Okay: As far as I can tell, the only important thing to know about Bill Gates since that thing he did once is that he’s got a lot of money, and he believes that makes him wise and important. Naturally when he tells other people how they should run their lives, they would do well to shut up and listen. In his fantasy world.
As far as I can tell, the people running the Bolivian government think that the only thing the people running the Venezuelan government did wrong, is that they didn’t take socialism far enough.
What do these things have to do with each other, you ask? Heh.
Why I Would Raise Chickens
By Bill Gates
If you were living on $2 a day, what would you do to improve your life?
That’s a real question for the nearly 1 billion people living in extreme poverty today. There’s no single right answer, of course, and poverty looks different in different places. But through my work with the foundation, I’ve met many people in poor countries who raise chickens, and I have learned a lot about the ins and outs of owning these birds. (As a city boy from Seattle, I had a lot to learn!) It’s pretty clear to me that just about anyone who’s living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens.
In fact, if I were in their shoes, that’s what I would do—I would raise chickens.
Here’s why:
He then proceeds to recite some platitudes about chickens which, while not untrue, don’t reflect any great depth of understanding on the subject of poultry in general or why giving a shit-ton of chickens away to people who don’t currently raise them makes any sense. Hey, he’s Bill Gates. He has people who can think for him if he wants it done.
So he started a project called Coop Dreams and announced his intention to uplift two dozen hellhole nations “from Burkina Faso to Bolivia” by inundating their rural areas with artisanal chickens lovingly raised by PNW hipsters. Apparently he didn’t bother to check this with the nations in question first. I don’t know how it went with those other nations, but the Bolivians said…
Cluck you: Bolivia rejects Bill Gates’ donation of hens
Yup, they said we don’t need your paltry poultry, because…
Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.
Uh huh. Please note that this is a production statistic coming from a spokesman for a ministry in a socialist government, which means it’s a damn lie. What he’s really saying is “we have nationalized all our chicken production and are in the process of starving out the last of our small farmers, so your kind offer is at least one election too late.“
Assuming that a project like this was wanted and well-implemented, it could actually do some good for the 600,000 farmers in Bolivia, 68 percent of which have small farms. But the true issue is the Morales government has little interest in supporting the type of small farmers Gates’ “Coop Dreams” targets, which MAS views as economically insignificant. When the MAS government does turn its eye to agriculture, it’s to promote industrial production of soy and corn, driven by foreign investment. Although the majority of Bolivia’s farms belong to smallholders, 91 percent of the country’s agricultural land is tied up in just 4 percent of the farms. Small farmers will not drive the economy, and, therefore, they get little love from MAS.
And let the mass starvation begin. For the People! So thank you but no thank you, capitalist pig. We’re trying to kill off our kulaks, not feed them.
I could use a dozen, though. As long as they’re good layers. And as long as they don’t come with any advice from Bill Gates, expert though he may be on all things agricultural. He has already demonstrated he doesn’t know jack about political reality.
I always figured that if I were ever to (miraculously) become a multimillionaire, then people would listen when I speak, and even laugh at my jokes.
And if I decided that the world needed chickens, then they would tell me I was precisely right, take my money, and perhaps even send a few random chickens to a few random places.
Why? Because that’s just the way human nature works.
I’m surprised he hasn’t tried the live turkeys from a helicopter stunt yet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg
The Heifer Project has been doing this for years to include other animals also that are region specific.