The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
Restoring Africa or restoring power
Today we’re talking about the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a movement that sprung out from the World War Two boom in American agriculture (we talk about it here and here, for a start). Iterations of attempting to “save” Africa from itself, seemingly, play out over and over again, which begs the question— what are we trying to save, exactly?
There are many words to describe the green revolutions that take place across the globe as American successes in agriculture are attempted to be replicated, and all of those words are not the word ‘revolution’. As we saw in Chapingo as well as with the FAO at this time, these conversations about making food available cheaply are a complex subject that is the byproduct of America’s need to stretch its economic reach into the rest of the world for perpetual growth and profit but also a tool of the proxy war with the East. Well-fed people are less likely to revolt, and America felt it knew how to feed the world while also profiting off of these projects.
AGRA’s website describes the organization as:
an alliance led by Africans with roots in farming communities across the continent. We understand that African farmers need uniquely African solutions designed to meet their specific environmental and agricultural needs so they can sustainably boost production and gain access to rapidly growing agriculture markets.1
The organization came into existence in 2006 through a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fulfill the vision of an Africa that can feed itself, as well as make significant contributions to feeding the world. This vision is premised on a broad-based alliance of key stakeholders, including national governments, African farmers, private sector entities, NGOs, and civil society. They had a bold vision; AGRA set ambitious quantitative targets such as reducing food insecurity by 50 percent in at least 20 African countries; doubling the incomes of 20 million smallholder farmers; and developing policy and institutional frameworks that lead to sustained improvements in agricultural productivity in at least 15 African countries by 2020.
The first thing AGRA set out to do, and by first thing, I mean 4 years into existence, in 2010, they set up the Farmer Organization Support Centre in Africa (FOSCA) to address the issue of accountability. Its aim was “to enhance access to high-quality, demand-driven, income-enhancing services by smallholders – especially women and youth – through strong farmer organizations (FOs)”.2 Now AGRA, which oversees FOSCA (which should be a red flag for anyone reading this), is under an economic umbrella policy framework called the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) established in 2003 by the Africa Union Initiative.3
Let’s back up a bit— Bill Gates has a long history of trying to tell Africans how to grow food, so it shouldn’t be a surprise he’s a major funder for AGRA.4 Calling him a major funder, to be honest, is an understatement; The Gates Foundation is far and away AGRA’s largest funder, providing roughly two-thirds of the roughly $1 billion the organization has received.5 The Rockefeller Foundation, more famously known for funding nazi research propaganda and not even trying to fucking hide it, also funded the first Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, which, based on the fact AGRA popped up 20 years later should be a sign that it didn’t go great, and they have been a partner from the start as well as the second largest funder.6, 7
The most obvious thing that should now be apparent is that most of the support for AGRA has come from international donors, the largest coming from the U.S. government and a handful of billionaires. Now, there’s nothing wrong inherently with donating money to people in need. But there is a problem when that money is repackaged through NGOs so that countries can feign ignorance on how that money is used or leveraged to get specific things in return.
I know that we’ve named several organizations that are part of this mix of nonprofits and government collaboratives, and there's more to go. This web of organizations is made complex on purpose, to make it difficult. to trace who is responsible for funding these projects. Let’s unpack some of the organizations like the AU, the Africa Union Initiative, which present themselves as collaborations of African countries, and I think it’s going to help us get a better understanding of who is behind things and why that’s important to understanding what’s going on in Africa.
While it’s easy to focus on who— on paper— are supposed to be key funders, it’s more important to pay attention to the quality of funding: predictability, reliability and the quality of public finance systems are as decisive in which parts of the AU agenda are prioritized, what gets implemented and how.
The two major sources of funding for the AU are African member states and donors. Both sources are problematic in distinct ways. How the funding sources are governed partly shapes what gets prioritized. Though African member states have agreed to make the AU’s stability a priority, they’ve only actually contributed approximately 27% of the spent budget, per year, on average, and that money has been sporadic. Donors, in contrast, have used their consistent contributions and their ability to increase contributions to drive specific projects, programs, and even organizations under the umbrella of the AU. Since the establishment of the Organization for African Unity in 1963 and later the AU, their main donors— primarily Africa’s former colonizers and the European Union— had a dominant position in providing external financial and other support to the pan-African and sub-regional organizations such as the Regional Economic Communities.
