmland-inequality-is-rising-around-the-world-finds-report?fbclid=IwAR2jnk1ETI2U3MKe_NO3C_pttjruVM6pWlLpvRsTI1EosPscunfz9u3Uk-E>. 
The biggest shift in recent years from small to big farms was in the US.

The principal danger of private farmland owners like Bill Gates 
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/billgates> is not their 
professed support of sustainable agriculture often found in 
philanthropic work – it’s the monopolistic role they play in 
determining our food systems and land use patterns.

Small farmers and Indigenous people are more cautious with the use of 
land. For Indigenous caretakers, land use isn’t premised on a return 
of investments; it’s about maintaining the land for the next 
generation, meeting the needs of the present, and a respect for the 
diversity of life. That’s why lands still managed by Indigenous 
peoples worldwide protect and sustain 80% of the world’s biodiversity 
<http://www.fao.org/indigenous-peoples/news-article/en/c/1029002/>, 
practices anathema to industrial agriculture.

The average person has nothing in common with mega-landowners like Bill 
Gates or Ted Turner. The land we all live on should not be the sole 
property of a few. The extensive tax avoidance by these titans of 
industry will always far exceed their supposed charitable donations to 
the public. The “billionaire knows best” mentality detracts from the 
deep-seated realities of colonialism and white supremacy, and it ignores 
those who actually know best how to use and live with the land. These 
billionaires have nothing to offer us in terms of saving the planet – 
unless it’s our land back.

  *

    Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an
    assistant professor in the American studies department at the
    University of New Mexico. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation
    <https://therednation.org/>, an Indigenous resistance organization.
    He is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing
    Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of
    Indigenous Resistance
    <https://www.versobooks.com/books/2953-our-history-is-the-future>
    (Verso, 2019)


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