This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) this month said it will invest $200 million in digital ID projects, encompassing “digital public infrastructure, including civil registry databases and digital ID” to help meet the 2030 target date for reaching the United Nation’s (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The $200 million in new funding — part of an overall $1.27 billion commitment by the BMGF in support of “global health and development projects,” is closely tied to Goal 16.9 of the SDGs, for which “digital identity programs are supposedly needed,” Reclaim the Net reported.
The funding adds to several existing BMFG-supported global digital ID initiatives, even as such initiatives come under fire for violating people’s right to privacy.
Michael Rectenwald, author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” said that far from promoting an improved digital infrastructure or “global health and development,” digital identity will have more onerous applications.
Rectenwald told The Defender:
“Of all the other means of identifying and tracking subjects, digital identity poses perhaps the gravest technological threat to individual liberty yet conceived.
“It has the potential to trace, track and surveil subjects and to compile a complete record of all activity, from cradle to grave.”
Rectenwald said these more onerous applications of digital identity are what the BMGF and other similar entities find appealing:
“Digital identity will serve as a means of coercion and enforced compliance with the outrageous demands of a vaccine regime that will have no end.
“It is no wonder that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding this invasive, rights-abrogating technology, given Gates’ investments, both financially and ideologically, in coercive neo-Malthusian and arguably eugenics-friendly methods.”
Report claims biometric technologies required for ‘equitable redistribution of wealth and resources’
Commenting on the $200 million investment, the BMGF said:
“This funding will help expand infrastructure that low and middle-income countries can use to become more resilient to crises such as food shortages, public health threats, and climate change, as well as to aid in pandemic and economic recovery.”
Additionally, according to the BMGF, such infrastructure “encompasses tools such as interoperable payment systems, digital ID, data-sharing systems, and civil registry databases.”
The announcement came during the two-day Goalkeepers event in New York City held in parallel with the annual session of the UN General Assembly, and one week after the release of the BMGF’s “Goalkeepers Report” for 2022.
The 2022 Goalkeepers Report warned that progress toward achieving most SDGs by 2030 is off track, in part due to a myriad of global crises in the past two years that reversed previous progress in meeting the targets.
The report also highlighted biometrics as one of the technologies required to achieve the equitable redistribution of wealth and resources in economically developing countries — a goal also contained within the SDGs.
Participants in this year’s Goalkeepers event — the first held in person since 2019 — stressed the need for a renewed commitment to meeting the SDGs by the 2030 target.
BMGF CEO Mark Suzman, speaking at the event, said:
“We can get back on track toward the SDGs, but it’s going to take a new level of collaboration and investment from every sector.
“That’s why our foundation is significantly stepping up our commitment to helping confront crises now and ensure long-term impact across critical determinants of health and development.”
Gates, BMGF, Microsoft involved in multiple global digital ID initiatives
Gates is invested in digital ID initiatives around the world, not only through the BMGF but also personally and through Microsoft.
For instance, the BMGF is a supporter of MOSIP, an India-based open-source digital ID platform.
On its website, MOSIP provides “a robust scalable and inclusive foundational identity program” and “an open source platform on which national foundational IDs are built.”
These platforms, claims MOSIP, help “governments and other user organizations implement a digital, foundational identity system in a cost effective way.”
The BMGF is also a partner of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, which in 2018, through its INFUSE (innovation for uptake, scale and equity in immunization) initiative, advocated in favor of digital IDs for kids:
“Imagine a future in which all children have access to life-saving vaccines no matter where they live — a future in which parents and health workers ensure their timely vaccination, a future in which they have their own digitally stored health record that cannot be lost or stolen, a future in which, regardless of gender, economic or social standing, this record allows each child (and parents) to have access to a bank account, go to school, access services and ultimately build a prosperous life.
“This future is possible today. With the latest advances in digital technologies that enable more effective ways to register, identify births and issue proof of identity and authentication for access to services — we are on the brink of building a healthier and more prosperous future for the world’s most vulnerable children.”
This would be accomplished by “calling for innovations that leverage new technologies to modernize the process of identifying and registering the children who are most in need of life-saving vaccines.”
