The Gates Foundation and its Nairobi-based agriculture initiative paid public relations consultants to remove critical content from AGRA’s Wikipedia description.
On January 14, the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) exposed a wide-ranging black-hat image-laundering scheme that implicated government and philanthropic leaders. Among the culprits, which included the Qatari government, were the Gates Foundation and its signature Green Revolution agriculture initiative, the Nairobi-based AGRA. The Guardian covered the story but barely mentioned the Gates and AGRA connections.
Journalist Claire Wilmot found that these influential institutions had hired Portland Communications, a UK-based public relations firm founded by Tim Allan, until recently the communications director for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, to surreptitiously edit Wikipedia web pages about its clients to enhance their presentation and remove potentially embarrassing or damaging content. This was in direct violation of the ubiquitous public encyclopedia’s terms-of-use, which encourages public contributions to its web pages but prohibits interested parties, and their paid consultants, from editing articles about themselves.
According to TBIJ, Gates and AGRA both contracted with Portland Communications, which hired a consultant to use multiple fake “sock-puppet” email accounts to evade Wikipedia’s security measures. TBIJ, which interviewed former Portland employees involved in the schemes and identified one fraudulent network of accounts, pinpointed specific edits to the Wikipedia page for AGRA that sought to expunge information critical of the controversial initiative.
In one edit, the hired consultant eliminated an existing section on “evaluations,” which included some published critiques from organizations such as the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and the Oakland Institute. He also removed the reference to my 2020 Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University assessment demonstrating that AGRA was failing to meet its own goals to double productivity and incomes for 30 million small-farm households while halving food insecurity by 2020. On the Wikipedia page, the contractor instead changed AGRA’s goals deadline to 2021 so the time hadn’t run out on meeting them, substituted less ambitious goals, and removed a section on “evaluations.”
I was not surprised. I had undertaken the assessment because I could find no publicly available evaluation of this billion-dollar initiative to “catalyze a productivity revolution” in Africa with the promotion of commercial seeds and fertilizers. This was not the first time AGRA had tried to impugn my work and that of other critics. When my study first came out, AGRA contacted Tufts University in an attempt to question the integrity of my work. To their credit, University officials reviewed the study and determined it to be rigorously designed, objectively conducted, and transparently reported. They also conveyed to AGRA that the University is committed to the principles of academic freedom to engage in, appropriately interpret, and openly disseminate the results of research, including those that may be controversial, without fear of censorship, discipline, or intimidation. (The exchange is summarized here.)
With the rise of internet search engines driven by artificial intelligence, Wikipedia’s objective summary pages are a primary source for AI’s own summaries, which now often appear at the top of search results. Powerful governments, corporations, and individuals have taken notice, leading to PR schemes such as Portland Communications’ to remove critical material.
To Wikipedia’s credit, AGRA’s edited page was reverted after TBIJ exposed the violations of its terms of use. But this one secret network is likely only the tip of a large iceberg of efforts to put a chill into public criticisms of the powerful.
“Gates and AGRA have once again shown that they are more concerned with their images than they are with recognizing the failures of their Green Revolution policies and changing course to support agroecology,” said AFSA coordinator Million Belay....
Please read the full article, with screenshots of AGRA's edits, on The Elephant.