AGRA’s model of agricultural transformation is predicated on a large number of people leaving farming, increasing the commodification and consolidation of land in the hands of larger and wealthier firms.

Numerous studies have found that AGRA and other Green Revolution programs in Africa mostly benefit large-scale commercial farmers for whom industry-produced inputs (like seeds and chemical fertilizers) and mechanization are cost-effective and who have stronger connections to markets through contract buyers. Although AGRA claims to be helping small-scale farmers, their model of agricultural transformation both acknowledges and advocates for these inequalities among farmers. In their 2020 Annual Report, they state, “Our vision is an agriculture transformation that fundamentally changes how food is produced.”

Illustrating their perspective of agricultural transformation, they include a diagram from C. Peter Timmer’s A World without Agriculture, which postulates an evolution from subsistence farming, to higher productivity enabling a surplus, to the emergence of a non-agricultural section, to the growth of that sector in ways that lead to a shift in labor, to a fully integrated and urbanized rural economy. In embracing this model, AGRA makes clear that its leadership knows and assumes that many millions of people will have to abandon agriculture, enabling land consolidation and increased productivity by commercial farmers. And in the early 2000s, the Gates Foundation apparently also expressly advocated for this eviction trajectory, referring to it euphemistically as “land mobility.”

AGRA’s model of agricultural transformation, from C.P. Timmer’s A World without Agriculture (source: AGRA Annual Report 2020)

Inspired by modernization theory, this model reflects the "Lewis path.” The Lewis path suggests that increasing agricultural productivity “frees up" surplus labor for industry. This process leads to industry-led economic growth, while also enabling revenues from agriculture to more closely approximate those in other sectors. When AGRA models "agricultural transformation” on the Lewis path, they assume that the urban industrial workforce will absorb displaced farmers, while larger farms will be able to more efficiently and cheaply produce food to sustain growing cities. 

In fact, while cast as a general and universal model, the “Lewis path” has only been observed in industrialized countries of the Global North, where historical conditions produced by colonization, early capitalism, and emigration to other continents all played a role in agriculture and industry having the relationship they do today. In much of the rest of the world, the trend is the opposite: increasing numbers of farmers, who are poorer relative to other workers and other farmers elsewhere in the world. AGRA’s modeling of its theory of agricultural transformation on the “Lewis path” thus misapplies the historically- and geographically-specific experience of industrialization in Europe and the US (see our first companion guide for numerous critiques of this model) to contemporary African contexts. Moreover, estimates suggest that it would take an unprecedented and unrealizable 15 percent economic growth rate, sustained continuously for over 50 years, to absorb the rural exodus anticipated to be caused by the AGRA model.

AGRA claims that it is working toward agricultural intensification–growing more on the same amount of land. However, studies indicate that marginal increases in yield under AGRA programs are actually due to extensification—growing more by expanding the acreage of farms (often through land and forest clearance). This is dangerous ecologically (because of the impacts of newly cleared forests on carbon emissions and sequestration, as well as on biodiversity loss) and socially (because of the impacts of consolidating existing farmland).

Extensification of agriculture and cattle ranching contribute to deforestation in the Amazon (pictured) and other regions (source: NASA Earth Observatory)

Change in agricultural land around the world between 2009-2019 (source: Our World in Data)

Green Revolution models of agriculture on the African continent go hand in hand with attempts by the World Bank and other economic institutions to privatize land through individual titling and the creation of formal land markets. This is a form of commodification and enclosure, which imposes exclusive ownership over common resources and allows certain individuals to buy and sell land. This also goes against many existing customary land tenure systems and ideologies, in Africa and elsewhere.

Composite image showing enclosure of common fields (lines from 19th century map) and 20th century land consolidation in South Yorkshire, England (source: South Yorkshire Historic Environment Characterisation)

The Enclosure Acts were passed in England and the UK from approximately the 1200s onward, with the peak occurring in the 1800s. Enclosure privatized common land and open pastures, leading to mass displacement of peasants who over many generations formed the emergent industrial workforce in urban areas.

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