The INFUSE initiative supports a digital ID for children from the moment they are born, claiming that “digital records can make it convenient to track a child’s vaccines and eliminate unnecessary paperwork.”
According to INFUSE, as children grow, “their digital health card can be used to access secondary services, such as primary school, or ease the process of obtaining alternative credentials.”
“The digital health card could, depending on country needs and readiness, potentially become the first step in establishing a legal, broadly recognized identity,” INFUSE concluded.
Investigative reporter Leo Hohmann described the initiative as “all about data collection,” having “nothing to do with health” but instead bringing “the current generation of children into the blossoming global digital identity system.”
Gavi, in turn, closely collaborates with the ID2020 Alliance, founded in 2016, which claims to advocate in favor of “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID,” adding that “doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties, and claims to support “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID.”
Microsoft is a founding member of the ID2020 alliance (in 2018) and appears to partner with it, while Kim Gagné, ID2020’s board chairman, is a former Microsoft executive.
Other founding partners of ID2020 include Gavi, the BMGF, the World Bank, Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Bill Gates also backed Aktivate, a “software-as-a-service” platform that “powers student-athlete administration for over 1,300 K-12 schools and 1.5 million athletes across 30 states.”
Aktivate recently generated controversy in one Florida school district, which quietly made the platform mandatory for the registration of student athletes, before walking back this requirement.
Gates has drawn fire in India for his support and funding of various digital ID schemes there.
For instance, on his personal blog, Gates praised Aadhaar, a national digital identification card system launched in 2009, which today is the world’s largest biometric identification system.
Gates described Aadhaar as “a valuable platform for delivering social welfare programs and other government services” — and Nandan Nilekani, who developed the Aadhaar system and now works with the World Bank Group to help other countries develop similar schemes.
The Aadhaar identification number was linked with numerous public and private services, including the opening of bank accounts, verification of electoral identity, filing income tax returns, making digital payments, receiving government pensions, subsidies and welfare payments and registration of mobile SIM cards.
Aadhaar generated controversy in India over the government’s plans to link it to the national voter database, and the alleged coercion of HIV patients to submit their Aadhaar numbers, leading them to drop out of treatment programs due to privacy concerns.
Gates has dismissed privacy concerns surrounding Aadhaar, stating that “Aadhaar in itself doesn’t pose any privacy issue because it’s just a bio ID verification scheme,” adding that “We [the BMGF] have funded the World Bank to take this Aadhaar approach to other countries.”
A counterpart system to Aadhaar, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission — a system that would complement Aadhaar by providing a unique digital health ID to all citizens and would be linked to their personal health records — was launched in 2021.
Gates also publicly praised this platform, claiming it will help “ensure equitable, accessible healthcare delivery and accelerate progress on India’s health goals.”
The BMGF gave the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission a $350,690 grant to support its “rollout and strengthening,” despite concerns regarding privacy, informed consent and data leakage.
A report released July 2022 by New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice entitled “Paving the Road to Hell? A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID” specifically linked digital ID programs such as Aadhaar to “severe and large-scale human rights violations.”
According to the report, such digital ID programs “may in fact exacerbate pre-existing forms of exclusion and discrimination in public and private services” and “may furthermore lead to novel forms of harm, including biometric exclusion, discrimination, and the many harms associated with surveillance capitalism.”
The report added that the benefits of digital ID are “ill-defined” and “poorly documented,” and their repercussions may be “severe and potentially irreversible,” adding that the “ultimate objective” of such programs is to “facilitate economic transactions and private sector service delivery while also bringing new, poorer, individuals into formal economies and ‘unlocking’ their behavioral data.”
The same report also highlighted the role of entities such as the World Bank in promoting digital ID schemes — highlighting broader efforts to continue developing such programs despite the controversy they have created.
Commenting on the report, Rectenwald said:
“Integrated with a kind of social credit scoring system like the one supposed to be in place in China, as well as a vaccine passport, the digital identity could serve as a definitive means for political profiling, for perfecting the means of political cancellation already a part of Western life.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
This is the last person on earth I would pay any attention to. Just because he has some money doesn’t mean anything to me.