Creative CGIAR. Rich out for the poor - Bill Gates
Frank A. Hilario
December 12, 2009
In essence, Atlas said: "We need the rich creative minds of business working with the poor productive bodies of farmers to design and build a brave new world in the midst of climate change." Audacious, original. The words are mine but the thought is that of the one and only William "Bill" Gates, once CEO of Microsoft. I have been reading his two master pieces, his Davos speech, "A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century" (click to see complete text at microsoft.com), and his Washington statement at the CGIAR business meeting, "For a sustainable & resilient global agriculture - Bill Gates" (americanchronicle.com). Short of a hypertext with a hyperlink, I have connected the two declarations together even as they are separated by almost 2 years. The creative force behind Microsoft is now behind the plow.
"Agriculture will play a central role in addressing most challenges that the international community faces today," says Carlos Perez del Castillo, newly appointed Chair of the Consortium Board of the CGIAR. Bill Gates would qualify that to say (my emphasis):
(The Foundation) believes that a sustainable and resilient global agriculture R&D system, focused on smallholder productivity growth, is absolutely crucial for achieving the goal of hunger and poverty reduction in the developing world.
We must focus on the poor farmers, Bill Gates says, as they are the key to world agriculture. The Harvard dropout is now the aggie scholar. With his creative capitalism, the software is now behind the hardware. In the 1980s, he wanted "a computer on every desk in every home." Microsoft is software. "From a very young age, I thought software was magical," he tells Peter Jennings of ABC (abcnews.go.com). The PC world has been listening, so it has made Microsoft a castle of legends, with 60% of homes in the US now with PCs. As it were, he now wants a magic pot of peas in every poor home. Is the rest of the rich world listening?
I didn't give Bill Gates credit for innovation until he retired from Microsoft and he came up with entirely new software, a novel capitalist tool: creative capitalism. You can't buy it - you have to buy into it. Great! As far as I know, I'm the first and probably the only one saying his Davos speech in January 2008 and his Washington statement in December 2009 are linked in time and meaning much more than Word 2007 is linked to PowerPoint 2007 in the suite called Microsoft Office 2007. There are 2,756 words in the Davos speech and 574 words in the Washington statement, including titles. Assuming that you have read both manuscripts word for word, which I doubt, afterwards you have to read between the lines. That needs practice.
You have to intuit, otherwise, you will miss the capitalist boat. Somebody else has gone ahead and given creative capitalism a run for its money. Says Declan McCullagh, the Chief Political Correspondent of CNET News.com (25 January 2008, news.cnet.com): "Gates misses the point on 'creative capitalism'." He doesn't know what he's talking about? McCullagh says creative capitalism is simply a new name for an old idea: "corporate social responsibility" or "social caring." Well, I have bad news for CNET News.com: As it turns out, McCullagh is the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Creative capitalism, as Heidi Benson puts it (sfgate.com), is capitalism being "a driver for social change" and not simply doing corporate good; or, as Michael Kinsley puts it, "It´s using the idea of self-interest turning into the general interest." The corporate good becoming the social good. "Creative capitalism" is a new name for a new idea.
In his opening paragraph in the Davos speech, after saying he is going to make "a big career change" and retire as Chairman of Microsoft, he says, "Also, I'm learning how to give money away." He's a practicing Christian, isn't he? He not only memorizes but also practices the dictum that of those who have more, more are expected of them.
And now, with creative capitalism, we can expect more from those who have less.
Climate change happens years before and creative capitalism happens months before the Wall Street cash crash. Then US President Barack Obama comes out with his bailout plan. I hope it helps. From climate change, there can be no bailout plan; we cannot buy our way out - it would be too late. You can buy carbon credits, even on credit, but you cannot buy time. Now the capitalists that McCullagh is trying to defend have no choice: Do it or else! Climate change leaves them no choice. Bill Gates says, unfortunately "climate change will have the biggest effect on people who have done the least to cause it." And there are billions of them. (You don't believe in climate change? Go jump in the lake - and email me, if you can, that it isn't warmer.)
On the same day that McCullagh opens his big mouth to make Bill Gates' seem little, Michael Kanellos, Editor at Large of CNET News.com, says "On 'creative capitalism,' Gates gets it" (25 January 2008, news.cnet.com). I like Kanellos for being frank. He mentions the rewards of creative capitalism: if not profit, recognition and enjoyment. It cannot buy you the farm, but it can buy you someone´s wolf's ticket. He then quotes a most important part of Bill Gates' Davos speech:
This kind of creative capitalism matches business expertise with needs in the developing world to find markets that are already there, but are untapped. Sometimes market forces fail to make an impact in developing countries not because there's no demand, or even because money is lacking, but because we don't spend enough time studying the needs and requirements of that market.
