Creative accounting at the Gates Foundation?

Here is an article from the peasant movement La Via Campesina denouncing the purchase of Monsanto stock by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While La Via Campesina predictably (and rightly, in my opinion), decries the Foundation's dogmatic pushing of transgenic technology as an effective tool for poor farmers around the world, something else bothers me more. The Foundation promotes, among other things, an increasing use of industrial inputs in agriculture. A sizeable share of these inputs (seeds and chemicals) come from the Monsanto corporation. With the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation holding Monsanto stock, it stands to profit from an increased purchase of Monsanto products by aid and development donors as well as poor farmers. How can the Foundation be said to offer objective advice for the well-being of poor farmers when it has a vested economic interest in their adopting one system and one set of industrial products over another? If the Foundation weren't a non-profit, I'm sure there would be some potential fraud charges here.

The article cites Gerald Steiner, VP of Monsanto, talking about the new US program for international food security, Feed the Future. "Feed the Future is exciting not least because it recognizes the entrepreneurial imperatives that Monsanto and other companies operate by. We want to do good in the world, while we also want to do well for our stockholders." It is understandable that a company executive should want to please private stockholders. It is neither effective nor ethical for publicly-funded development programs or nonprofit foundations to do so, especially when these institutions have a large impact on different countries' national policies.