Fears have arisen that members are concerned that the organization is more concerned with the donors than the member states. Some member states openly raise questions about skewed accountability relations towards donors. For donors, this includes a concern to use their partnership for social capital and to explore ways of partnering with donors such as the US, South Korea, the EU, Turkey, China, and also the World Bank.
And why is farming so important? Obviously, food is significant, but in Africa, it is more than just food— it is everything and it drives national politics. The agricultural sector generates 40% of the gross national product, 40% of exports, and 70% to 80% of employment. However, between 1960 and 2005, despite all of the efforts of international players, grain yields have only increased by 60%, compared to 220% in East Asia. Food production per capita in 2005 was 15% less than in 1960. In the same period, Africa’s share in agricultural exports declined from about 15% to 3%, and it went from being a net exporter of agricultural goods to a net importer— mostly from the US.
So basically, we see continental-wide organizations being funded by countries who are mainly responsible for the state of much of Africa, plus China trying to buy influence, which then funds numerous smaller organizations that are not only funded by these same outside players but oftentimes by the billionaire classes or pro-capitalist foundations, which then further funnel money to organizations like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Because of the numerous organizations with vague goals and claims, it’s difficult to discern the difference between these organizations or to follow how any of the money flows between them. And whenever these NGOs fail to meet their goals, a new NGO is set up to help fill the need.
For example, AGRA’s new partner, the Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA), is an alliance between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; the Rockefeller Foundation; and the United States Agency for International Development.8 This new organization, and I quote from their website, argues that they develop strategies “for transforming agricultural systems by driving integrated delivery within agro-economic zones and across value chains, for enhancing in-country coordination and for deepening engagements with the private sector to transition African agriculture from subsistence to sustainable business occupations.” (and since researching this their website has been taken down, despite funding from the international community).9 This word salad is a perfect example of obscuring the purpose of these NGOs except to exist as yet another funnel for money and the allusion to a diversity of players in solving the crisis of food systems in Africa.
So now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the first thing: their promises to lift people out of poverty with improved crops, technologies, and so on.
In the words of researcher Tim Wise:
While the evaluation is limited in its scope and its access to reliable data, that finding confirms earlier studies that have shown that there is little evidence that this 15-year investment in promoting market-driven development based on expanded use of commercial seeds and fertilizers has improved farmer’s yields, incomes or food security. Yields were increasing slowly and only for a few supported crops, farmers’ incomes were not rising significantly and the number of hungry people in AGRA’s 13 focus countries had increased by 31%.10
Now, based on national statistics, yields in AGRA’s 13 countries have risen only 18% over the past 15 years, not the promised 100%.11 Crop diversity is also declining at alarming rates as AGRA promotes GM corn and other starchy crops at the expense of other more nutritious and climate-resilient crops grown by African farmers.12
This is the crux of the problem with NGOs funded by absurdly rich people, they basically can buy such huge influence that what they believe goes, and everyone who challenges them quickly loses their job. So now I want to talk about another organization; SAFCEI, yes, another acronym organization—they’re a confederation of other organizations— and they have some strong feelings about the role of these NGOs and their funders in Africa. In an open letter, they wrote the following:13
We, 35 organizations from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and 174 allied organizations in 40 countries around the world, call on your agency to cease funding the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and other Green Revolution programs and to support African-led efforts to expand agroecology and other low-input farming systems. Even where staple crop production did increase, there was little reduction of rural poverty or hunger. Instead, diverse, climate-resilient crops that provide a more diverse and healthy diet for rural Africans have been displaced. The role played by AGRA is of serious concern for several reasons:
• It pursues an ill-conceived approach promoting monocultural commodity production heavily reliant on chemical inputs at the expense of sustainable livelihoods, long-term soil fertility, climate, and human development.