Business expertise, demand, money, needs, and markets untapped - The business experts fail in or fear to tread on the Third World because they fail to study the resources and requirements of those markets; they only succeed in studying the resources and requirements of their businesses.
"Climate change will have the biggest effect on people who have done the least to cause it," Bill Gates says in Davos. "In particular the billion people who live on less than a dollar a day." So we must harness the power, "the genius of capitalism" so that "it benefits everyone," the poor included. In certain cases, the profit motive will have to give way to the prophet motive. The Protestant Ethic will have to give way to what I shall call and define here as The Christian Ethic: "As you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me."
Bill Gates says:
I like to call this idea creative capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.
Too many words for me; I´d like to summarize creative capitalism in 12 simple words:
Meeting the needs of the poor as market, for business or pleasure.
With the threat of global warming beyond tolerance, what we need is not simple corporate social responsibility. Whether the capitalists like it or not, this is where the genius of capitalism is being tested, in the crucible of climate change. We don't want history to record that Atlas shrugged in 2008 - we may not be able to write that history. The rich cannot ignore the billions of poor even if they don't want to look. I have found the great leveler, and it's called climate change.
The Bill Gates I know, starting more than 20 years ago from my reading second-hand PC magazines, is the antithesis of John Galt in Ayn Rand's monumental novel Atlas Shrugged; instead of striking out, Bill Gates wants to apply creative capitalist intelligence onto the twin problems at hand: poverty and climate change. Nobody ever thought of that before. Rich reaching out for the poor to generate more progress and not more poverty, to create a common bounty and not a singular mendicancy. We are all in this together. The poor deserve more, the rich no less.
In the Washington statement, Bill Gates announces "the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's intention to formally join the CGIAR" even before the "programmatic focus, funding arrangements, and membership issues" are discussed. From the world´s biggest software company, Bill Gates is buying into the consultative body of the world's biggest partnership for research and development in agriculture, the CGIAR, comprising a total of 15 centers based in different parts of the world:
Africa Rice Center (Benin)
Bioversity International (Rome)
CIAT, Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (Colombia)
CIFOR, Center for International Forestry Research (Indonesia)
CIMMYT, Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo (Mexico)
CIP, Centro Internacional de la Papa (Peru)
ICARDA, International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (Syria)
ICRISAT, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (India)
IFPRI, International Food Policy Research Institute (Washington DC)
IITA, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (Nigeria)
ILRI, International Livestock Research Institute (Kenya)
IRRI, International Rice Research Institute (Philippines)
IWMI, International Water Management Institute (Sri Lanka)
World Agroforestry Centre (Kenya)
WorldFish Center (Malaysia)
Now retired, Bill Gates wants to be where the inaction is. The world has largely ignored its better half; the Wall Street crash signaled that the cash crop is as important as the cash drop, if not more so.
The CGIAR System may or may not be larger than Microsoft when Bill Gates turned it around on its own axis in 1995 to confront the challenge of the Internet that it had largely ignored previously; consequently, Microsoft captured the Windows- (PC-) based billion-dollar worldwide market, and almost the Internet; and for decades he was the world´s richest man. Bill Gates is not only a major survivor; he is a magnificent planner and victor.
Now, the plot thickens!
In its own press release, the news is that the CGIAR Goliath has challenged himself:
To enhance the organization's ability to mobilize science for overcoming poverty and hunger and achieving ecosystem resilience in developing countries. The agreed reforms should help boost funding for priority research areas, simplify organizational structures, reduce transaction costs and give greater emphasis to development results.
Right! Get rid of the heavy armor and get down to brass tacks.
I single out the two most important words in the announcement: "Boost funding." You can't work out external change with an internal budget on a string, except if you're a software genius. On this note, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed to the CGIAR some $400 million for the next 5 years, or $80 million a year, which comes down to $1.54 million a week. It can't get any better than that! Bill Gates has indeed learned how to give away money.
And he has thought about how to spend all that money. In the Davos speech and in TIME, he gives examples of real-life, working creative capitalism:
(1) As "a way to bring technology to people who don't have access," Microsoft has donated more than $3 billion in cash and software.
