THE GATES FOUNDATION’S rather sudden domination of a very politically charged sector of the developed-world economy has earned it some enemies. There is, of course, a seemingly unshakable enmity attached to anything associated, however distantly, with Microsoft. But the foundation’s methods are themselves drawing criticism. Raj Patel, the author of “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” is one of the foundation’s most eloquent critics. He told me that he came away from a meeting with Shah in Berkeley, Calif., feeling that it was “impossible to get a straight answer as to what they’re doing.” He added: “It seemed so up in the air. And of course while a public institution would have to be clear, they do not, and it’s hard not to feel that what we’re seeing is a foundation playing God in Africa.” He was careful to note that the reason the Gates Foundation could do this at all was that “no one else has the kind of money the foundation does.” Still, he said, “There has to be something problematic about a few big brains in Washington State making decisions about an entire continent.”

Patel was also quick to point out that his anxiety about the foundation’s lack of democratic accountability was only part of his critique. Rather, his substantive critique of the Gates Foundation’s agricultural initiatives focuses on its excessive confidence in technology and market-based solutions  what Bill Gates himself has called “creative capitalism.” For Patel and other leaders of the agro-environmental movement, the net effect of Gates’s efforts is to enshrine this narrowly technical approach as the global response to the food crisis in Africa. “I’m happy to impute the best possible motives to them,” he told me. “But Gates’s success in imposing his terms on the debate strengthens the status quo rather than doing what needs to be done  which is to transform it.”

Not everyone is as measured in their criticisms as Patel. At a recent conference of the Slow Food movement in San Francisco, the Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva denounced the Gates Foundation as being the “greatest threat to farmers in the developing world.” Critics like Shiva note with concern that the Gates Foundation has hired from major agricultural multinationals a number of senior officials, including, notably, Rob Horsch, a leading agronomist who spent much of his career with the agricultural biotech company Monsanto. As Peter Rosset, a Chiapas, Mexico-based agricultural expert with Via Campesina, the international food-sovereignty movement, put it to me, “Monsanto already controls much of the world’s seed market, and AGRA and by extension Gates is courting the major firms like Monsanto and Syngenta.”

In a scathing report issued last year, the Canadian ecological watchdog group E.T.C. warned of “a growing trend toward privatization of foreign aid, and the fusing of the private sector with governments.” The authors of the report went on to add bitterly that “these days, where Bill Gates goes, so goes government. Every head of every aid agency in the O.E.C.D. wants a photo-op announcing a joint venture with the megabillionaire.”

Gates Foundation officials steadfastly deny imposing any particular vision of their own on the debate. What the critics call ideology, they call reality. As for their hiring practices, it is an article of faith at the foundation that its officials have something to learn from people of every conceivable worldview, from veterans of Monsanto to veterans of the anti-globalization movement. What they do readily acknowledge is that their philanthropic efforts are in part intended to goad governments into action. As Mark Suzman, a former senior official at the United Nations Development Program who is now the foundation’s global development and advocacy director, put it to me, “One of our goals is to get donors to rethink their commitment to agriculture in Africa  and African governments as well.”

During my visits with the AGRA officials, DeVries seemed contemptuous of the foundation’s critics, and Ngongi seemed indifferent to them. But Shah seemed unhappy. “After I went to Berkeley to meet with the Food First people,” he told me, “I came away very much wanting to work more closely with agro-ecological groups. We talk to anyone who will talk to us. How could we aspire to be transformational if we didn’t?” He paused, and then added musingly: “I guess I really don’t know why there is so much hostility. I really think we have something to learn from them.”