Medium
Rising hunger, stagnant yields mark Gates initiative’s 20th anniversary
Global Development and Environment Institute Working Paper 26–01
August 2026.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, now known simply as AGRA after it removed the words “Green Revolution” from its name, is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. My updated assessment shows that there is little to celebrate. As I explain on InterPress Service with former U.N. agricultural economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram, the multi-billion-dollar initiative to expand the use of commercial seeds and fertilizers promised to “catalyze a farming revolution” through hunger-reducing agricultural productivity. Instead, productivity growth in AGRA’s focus countries has slowed to a crawl in the last six years while hunger has exploded.
Published as a working paper to contribute to a report by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, the paper analyzes data through 2024 to assess the program’s multiple failures. My Staple Yield Index of a basket of key food crops shows productivity growth of just 0.4% per year in the six years 2018–24. That leaves AGRA’s 13 focus countries with yield growth of just 1.2% per year since 2006 despite massive Green Revolution subsidies and incentives. That is a lower rate than those countries recorded in the years before AGRA was launched. The 18-year yield growth of just 25% is far short of the 100% increase set as a goal by both AGRA and the African Union, which largely adopted the same input-intensive development strategy.
More tragic still are the Green Revolution’s failures to reduce hunger. AGRA set the goal of cutting food insecurity in half. Instead, the number of undernourished people in AGRA’s focus countries nearly doubled from 2018 to 2024; it has increased 58% since 2006. No AGRA country doubled productivity or cut hunger in half. In Nigeria and in Kenya, where AGRA is headquartered, yields actually fell while the number of undernourished more than doubled.
This paper includes comparative evidence from Senegal, a non-AGRA country, which pursued a more diverse set of agricultural policies and, unlike the Green Revolution countries, succeeded in cutting the number of hungry in half. Senegal supported a wider range of crops, such as millet and groundnuts, and embraced farmer initiatives to expand low-input agroecological approaches.
The evidence also confirms that the Green Revolution’s promotion of improved seeds and fertilizers generated not the desired “sustainable intensification” — growing more food on existing land — but massive expansion onto new lands to grow supported crops such as maize. Other traditional crops have suffered as a result. Millet, a climate-resilient, nutritious crop central to the diets of many small-scale farming families, saw production decline 27% in those 18 years, with yields falling 17% in AGRA countries as farmers responded to subsidies to grow maize by reducing land planted to millet by 12%. In contrast, Senegal supported millet farming, achieving 87% yield growth on one-third more land to increase production by 147%.
This assessment does not pin the blame for these outcomes primarily on AGRA. Rather, it serves as an evaluation of the much larger Green Revolution approach, which was heavily supported by donors and is now primarily funded by the World Bank Group. It was also supported by African governments through their Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program, which set many of the same productivity, income, and hunger objectives that no African country was able to meet. As such, the evidence in this paper should be instructive as donors and governments seek more effective ways to catalyze agricultural development. Many of those more successful approaches are detailed in the food sovereignty alliance’s report, “The Green Revolution Has Failed Africa: Twenty Years of Evidence and What Works Instead.”
AGRA officials declined to respond to my detailed set of questions about whether, in fact, the removal of “Green Revolution” from AGRA’s name represented any significant reconsideration of its core strategies. It does not. Outgoing AGRA president Agnes Kalibata, interviewed in 2025 by Devex, acknowledged, “Part of why we [AGRA] rebranded was that the Green Revolution ship has sailed. We can’t continue pursuing what’s not working for others.”
Kalibata implies that Africa somehow missed the Green Revolution boat. AGRA did not miss the boat. It herded African governments and their hungry farmers onto it for a 20-year voyage that leaves them shipwrecked on a continent-sized island that is now less capable of feeding itself than it was before the multi-billion-dollar Green Revolution set sail.
“Requiem for Africa’s Green Revolution” is available as a Global Development and Environment Institute Working Paper. “The Green Revolution Has Failed Africa” is available from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. I will join AFSA at a virtual press conference August 24 where we will present our findings.