(2) When Microsoft people "show how to use technology to create solutions," they have the greatest impact.
(3) A Dutch company shares the rights to a cholera vaccine in Vietnam and brings down the cost to less than $1 a dose, including delivery and cost of an immunization campaign.
(4) The US FDA gives a priority review for another drug of your company if you develop a new drug for a neglected disease like malaria or TV (Bill Gates, 31 July 2008, time.com).
(5) Another approach is to find ways to create methods for information to serve a wider circle of people.
(6) Governments can create market incentives for business to help the poor improve their lives, by setting policy and disbursing funds.
(7) The Fast Company (a magazine) offers awards for what it calls "social capitalism."
That is all market-driven, Bill Gates says, demand-driven. For people who have been left out of the global economy. Creative capitalism focuses on "what your company does best," so much so that "it takes the brainpower that makes life better for the richest, and dedicates it to improving the lives of everyone else."
Since I am more familiar with ICRISAT than any other CGIAR center, I shall now proceed to look at what this India-based institute under the leadership of Director General William Dar has done in the name of creative capitalism, in fact if not in name:
(1) Access: ICRISAT has donated to countries like the Philippines seeds of improved crops like sweet sorghum and peanut (groundnut) for location testing and seed production.
(2) Solutions: With its Adarsha watershed model, ICRISAT is showing the world how old technology can create new solutions to old/new problems of water scarcity.
(3) Sharing costs: With its Agri-Business Incubator, ICRISAT shares the cost of developing businesses and products with the poor as markets.
(4)Neglected area: For farmers who can hardly afford fertilizers, ICRISAT has come up with what it calls microdosing: 6 grams per hill, so small they have to measure it with a bottle cap.
(5)Knowledge: ICRISAT has nurtured its award-winning system of information sharing called Virtual Academy for the Semi-Arid Tropics, VASAT. The system is actively involved, among others, in information leadership among women volunteers in Addakal, Andhra Pradesh and training in drought preparedness among youth. VASAT is now being modeled in the Philippines (as the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture), and Afghanistan.
(6) Government as ally: The national and local governments of India have been quite proactive and reactive in formulating policies as well as in developing, assisting and funding ICRISAT-partnered projects for its target clienteles in the semi-arid tropics.
(7) Awards: I suggest that through its Agri-Science Park, following Bill Gates' exhortation, ICRISAT begin to encourage innovation by itself offering awards for social capitalism directly addressing the needs of the poor.
Going back to Bill Gates, this is his challenge to the CGIAR's own challenge to itself in partnership "to tackle hunger, poverty and climate change:"
We believe the reform process should lead (the CGIAR) centers back to their comparative advantage and empower them to deliver high-quality research and technological innovations. We believe that region- and country-specific technology adaptation and dissemination activities ought to be led by National Partners and that the centers ought to work in close partnership with them.
Thinking globally and thinking locally, to me, these words stand out: comparative advantage, empower, research, technological innovations, adaptation and dissemination. I note ever so gladly that the activities, whatever they are, are "to be led by National Partners." Bill Gates proposes, CGIAR disposes. What do the poor want? What do they need? From faraway Manila where I sit thousands of miles away from either India or Washington DC, the leadership of projects will be a bone of contention - or a bone of contentment - depending on whether the CGIAR will or will not "spend enough time studying the needs and requirements of its market" even as it comes out with any number of innovations.
Having been a worldwide reader and having worked within the most densely populated PhD universe on Planet Earth, the University of the Philippines Los Baños, for the last 34 years, I can easily say myself that half the world's scientists are not driven - they push. That effectively eliminates the poor who cannot afford the technology, or cannot articulate their demand for something else entirely. Supply-push vs demand-pull. The pushers have been consistently pushing the supply of their discoveries and not been driven to discover the demand. Is science our salvation or not? This half neglect of science helps explain why is it that while we have always Christ with us, also we have always the poor.
Creative capitalism is out to change that; if inadvertently, Bill Gates is out to reform the CGIAR even as it reforms itself. "The end-result of the reform," he says, "ought to be a CGIAR system that can once again attract 'the best and the brightest' scientists to devote their careers to the cause of improving developing-country agriculture," focused on "the poor producers and consumers across the developing world."
I love it when everything comes together for the good of those who love the poor. This is the climate change I´d like to see enveloping the whole creative CGIAR.
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