Articolo molto interessante che esamina molti risvolti controversi della fondazione creata dal miliardario ed ex direttore dell’altrettanto controversa Microsoft. Accordi con multinazionali della biotecnologica, come Monsanto, e con i colossi dell’industria farmaceutica, che vengono pubblicizzati come “umanitari”, ottengono al tempo stesso un gran controllo sul mercato e permettono enormi guadagni, spesso a discapito dell’autonomia delle popolazioni povere. Ci si potrebbe chiedere quale sia lo scopo principale, quale l’effetto collaterale e se si possa parlare di una sorta di nuovo colonialismo mascherato da filantropia. Lo stesso Gates non ha mai nascosto di credere in un mercato privo di regole, nel quale l’unico obiettivo sia la massimizzazione dei profitti. C’è da chiedersi, però, se un sistema simile sia compatibile o in contrasto con il benessere delle persone.
Da Education Week:
The Gates Foundation’s Leveraged Philanthropy: Corporate Profit versus Humanity on Three Fronts
It’s hard to think of the Gates Foundation’s $26 billion leverage effort as “a little money”, especially since it’s been spread over the globe to gain access to vastly more resources than it contributes, including US tax dollars, the foreign exchange of emerging African nations, and United Nations funds for international development and world health.
Gates’ leveraged philanthropy model is a public-private partnership to improve the world, partly through targeted research support but principally through public advocacy and tax-free lobbying to influence government policy. The goal of these policies is often to explicitly support profitability for corporate investors, whose enterprises are seen by the Gates Foundation as advancing human good. However, maximum corporate profit and public good often clash when its projects are implemented.
For example, chemical giant Monsanto has partnered with the Gates Foundation, which works to suppress local seed exchanges and environmentally sustainable agricultural practices through its global agricultural charity work. Fraud-prone drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is a partner in the Foundation’s work to leverage its own relatively fractional contribution to vaccination efforts, so that it centrally controls enormous world funds for purchase, pricing, and delivery of vaccines for world public health. And in its US Education reform charity work, the Gates Foundation has increasingly shifted its funding to promote market domination by its British corporate education services partner, Pearson Education.
“C’è da chiedersi, però, se un sistema simile sia compatibile o in contrasto con il benessere delle persone.”
E rispondersi dopo 1.7 secondi, pensando alle evidenze :)
Sì. Ho fatto una domanda disonesta… La risposta era parecchio suggerita. :)
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