by JAN URHAHN (translated by Loren Balhorn)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promised Africa a “Green Revolution” to fight hunger and poverty. It hasn’t worked — but it has upped corporate agriculture’s profits. Local farmers are being left empty-handed, and hunger is rising.
Over the last five years, the number of people around the world suffering from hunger has been on the rise. Against this backdrop, a decades-old debate continues to rage, asking which agricultural approaches can provide everyone with sufficient healthy food.
One simplistic answer comes from governments in the Global North (and so, too, some in the Global South). They claim that international agribusiness could end global hunger if only it had the means to do so, boosting agricultural productivity through the use of pesticides, hybrid seeds, and other external inputs.
But many social movements, experts, and NGOs disagree. They insist that hunger isn’t a problem of production — rather, it’s rooted in the unequal distribution of power resources and control over agricultural inputs such as land and seeds.
Agribusiness’s narrative nevertheless continues to be influential. It determines policy much more than the demands put forward by small farmers and their advocates ever do. Governments in the Global South, especially in Africa, are regularly pressured to modify their agricultural sectors with new laws or projects that favor international agribusiness. And in Africa, there’s a particularly prominent initiative driving corporate agriculture’s agenda — Bill Gates’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
Corporate Agriculture Against Global Hunger
AGRA was established in 2006 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Deploying high-yield commercial seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides as its main weapons, the program is meant to help Africa unleash its own Green Revolution in agriculture to fight hunger and poverty. At least, that’s the promise.
Upon its foundation, AGRA set out to double the agricultural yields and incomes of thirty million smallholder households, thereby halving both hunger and poverty in twenty African countries by 2020. To achieve this, the “alliance” funds various projects and lobbies African governments to implement structural changes that would set the stage for its “Green Revolution.” Since its foundation, AGRA has received contributions of about $1 billion, mainly from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Large grants have also come from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and other countries.
From these donations, AGRA has awarded grants of more than $500 million across the continent. African governments support AGRA’s goals with public funds through so-called farm input subsidy programs (FISPs), with which farmers are expected to purchase the seeds — mostly hybrid — and synthetic fertilizers promoted by AGRA. The state subsidies for small farms provide an incentive to introduce the bundle of farming technologies AGRA counts as part of its Green Revolution. FISPs have been introduced on a significant scale in ten of AGRA’s thirteen “focus countries” including Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Rwanda, Zambia, and Tanzania.
But fourteen years after AGRA was founded, it’s safe to say that the initiative has failed to meet its goals. Rather than combat hunger and poverty, hunger has actually increased by 30 percent in the AGRA focus countries — meaning that thirty million more people are suffering from it than when AGRA started. By 2018, agricultural yields in the focus countries had increased by only 18 percent, as opposed to the 100 percent AGRA promised. In the period before AGRA, yields in these countries had grown by 17 percent. The increases in yields with and without AGRA were therefore almost identical.
Winners and Losers
AGRA’s results are devastating for small-scale farmers. Most AGRA projects primarily entail selling them expensive inputs such as hybrid seeds and synthetic fertilizers via agrochemical companies. These inputs are extremely costly and thus drastically increase farmers’ risk of falling into indebtedness. Examples from Tanzania show that small-scale farmers have not been able to repay seed and fertilizer debts directly after the harvest, even forcing some to sell their livestock.
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