Pakistan really needs to stop getting starstruck. I am talking about behemoths like Bill Gates.
When Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif eagerly met Gates on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, they expressed intent to collaborate in agriculture and biotechnology. But why exactly are we so eager to bring one of the world’s most controversial billionaires closer to Pakistan’s agriculture?
Our case should be clear. We cannot replace naturally grown and processed food with bioengineered/artifical foods that increase cancer risk and autoimmune disorders.
Public (Reddit) Reaction
The reaction from many Pakistanis was immediate. People questioned whether “improved seeds” and biotechnology could eventually mean greater dependence on foreign intellectual property, corporate agriculture and technologies that Pakistani farmers do not control and cannot afford.
That is not an irrational concern.
Agriculture is not another software product that Pakistan can simply download, install and forget about. Seeds, food production and farming livelihoods are strategic issues.
If Pakistan invites foreign corporations and philanthropists like Bill Gates into these areas, the country needs to know exactly who owns the technology, who controls the supply chain and who ultimately gets paid.
Bill Gates has a history
Then there is Gates’ own history.
In 2026, Gates appeared before the US House Oversight Committee as part of its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Gates described his association with Epstein as a “grave error in judgment.”
An independent review commissioned by the Gates Foundation subsequently found around 30 meetings involving Epstein and Gates Foundation leaders between 2011 and 2014 despite Epstein’s earlier convictions. That distinction matters. But so does the fact that the association happened at all.
Then there is Microsoft.
Microsoft
Long before Gates became the world’s favorite billionaire philanthropist, Microsoft was fighting one of the biggest antitrust battles in technology. A US court found that Microsoft maintained its operating-system monopoly through anticompetitive means and unlawfully tied its browser to Windows. The case remains one of the defining corporate competition battles in modern technology history.
So when someone with that history walks into Pakistan talking about transforming agriculture, perhaps we are entitled to ask this:
Why does Pakistan repeatedly need a billionaire to tell us what our development priorities should be?
If Pakistan cannot build agricultural research institutions, protect farmers, develop local seed technology and create accountable systems without attaching a foreigner to the process, then Bill Gates is not the problem. Our dependency is.
Verdict
Pakistan can welcome investment, technology and expertise from anywhere. But there should be a very clear line between accepting help and handing outsiders influence over strategically important sectors.
Gates does not need to be Pakistan’s agricultural savior. Pakistan needs to become capable of saving its own agriculture. That should be the headline coming out in the coming years.
The views expressed here belong to the author.
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