Did Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation buy farmland in the United States to grow genetically modified tomatoes that are tested on schoolchildren? No, that's not true: Tomatoes are not among a list of one dozen crops or foods approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to be grown, tested and sold to U.S. consumers. Gates, in an annual Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session, addressed his farmland purchases, saying he has invested in U.S. farms to make them more productive and create more jobs, and pointed to a team of professional investors who decided on his farmland purchase.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) on June 30, 2023, in a post by University of Tokyo professor Nobuhiro Suzuki. He says (translation from Japanese to English by Lead Stories staff), at the 0:48 mark:
They [Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] are going to test GMO tomatoes on children by letting them eat it through their school lunches and in their homes. They [children] are practically being used as guinea pigs. GMOs are a recent discovery and some studies have pointed to their carcinogenic properties. They're using Japanese children as test subjects to spread GMOs, and the profit earned from selling these GMO crops are all going to the U.S. agribusiness industry.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Aug 4 01:34:40 2023 UTC)
The Faculty of Agriculture professor, who also works for Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, was speaking about the "destruction" of the food industry in Japan, which he believes to be caused by the rampant acceptance of GMO crops.
According to a list of Bioengineered Foods maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), "New BE [bioengineered or GMO] products continue to be developed. Even if a food is not included on the list, regulated entities whose records show that a food they are selling is bioengineered must make appropriate disclosure of that food." Currently, the list includes alfalfa, apple (Arctic varieties), canola, corn, cotton, eggplant, papaya, pineapple, potato, salmon, soybean, squash (summer) and sugarbeet.
In September 2022, the USDA issued a finding saying that a new purple tomato from Norfolk Plant Sciences could be grown in the U.S., and the company expects to start limited test markets to identify interested consumers this year before it receives FDA approval to sell the purple tomato commercially at a future date.
Meanwhile, several press accounts report that a team of investors purchased farmland in the U.S. Answering questions during a Reddit AMA session, Gates stated that there were no ulterior motives for his purchases and that he and his investor team wanted to raise productivity and create more jobs.
