Timothy A. Wise and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, IPS News
Despite its dismal record, the Gates Foundation-sponsored Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) announced a new five-year strategy in September after rebranding itself by dropping ‘Green Revolution’ from its name. Instead of learning from experience and changing its approach accordingly, AGRA’s new strategy promises more of the same. Ignoring evidence, criticisms and civil society pleas and demands, the Gates Foundation has committed another $200 million to its new five-year plan, bringing its total contribution to around $900 million.
Read moreAnn Garrison, LA Progressive
Food production in Africa is complicated by climate change and the use of fertilizers which increase food production but which also create green house gases and create other environmental harm. Read this extended interview with Timothy A. Wise for a deep dive into synthetic fertilizer’s role in the climate crisis and the 2022 food crisis.
Read moreFood Tank
It is remarkable that a program enshrined in so much mythology over so many years is now being shunned by some of the most powerful mainstream agricultural development donors. AGRA’s website still offers no explanation for dropping “green revolution” from its name, and officials did not respond to requests for comment or clarification. It certainly suggests that AGRA and its donors are concealing their retreat from a failing strategy.
Read moreThe Nation (Kenya)
With this new plan, AGRA may well be building on the strengths identified in a donor evaluation: strengthening markets, research, state capacity, and the private sector, especially seeds. But it accentuates the flaws, doing even less to ensure that such achievements translate into improvements for farmers.
Read moreDaily Nation (Kenya)
Rising fertilizer prices and uncertain supplies are bringing promoters of Africa's Green Revolution face-to-face with a food crisis very much of their own making. Inorganic fertilizers, the supposed catalyst for Africa's productivity revolution, have been a bust, and now they are too expensive for governments to subsidize or farmers to buy.
Read moreFood Tank
On April 27, three members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote to the co-chairs of the House Appropriations Committee expressing “serious concern about U.S. funding for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).” The letter, signed by Democratic Representatives Sara Jacobs, Tom Malinowski, and Ilhan Omar, came on the heels of a March 30 briefing by African civil society and faith leaders, who called on Congress to cut funding to an initiative that, in their words, “has done more harm than good” since it was founded 16 years ago.
Read moreDown to Earth India
Some governments, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are reforming their seed laws in ways that make it harder for farmers to save, exchange and sell their seeds. Their agenda is certainly to corporatise the seed sector. They have decided that farmer-managed seed systems are too unproductive. They are wrong. African organisations have proven that careful seed selection can improve productivity and improved farming practices can enhance soil fertility without heavy reliance on synthetic fertilisers. The real beneficiaries of the input subsidies are seed and fertiliser companies, which would have no markets for their products if not for government funds.
Read moreMongabay
A critical new donor-funded evaluation of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has confirmed what African civil society and faith leaders have claimed: “AGRA did not meet its headline goal of increased incomes and food security for 9 million smallholders.” The evaluation should be a wake up call, and not just for the private and bilateral donors that have bankrolled this 15-year-old effort to the tune of $1 billion. It should also rouse African governments to repurpose their agricultural subsidies from the Green Revolution package of commercial seeds and fertilizers to agroecology and other low-cost, low-input approaches. They have been providing as much as $1 billion per year for such input subsidies.
Read moreIATP Blog
A new donor-commissioned evaluation of the controversial Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) reveals serious shortcomings in the 15-year-old initiative’s efforts to “catalyze a farming revolution in Africa.” Today, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) published an analysis of the evaluation. As the headline coverage in development media outlet Devex stated, “AGRA has failed to improve Africa's food security, report finds.”
Read moreThe Elephant (Kenya)
It is a myth that the only way to increase productivity on existing agricultural lands is through Green Revolution programs. Evidence shows that they are among the principal causes of unsustainable land use.
read the full article on The Elephant…
Read moreAfrican Arguments
Timothy A. Wise responds to an op-ed by Hailemariam Desalegn, former prime minister of Ethiopia and current Board Chair at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, defending AGRA over findings that it is failing on its own terms.
Read moreIPS News
As world leaders wrap up the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, new scientific research shows that there is still a great deal of magical thinking by people like Bill Gates about the contribution of fertilizer to global warming.
Read moreFood Tank
Bayer/Monsanto suffered another in a long string of setbacks in its battle to grow genetically modified (GM) corn in Mexico when the country’s highest court on October 13 refused to overturn a precautionary injunction restricting the cultivation of GM corn. In its unanimous decision, the court agreed with the citizen petitioners who sought the injunction in 2013 that cultivation of GM corn poses a credible threat to Mexico’s rich store of native corn biodiversity through uncontrolled cross-pollination.
Read moreThe Conversation - Africa
Our research paper calls into question the very premises of the Green Revolution’s “theory of change”. The theory is that if seeds and fertilisers are put in the hands of small-scale farmers, their yields will double, as will their incomes from the sale of surplus crops. And they will become food secure from the crops they grow and the food they can now afford to buy. None of that has come to pass.
Read moreIPS News
AGRA seems to be living in a different world from poor, rural Africans, oblivious to the documented shortcomings of its technology-focused approach to agricultural development. AGRA leaders and donors seem unaware that the number of severely undernourished people in Sub-Saharan Africa has risen nearly 50% since AGRA was founded in 2006.
Read moreIATP Policy Brief
A review of AGRA’s 2020 Annual Report, published July 12 with a companion report on “Emerging Results 2017-21,” reveals that AGRA provides some data but no convincing evidence of progress toward these three topline goals of doubling yields and incomes for 30 million small-scale farming households in Africa while halving food security.
Read moreIATP Blog
According to an anonymous inside source, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is preparing a campaign to raise $1 billion in the coming months to fund its promotion of industrialized agriculture through 2030. AGRA’s fund drive is sure to intensify calls from African farm, environmental and community organizations to demand that donors shift their funding from expensive Green Revolution programs to more affordable and sustainable approaches such as agroecology.
Read moreSince the Mexican government published its much-awaited presidential decree on New Year's Eve to restrict the use of the herbicide glyphosate and genetically modified corn, IATP has actively worked to defend the government against threats from U.S. agribusiness using the revised North American Free Trade Agreement, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Bayer/Monsanto and Mexico's National Agribusiness Council (CNA) filed for an injunction in Mexico courts to stop the glyphosate regulations.
Read moreBy Timothy A. Wise and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, IPS News
Since the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was launched in 2006, yields have barely risen, while rural poverty remains endemic, and would have increased more if not for out-migration. What went wrong? The continuing Indian farmer protests, despite the COVID-19 resurgence, highlight the problematic legacy of its Green Revolution (GR) in frustrating progress to sustainable food security. Many studies have already punctured some myths of India’s GR. Looking back, its flaws and their dire consequences should have warned policymakers of the likely disappointing results of the GR in Africa.
Read moreIPS News
José Graziano da Silva has been one of the world’s most influential leaders in the fight against hunger. After leading Brazil’s Zero Hunger program nearly twenty years ago, he was appointed Director-General of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, where he served from 2012 to 2019. During his tenure, he helped transform an institution known for its promotion of agricultural practices associated with the “Green Revolution” – reliance on commercial seeds, fertilizers and pesticides – into one that also welcomed the growing calls from farmer and indigenous groups for more sustainable approaches. I interviewed him by email.
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