• The strategy to convert farmers to “high-yield” commercial seeds, fertilizers and pesticides directly harms farmers as it increases their dependence on corporations and long supply chains for inputs and harms the environment. It also undermines resilience, and increases the risks of debt for small-scale farmers in the face of climate change. AGRA uses its financial leverage to encourage African governments to focus on boosting agricultural yields at the expense of hunger and poverty on the continent, including centuries of exploitation of the continent’s people and natural resources that have not benefited Africans.
With AGRA’s president, Agnes Kalibata, leading the upcoming United Nations Food Systems Summit as UN Special Envoy, AGRA’s financial backing and influence allow its model to be wrongly presented as the way forward for the world. It is, in fact, part of the problem. Hundreds of organizations from around the world have denounced the Food Systems Summit as an attempt to promote more corporate-led industrial agriculture around the world along AGRA’s model for Africa.
In June 2021, nearly 500 faith leaders across Africa sent a letter to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to end its damaging support for industrial agriculture. The letter, sent by the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI), rejects the Foundation’s current approach to food security, in the face of the intensifying climate crisis, as doing more harm than good on the continent.
Six months since sending the letter, and despite extensive coverage of the pre-summit, which saw more than 100 countries discussing ways to transform national food systems to meet sustainable development goals by 2030, the faith leaders in Africa never received a reply or acknowledgment from the Gates Foundation. The extractive business models that underscore the vision by investors like the Gates Foundation reduce farmers to nothing more than “food factories”, rather than meaningful stakeholders and contributors to their food and community.
So let’s talk about the Gates Foundation in Africa; specifically regarding agriculture. We’ve pointed out that he’s a cornerstone of AGRA, but he is also invested in the N2Africa project, which started in 2009, right on the heels of AGRA.14 N2Africa focuses on logistics and agriculture; while they advocate for sustainable agriculture practices, their goal is to scale up by working with improved varieties that produce higher returns and overproduce for overseas markets.
What this means in practice is that local legume crops and varieties that are within existing seed banks and have been grown for generations in ecosystems are being bypassed in favor of imported commercial varieties that are developed for industrial feed and processing markets. Not only does this not solve local food security issues, but it also threatens local varieties that African farmers and consumers prefer, impacting the affordability of foods, local nutrition, and cultural foodways.
The Gates Foundation also invests time and money to impact laws being written. The foundation is working to fundamentally restructure seed laws, which protect certified varieties but criminalize non-certified seeds. This is particularly problematic for small-scale farmers in Africa, who nourish their families and their communities through seeds that are not certified.
SAFCEI’s Climate Justice Coordinator, Gabriel Manyangadze points out the crux of these issues, saying “We’ve seen from its initiatives in Africa that the Gates Foundation puts its full faith in technological fixes without seeking to address the vitally-important issues of morality and political economy involved. As such, the Foundation’s approach supports a dominance of multinational corporations over African-led food production systems. And in the Gates Foundation’s unwillingness to listen – we see a self-confidence bordering on arrogance, exactly the kind of ‘white saviour’ mentality of colonialism that Africa neither needs nor wants.”
While AGRA has been around for over 15 years, it was only seven years ago that they started reporting ANY data. And the data is, ready for it? Bullshit. So, let’s look at some things that you’d think would be important. There are no good, consistent measures of farmer incomes at the national level for any of the countries they operate in. Case studies done by Tim Wise as well as the folks at Mathematic look at Mali, Tanzania, Zambia, and Kenya, and their research showed little benefit to farmers’ incomes or food security. Some even reported a decline, as the cost of the inputs put them into debt and yields did not go up enough to pay those loans. Others reported declining nutrition with declining crop diversity.
Further, the limited data they provide focuses almost entirely on corn, with passing references to data on rice. However, AGRA’s mission was to improve food crop productivity overall, not just corn and rice productivity. The evaluation thus replicates one of AGRA’s key flaws: its narrow and destructive focus on two cereal crops at the expense of other important and native crops such as millet, sorghum, cassava and legumes.
