Billionaire Bill Gates has a knack for peddling solutions to problems that have yet to emerge. Should we be worried now that he’s amassing a sizeable chunk of America’s farmland?
According to mainstream media outlets like the Associated Press, there’s absolutely nothing to see here as the Microsoft mogul becomes the largest private owner of U.S. farmland, having acquired as many as 270,000 fertile acres.
Though it’s only a sliver of the nation’s 900 million agricultural acres, Gates’ trust gobbled up property in dozens of states just ahead of a time when several situations are converging to threaten a food shortage.
Perhaps this fact partly explains why North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley sent a letter on June 21 demanding to know exactly how six agricultural properties purchased by the trust would be used.
Though Gates has stated in the past that the purpose of investing in farmland is to potentially source biofuels and improve seed production, the philanthropic billionaire has a way of getting ahead of a global crisis before it happens.
“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” Gates stated during a Ted Talk in 2015, five years before the COVID-19 pandemic became an investment opportunity for the technocrat.
“We’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready for the next epidemic,” Gates warned at the time.
Moreover, Gates is acquiring land while also pushing for the developed world to replace meat with a synthetic meat-like product with assurances that we’ll “get used to the taste difference.”
Are you worried that Bill Gates knows something we don’t?
It’s true that shrewd businessmen like Gates are better at the kind of big-picture thinking which allows them to anticipate the next boom or crisis — but that’s partly the point.
Media billionaire Ted Turner has also invested in 2 million acres of land (much of it rangeland and prairie, rather than cropland) and earned the distinction of being the largest private owner of buffalo herds that roam the 200,000 acres of his private ranch, The Guardian reported.
These powerful men have the ability to carve out a decent, if not a sizeable, portion of food-producing land for themselves to use as they please, and that makes people understandably nervous — and it isn’t just agriculture where this is happening.
While surging home prices will likely force many would-be home buyers into rentals, the BlackRock investment firm is buying up single-family properties ready to be leased.
The AP again assures us that this is a non-issue, considering the small portion of homes this acquisition represents. But taken together, this trend is sounding alarm bells for eagle-eyed Americans putting the pieces together.
Although they are deemed baseless conspiracy theories, prudence dictates further scrutiny of these particular events.
There’s no shortage of people predicting that the world is at the precipice and about to fall off into the abyss with one crisis or another — though it’s hard to foresee what shape the disaster, if it comes at all, will take.
However, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, impending food shortages, soaring housing costs and a coming energy crisis are enough on their own to cause misery; all of them together are enough to plunge the world into unprecedented chaos.
But don’t worry, it’s just a coincidence that Bill Gates and his ilk will once again be in a privileged position to cash in on it.
