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Chickens, Eggs, Beef, Farmland, Water…

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is in the headlines for his investment in the development of the world's first lab-grown burger, but he is not the only tech billionaire to fund genetically engineered food products.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates are also funding efforts to find alternatives to livestock-sourced meat. Gates invested in Hampton Creek Foods, a startup company working on plant protein based egg substitutes, and has praised Beyond Meat, a meat substitute company. Thiel gave a grant to Modern Meadow, a company using animal stem cells in what it calls "tissue engineering" to create meat and leather via 3D printing. Brin invested in Mark Post, a professor out of Maastricht University, who used stem cells and a fetal serum to grow meat in his lab.

If Bill Gates has his way, the food in our future will little resemble what’s on our plates today. Gates and his agribusiness industry partners are proposing to transform our food and how it is produced.

To the techno-food industrialists, hunger and climate change are problems to be solved with data and engineering. The core ingredients of their revolutionary plan: genetic engineering – and patenting – of everything from seeds and food animals, to microbes in the soil, to the processes we use to make food. Local food cultures and traditional diets could fade away as food production moves indoors to labs that cultivate fake meat and ultra-processed foods.

A 2018 deal showed the tremendous speculative value of land/water deals in the Columbia River Basin. That’s when Gates’ 100C paid $171 million for 14,500 acres of land (10,500 acres of it irrigated farmland) from the Boston-based John Hancock Life Insurance Company, which had paid $75 million for the parcel in 2010.

It’s not only land acquisitions. Northwest Natural Holding Company — formed in 2018 as the parent company of longtime Portland-based NW Natural Gas Company — has quickly expanded into public water utility ownership. In 2021, the gas company’s NW Natural Water concern added to its portfolio by acquiring five water companies in Washington, Idaho and Texas, cumulatively investing more than $110 million in the water sector.

www.governing.com/now/corporations-are-consolidating-water-and-land-rights-in-the-west

ccm.net/news/23920-bill-gates-invests-in-genetically-engineered-food-products