By Timothy A. Wise, Kenya Business Daily, September 9, 2020
If you are one of the 2,000 delegates virtually attending this week’s African Green Revolution Forum hosted by Rwanda, you wouldn’t know that heavy storm clouds hang over the gathering. A recent report assessing the impacts of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which hosts the annual forum, show that it may be “failing on its own terms.”
AGRA had set the goals of doubling productivity and incomes by 2020 for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half in 20 countries.
According my research, which contributed to July report “False Promises,” there has been no productivity surge. Most alarming, the number of undernourished people in AGRA’s 13 focus countries has increased 31% during the organization’s well-funded Green Revolution campaign, according to U.N. data.
"The results of the study are devastating for AGRA and the prophets of the Green Revolution," says Jan Urhahn, agricultural expert at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, which commissioned the research and the report.
AGRA has received nearly $1 billion in contributions, the vast majority from the Gates Foundation but with significant contributions from donor governments. AGRA has made over $500 million in grants to promote its vision of a “modernized” African agriculture.
The campaign has been fortified with large financial outlays by African governments, much of it in the form of subsidies to farmers to buy the seeds and fertilizers AGRA promotes. These programs have been estimated to provide as much as $1 billion per year in direct support for such technology adoption.
As AGRA reaches its self-declared deadline of 2020, the organization has published no overall evaluation of the impacts of its programs on the number of smallholder households reached, the improvements in their yields and household incomes or their food security. Our research sought to fill that accountability gap.
Using national-level data from 13 AGRA countries through 2018 on crop yields, poverty, and hunger to gauge AGRA’s impacts, we found no evidence that productivity, incomes or food security were increasing significantly for smallholder households.
Specifically, we found little evidence AGRA was reaching a significant number of farmers, far short of the 30 million it set out to help. Kenya, home to AGRA’s headquarters, saw an increase in the share of its people suffering undernourishment in the AGRA years.
No evidence of significant increases in smallholder incomes or food security. On the contrary, there has been a 31% increase in the number of people suffering extreme hunger since AGRA began in 2006.
There was also no evidence of large productivity increases. For staple crops as a whole, yields are up only 18% over 12 years for AGRA’s 13 countries.
We found that even where technology adoption had taken place, input subsidies provided by African governments seemed far more influential than AGRA’s programs. It is difficult to find evidence that AGRA’s programs would have any significant impacts in the absence of such large subsidies from African governments.
Even where production increased, as in AGRF host Rwanda, a quadrupling of maize production did not result in reductions in hunger. According to the latest U.N. data, the number of undernourished Rwandans increased 41% since 2006.
Green Revolution incentives for priority crops such as maize drove land into maize and out of more nutritious and climate-resilient traditional crops such as millet and sorghum, eroding food security and nutrition for poor farmers. Millet production declined 24% with yields falling 21% in the AGRA years.
The report argues that African governments and donors should instead actively consider agroecology and other low-cost, low-input approaches, which have shown far better short and long-term prospects. One University of Essex study surveyed nearly 300 large ecological agriculture projects across more than 50 poor countries and documented an average 79% increase in productivity with decreasing costs and rising incomes. Such results far surpass AGRA’s.
"AGRA is a vicious circle that drives small-scale food producers further and further into poverty, destroying their natural resources," says Mutinta Nketani, an agricultural specialist from PELUM Zambia and author of the report’s case study on Zambia. PELUM and two other African organizations on September 7 issued a public letter challenging AGRA to provide evidence of its impacts.