They also fail to include all AGRA countries. The new and only evaluation refers to only six of AGRA’s current 11 focus countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Nigeria. And neither AGRA nor its donors have yet provided any evaluation of the initiative’s entire history of work since 2006. The list of references used in the evaluation includes just eight documents, five AGRA studies, and three methodological texts.15 It should also be a red flag that AGRA no longer has its Outcome Monitoring reports available to the public on its website, which AGRA posted in 2021 only after a public-records request to the U.S. government revealed them (these have since been reposted since the airing of the podcast episode this information is collected from).16
A cursory review of some of the Outcome Monitoring reports provides the right language, including a focus on “building women-led enterprises in seed production”, the data doesn’t support their vision. In Rwanda, for example, there are 6.2 million dollars allocated across five years for training and infrastructure for growers, while AGRA’s financial reports show 80 million dollars in revenue just in 2022, and of the 55 million dollars in cash, 52 million of it is limited in use by the donor contributor (i.e. Bill Gates). Looking at the returns from their investments, their data shows a net wealth DROP for families that grow maize.17
All of this boils down to one thing— that AGRA’s core theory of change, its entire Green Revolution rationale, proved false even in two countries in which corn yields slightly increased. In other words, rising yields failed to translate into rising incomes for farmers. And improved corn sales alone are not proof that farmer incomes have increased, since the Green Revolution package of seeds and fertilizers is more expensive for farmers. But, it gets worse.
Wealthier male farmers, for example, despite AGRA’s focus on women-led initiatives, seem to be the main beneficiaries of the money that made it to farmers. As the evaluators note, “Farmers who adopted improved inputs and experienced yield increases were typically younger, male, and relatively wealthier. In particular, male farmers with larger dwellings, access to electricity, greater total landholdings, and lower rates of disability were more likely to adopt improved maize varieties and inorganic fertilizer, and engage with extension services.” In addition, “productivity and income gains were also concentrated among these relatively high-resource farmers.” In their recommendations, the evaluators stress this, calling on AGRA to “Expand gender and youth inclusion efforts”.
So why is the Gates Foundation doing all of this? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent nearly $6 billion on agricultural development programs with a key focus on expanding industrial agriculture in Africa. In 2014, GRAIN published a detailed breakdown of the grants made by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote agricultural development in Africa and other parts of the world. The question, however, was how they intended to do that. In their words— “Our main conclusion then was that the vast majority of those grants were channeled to groups in the US and Europe, not Africa nor other parts of the global South. The funding overwhelmingly went to research institutes rather than farmers. They were also mainly directed at shaping policies to support industrial farming, not smallholders. The Gates Foundation claims that 80% of their grants are meant to serve African farmers. But of the funding to these hundreds of organizations a staggering 82% was channeled to groups based in North America and Europe while less than 10% went to Africa-based groups. The grants are also heavily skewed to technologies developed by research centers and corporations in the North for poor farmers in the South, completely ignoring the knowledge, technologies and biodiversity that these farmers already possess. Also, despite the Foundation's focus on techno-fixes, much of its grants are given to groups that lobby on behalf of industrial farming and undermine alternatives.”18
Specifically speaking, the single biggest recipient of grants from the Gates Foundation is the CGIAR- a consortium of 15 international research centers launched in the 1960s and 70s to promote the Green Revolution with new seeds, fertilizers and chemical inputs. The Gates Foundation has given CGIAR centers over $1.4 billion since 2003. Another priority for the Gates Foundation in its funding is to support research at universities and national research centers. Together, all this research gets almost half (47%) of the Gates Foundation's funding.
Now, we haven’t talked about CGIAR. Partly, because they’re not an African organization; they’re based out of France and have other major donors aside from the Gates Foundation; including noted terrible groups such as OPEC. This speaks to the ability of these organizations to wrap themselves within one another to make it impossible to break through their tapestry to see who is funding what.
Which brings us back to AGRA. Their funders are the same handful of organizations through several other nonprofits and consortiums and so on to transition farmers away from traditional seeds and crops to patented seeds, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, and other inputs to grow commodity crops for the global market. The foundation says its goal is to “boost the yields and incomes of millions of small farmers in Africa… so they can lift themselves and their families out of hunger and poverty.”
Against this backdrop, agribusiness interests and private donors, the biggest being the Gates Foundation, are staging what critics describe as power plays to solidify control over global agriculture policies through the UN Food Systems Summit. Now these include proposals to implement food systems designed similar to what we see in India, which is based on what we see in places like the US, and to centralize control over agricultural research centers.
