{"id":22345,"date":"2021-04-06T11:53:23","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T10:53:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/?p=22345"},"modified":"2021-04-23T12:04:30","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T11:04:30","slug":"bill-gates-is-the-biggest-private-owner-of-farmland-in-the-united-states-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/bill-gates-is-the-biggest-private-owner-of-farmland-in-the-united-states-why\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Gates is the biggest private owner of farmland in the United States. Why?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nick Estes – The Guardian, 5 April 2021 | Source<\/a><\/p>\n

Gates has been buying land like it\u2019s going out of style. He now owns more farmland than my entire Native American nation<\/em><\/p>\n

Bill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub him \u201cFarmer Bill\u201d this year? The third richest man on the planet doesn\u2019t have a green thumb. Nor does he put in the back-breaking labor humble people do to grow our food and who get far less praise for it. That kind of hard work isn\u2019t what made him rich. Gates\u2019 achievement, according to the report, is that he\u2019s largest private owner of farmland in the US. A 2018 purchase of 14,500 acres of prime eastern Washington farmland \u2013 which is traditional Yakama territory \u2013 for $171m helped him get that title.<\/p>\n

In total, Gates owns approximately 242,000 acres of farmland with assets totaling<\/a> more than $690m. To put that into perspective, that\u2019s nearly the size of Hong Kong and twice the acreage of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, where I\u2019m an enrolled member. A white man owns more farmland than my entire Native nation!<\/p>\n

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

Land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race and class. The relationship to land \u2013 who owns it, who works it and who cares for it \u2013 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 \u2013 which amounts to 10% of US land \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The billionaire media mogul Ted Turner epitomizes such disparities. He owns 2m acres and has the world\u2019s 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\u2019s ranchland<\/a> 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 \u201cpermanent home\u201d<\/a> for Lakota people.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 with big payouts in a for-profit economy seeking \u201cgreen\u201d solutions.<\/p>\n

Our era is dominated by the ultra-rich, the climate crisis and a burgeoning green capitalism. And Bill Gates\u2019 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<\/a> a \u201cglobal green revolution\u201d to help poor farmers mitigate climate change. What expertise in climate science or agriculture Gates possesses beyond being filthy rich is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n

READ FULL ARTICLE<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nick Estes – The Guardian, 5 April 2021 | Source Gates has been buying land like it\u2019s going out of style. He now owns more farmland than my entire Native American nation Bill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub him \u201cFarmer Bill\u201d this year? The third richest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-the-news","category-news","thematic_area-corporate-free-future","thematic_area-philantrocapitalism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/DDCattura.jpg","wpml_translations":[{"language_code":"en","post_id":22345,"original":true}],"custom_fields":{"_edit_lock":["1619175736:2"],"_edit_last":["2"],"_wpml_media_featured":["1"],"_wpml_media_duplicate":["1"],"_thumbnail_id":["22346"],"_wp_old_date":["2021-04-23"],"wpl_sidebar_option":["on"],"wpl_featured_image_post":["off"],"wpl_share_buttons":["on"],"_wpml_media_has_media":["1"]},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9KkNM-5Op","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22354,"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22345\/revisions\/22354"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/navdanyainternational.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}