IATP 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. The organization, which has spent $1 billion since its founding in 2006, is reportedly counting on the September United Nations Food System Summit as a key platform for its fundraising. AGRA’s president, Agnes Kalibata, was named Special Envoy last year by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres to lead the summit. The simultaneous fund drive raises immediate questions about her conflicts of interest.
The reported funding campaign comes one year after our research documented that AGRA was failing on its own terms. Our review of national-level data from 13 AGRA focus countries showed that Green Revolution programs were falling far short of stated goals of doubling productivity and incomes for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half by 2020.
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. Ecological agriculture received another vote of confidence earlier this month when the U.N. Committee on World Food Security approved a set of polic recommendations supporting such measures….
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