AGRA (the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) is a failing program that does not help — or in fact actively harms — many small-scale farmers in Africa.

 Since 2006, the Gates Foundation and other donors have invested nearly $1 billion in AGRA, claiming to help African farmers and transform African agriculture. But from its inception, AGRA has been criticized by many civil society organizations and farmers’ associations in Africa.

The 2015 Nyéléni Forum on Agroecology brought together advocates of food sovereignty and sustainable, farmer-led agricultural approaches, in contrast to the Gates Foundation-led AGRA model. (source: Flickr)

Even early on, African farmers and environmentalists were raising concerns about numerous aspects of AGRA, namely:

  • AGRA’s promotion of industrial agriculture has systematically undermined food sovereignty and African knowledge systems, seeds, and self-reliance. As laid out in the Declaration of Nyéléni, signed in Selingué, Mali, food sovereignty is the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. 

  • AGRA seeks to create private-sector opportunities in African agriculture and attempts to make agricultural systems function exclusively as a business. This includes directing funding to lobbying groups that push for national seed commercialization laws, which make it so that farmers in some places can no longer use their own seeds and are encouraged to rely on expensive high-yielding seeds. It also includes opening markets for expensive, harmful chemicals, which increase farmer debt and dependency.

  • AGRA has also come under fire for promoting genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are heavily debated on ecological, safety, and socio-political grounds. Specifically, AGRA supports policy and advocacy efforts that alter African legal regulations and policies in favor of seed privatization — often including GMOs. When AGRA began, only South Africa allowed the commercial production of GMO crops; even now, only a handful do, but many are developing confined field trials and allowing GMO research. 

After fifteen years, additional critiques of AGRA continue to emerge:

  • It has failed to meet its own objectives. AGRA initially promised to increase incomes and yields for 20 million smallholder farming households by 2020 (this goal has since been revised to 30 million farmers in 11 countries by 2021). Specifically, it claimed that its Integrated Soil Fertility Management programs would directly benefit 9 million smallholder farmers and indirectly benefit 21 million. But a 2020 report based on AGRA’s own progress reports found that AGRA programs directly benefited fewer than 2 million farmers. Of those, most were mid-scale farmers (with landholdings of 5-100 hectares).

  • Recent reports have shown that yields remain comparatively low when small-scale farmers apply Green Revolution technology. Many of these technologies are better suited for larger or “emerging” farmers able to take advantage of economies of scale, and/or only have higher yields for a short period of time and in optimal environmental conditions. For example, in Rwanda--often held up as an AGRA success story — only a wealthy minority of farmers have been able to adhere to the strict agricultural intensification mandates imposed by the central government. While the country has experienced increased yields and reduced poverty rates (by conventional measures), AGRA’s interventions in Rwanda have increased rural landlessness, replaced polycultures with monocrops, and jeopardized land tenure security. 

  • In contradiction to what it claims, AGRA has not reduced malnutrition, hunger, or poverty in the countries where it operates, and may in fact be contributing to exacerbating these issues. In many countries, the number of hungry people actually increased in the AGRA period. In Kenya, the number of hungry people increased by 4.2 million during the AGRA period and proportionately remained at about the same level. In Tanzania, the number of undernourished people increased by four million from 13.6 million for the period 2004–06 (pre-AGRA) to 17.6 million for the period 2016–18. 

  • Finally, AGRA’s monitoring and evaluation has been inadequate. They have been reluctant to share program evaluation reports, doing so only after considerable public pressure and Freedom of Information Act requests. The evaluation they eventually released, for the years 2017 to 2020, included very limited baseline data and no data for the first 10 years of programming. Moreover, the evaluators suggested that AGRA had not met most of its targets related to systems development: only 33% of the total direct farmer reach had been achieved, and farmer-level results were unsustainable due to highly subsidized delivery models and incentives. And while their most recent annual report from 2020 claims that they have directly “reached” 10.1 million farmers and indirectly “touched” 44 million farmers, they rely exclusively on these kinds of non-specific verbs, which do not give any real sense of through what mechanisms they have been working with farmers, nor any real demographic information on the farmers they claim to be helping. 

AGRA Story: The March Towards a Green Revolution in Africa, a film produced by the Gates Foundation, depicting African agriculture (and farmers) as backwards and stuck in the past.

 

So if most African farmers aren’t benefiting from AGRA, then who is?

The short answer: AGRA is helping large agribusiness corporations and private companies gain a foothold in African agriculture.

The long answer: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the largest private charitable foundation in the world and the largest donor to AGRA, is pioneering a form of philanthropy that has come to be called philanthrocapitalism. Unlike earlier models of philanthropy that gave money to the arts, libraries, and other public endeavors, philanthrocapitalism is based on an expectation of long-term financial returns or secondary benefits from investments in social programs.

Of many meanings given since it was coined in 2006, the term philanthrocapitalism can be broadly understood as a tactic of billionaire philanthropists to establish the profit motive and market mechanisms as the best means of achieving the public good--and to generate additional prosperity through so-called “charity."

 

Sources and additional reading:

Note on GMOs: The literature on GMOs remains extremely divisive, and the debates are far too extensive to be reproduced here. For a concise overview of various contentious issues, see Nathanael Johnson (2013), 20 common questions about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), Grist. For overviews of the debates and concerns specifically in Africa, see Noah Zerbe (2004), Feeding the famine? American food aid and the GMO debate in Southern Africa, in Food Policy ; Devlin Kuyek (2002), Genetically Modified Crops in African Agriculture: Implications for Small Farmers, GRAIN ; Tomme Young (2004), Genetically Modified Organisms and Biosafety: A background paper for decision-makers and others to assist in consideration of GMO issues, IUCN Policy and Global Change Series No. 1 ; Ademola Adenle (2013), Stakeholders' Perceptions of GM Technology in West Africa, in Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics ; José Falck-Zepeda, Guillaume Gruère, and Idah Sithole-Niang (2013), Genetically Modified Crops in Africa: Economic and Policy Lessons from Countries South of the Sahara, International Food Policy Research Institute ; and publications by the African Centre for Biodiversity.

Note on AGRA’s policy interventions: See AGRA (2017), Seeding an African Green Revolution: The PASS Journey for an example of AGRA’s policy interventions. It is very difficult to trace direct engagements by AGRA in drafting explicitly pro-GMO legislation, but it is well-established that they have supported broader legislative frameworks that create an enabling environment for agribusiness corporations and private seed markets. For example, they directly supported Nigeria’s Agricultural Promotion Plan for 2016-2020 (more commonly known as the Green Alternative Plan) — a framework that has since been mobilized to pass Plant Varieties Protection laws privatizing seed and to support GM cowpea and cotton, as indicated in John Komen et al. (2020), Biosafety Regulatory Reviews and Leeway to Operate: Case Studies From Sub-Sahara Africa, in Frontiers in Plant Science. See also AGRA Nigeria Operational Plan (2017) and FMARD, The Agriculture Promotion Plan (2016-2020). It is also worth noting that due to the polemical nature of GMOs, many biotechnology-related interventions are not named as such but are grouped into the broader category of “climate-smart agriculture” — as is the case in the Green Alternative Plan.