Now, these research centers are also largely funded by the same players through different NGOs. The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems described it as “part of a broader battle over what food systems should look like and who should govern them.” And while it’s not just these ‘follow the money’ actions, there are some less subtle ways they’re pushing policymakers.
One recent example is the “High-Level Dialogue on Feeding Africa” that was held in April of 2021. This forum, funded by the Gates Foundation, and organized by some Gates Foundation grantees such as the African Development Bank, CGIAR and AGRA, was meant to launch a policy and funding agenda to further push the Green Revolution into Africa. Every major player involved, outside of governments, had Bill Gates as one of their primary funders. The event attracted at least 18 African heads of state and several other high-profile personalities. Almost every single speaker at the event, this symposium to exchange ideas on the future of food in Africa, were Gates grantees.19 These types of events provide the backdrop of diversity and collaboration to quell the concerns of outsiders looking in.
This is how AGRA has managed to maneuver itself from not existing 15 years ago to the main player of agricultural policy discussions across the continent. Similarly, while resistance to GMOs in Africa remains high, the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) is managing to get legislation adopted to accept GMOs, as seen most recently in Ghana. A 2002 State Department communication says AATF is "a partnership between USAID, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto, Dupont/Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences, Syngenta, and Aventis, that will begin operation in 2003 to help develop and disseminate new varieties of Africa-specific crops by assuming licenses from industry, managing sublicenses, assuming legal liability for licensed technology and providing high quality project management oversight."20
The real beneficiaries of AGRA are these multinational firms that sell the seeds, the fertilizers, and the technologies.21 A former Monsanto executive drafted the initial seed policy reform in Malawi, which threatened to make it illegal for farmers to save, exchange, and sell their seeds.
And in all of this, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the way the Gates Foundation is funneling money in a million ways to direct policy, but it’s just as important to look at who the Gates Foundation is supporting as who they are not supporting. Despite all of this money, the Gates Foundation provides zero funding to support farmer seed systems— that is, seeds without any genetic ownership— which supply 80 to 90% of all the seeds used in Africa (although it heavily advertises in using ‘local’ seed, ignoring that local does not mean indigenous or culturally relevant). Furthermore, the Gates Foundation props up biofortification as a solution to malnutrition, taking funds and attention away from much more practical and culturally appropriate efforts to improve nutrition by enhancing on-farm biodiversity and people's access to it. Over the last decade or so, the Gates Foundation has given $73 million to biofortification initiatives that essentially seek to artificially pack nutrients into single-crop commodities.
Fortification isn’t a bad thing necessarily though, right? It’s not. But it doesn’t address fundamental issues of how we’re doing things, and it treats the idea of sustainable agriculture as being impossible, so much so that we need to put fake nutrients in crops. We’ve already seen this scenario play out. Warnings from the first Green Revolution have largely gone practically unheeded by the major stakeholders in Africa. Much of India is moving away from its Green Revolution past, trying to address damage to soil and water, excessive exposure to pesticides, and declining incomes for small-scale farmers. Many are actively moving toward agroecology and organic farming, and African-led organizations are quickly learning from their Indian counterparts as they advocate for their own agroecology programs.
But the point here is that there’s still reason to have hope. In a 2015 study, Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner Kerr found that smallholder farmers still preferred their own corn varieties, even when government and development organizations made more “advanced” hybrids available.22 As the farmers understood well, their own hardier, local varieties of corn were more resistant to drought, required less labor, cost less, and required little or no chemical fertilizer. Moreover, unlike hybrids, whose wide leaves obstruct the sun for polycropping, farmers could plant their own corn varieties alongside peanuts, cowpea, and bambara beans – all nutritious crops well adapted to the local ecology.
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https://safcei.org/press-release-african-faith-communities-tell-gates-foundation-big-farming-is-no-solution-for-africa/
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Odame, H., & Muange, E. (2011). Can agro-dealers deliver the Green Revolution in Kenya? IDS Bulletin, 42(4), 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2011.00238.x