[In Africa, there’s a particularly prominent initiative driving
corporate agriculture’s agenda — Bill Gates’s Alliance for a
Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). AGRA’s results are devastating
for small-scale farmers.] [[link removed]]

BILL GATES’S FOUNDATION IS LEADING A GREEN COUNTERREVOLUTION IN
AFRICA  
[[link removed]]


 

Jan Urhahn, translation by Loren Balhorn
December 27, 2020
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ In Africa, there’s a particularly prominent initiative driving
corporate agriculture’s agenda — Bill Gates’s Alliance for a
Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). AGRA’s results are devastating
for small-scale farmers. _

Bill and Melinda Gates., Wikimedia Commons

 

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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
and synthetic fertilizers via agrochemical companies
[[link removed]].
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.

The AGRA formula — “doubled yields equal doubled incomes” —
simply does not pan out in practice. In the AGRA model, any short-term
increases in yield have to be bought at great expense with seeds,
fertilizer, and often pesticides — an arrangement that only boosts
the incomes of seed and fertilizer companies.

Moreover, freedom of choice is restricted: in AGRA projects in Kenya,
small-scale farmers are not allowed to decide for themselves which
corn seed they plant and which fertilizers and pesticides they use on
their fields. The managers of AGRA projects assume that participating
agrochemical companies make the best decisions for the farmers.
AGRA’s focus is on a few food crops such as corn or soy, causing
traditional nutrient-rich foods to be neglected and even displaced.

Statistics for the thirteen AGRA focus countries show that production
of cereals has fallen by 21 percent since the initiative was launched.
A yield decline of 7 percent was recorded for root and tuber crops.
All in all, AGRA reduces the diversity in farmers’ fields and thus
also the variety of seeds being used. This development in turn makes
agriculture even more vulnerable to the consequences of the climate
crisis.

Lobbying for Corporate Interests

AGRA’s current strategy describes “policy and advocacy” as its
first field of activity. Its primary goal is to actively promote
policies that open the door to high-yield seeds, synthetic
fertilizers, and other Green Revolution inputs. This prevents support
for alternative approaches such as agroecology.

AGRA funded the establishment of a fertilizer and agribusiness lobby
known as the African Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) to
the tune of $25 million. It represents the interests of the fertilizer
industry vis-à-vis African governments and donor organizations. In
Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania, for example, AFAP wants to increase
fertilizer use by 100 percent. AFAP’s partners include Louis Dreyfus
Company, one of the world’s largest grain traders, and International
Raw Materials (IRM), a major US fertilizer distributor. The links
between AGRA and AFAP are also close: the president of AGRA is also a
member of AFAP’s board of directors.

High on AGRA’s political agenda has always been the suppression of
local farmers’ seed — and the reconfiguration of national and
regional regulations to suit commercial seed companies. Together with
the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), AGRA
has coordinated and supported seed policy reforms in several countries
such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

Such changes have brought African countries into the 1991 Convention
of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of
Plants, known as “UPOV 91.” It guarantees breeders’ rights to
new seed varieties and establishes intellectual property rights over
seeds. The result: a framework was created to privatize plant genetic
resources and thus generate profits.

AGRA also signed a formal memorandum of understanding with the
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 2017. Here, too,
seed legislation is to be adapted to UPOV 91. Yet the criteria for
UPOV admission are often beyond the reach of small-scale producers.
Seed that does not meet the so-called DUS criteria for seeds’
Distinctness (D), Uniformity (U), and Stability (S) cannot be
protected by the UPOV system, and nor can it be included in the
variety registers required by ECOWAS. This means that these seeds
cannot be traded on formal markets. The effect is to restrict
farmers’ right to store, exchange, and sell the seed they save from
cultivating their own farms. At the same time, these rules strengthen
corporate seed. In the worst case, farmers’ own seeds are
criminalized — despite the fact that they remain the main source of
seed across Africa.

Forget AGRA, We Need Agroecology

This hasn’t been without resistance. African movements such as the
Coalition for the Protection of African Genetic Heritage (COPAGEN) and
many others have opposed AGRA from the outset, arguing that AGRA and
other Green Revolution initiatives neglect the needs and rights of the
small-scale producers who produce most of our food worldwide.

Agricultural movements across Africa are calling for a phasing out of
AGRA in favor of greater support for agroecology
[[link removed]],
an agricultural practice originating in the Global South and pursued
by millions of farmers around the world.

Agroecology is both a sound science as well as a social movement that
stands up for the rights of farmers and rejects a purely capitalist
approach to agriculture. Agroecology offers small-scale farmers the
kind of innovation they need: an agriculture that makes conscious use
of nature and natural processes to promote the kinds of soil-building
practices that become impossible when Green Revolution technologies
are used.

These practices are characterized, for example, by the cultivation of
several food crops in the same field. Compost, manure, mulch, legumes,
and organic fertilizers — instead of synthetic fertilizers based on
fossil fuels — are used to fertilize the fields. Ecological pest
control reduces the use of pesticides. Researchers work with farmers
to improve their farm seeds rather than replace them with commercial
hybrid seeds that have to be repurchased every year and also force
them to treat the plants in their fields with synthetic fertilizers to
achieve sufficient yields.

But corporate power is putting up enormous resistance to any and all
alternatives to AGRA. The interests and spheres of influence of the
agribusinesses that profit from the status quo are huge. Alternatives
that strengthen agroecology and farmers’ rights, reduce the use of
pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, or promote farm seeds come into
direct conflict with the interests of capital. Too often, governments
in the Global North see themselves as representatives or ambassadors
of “their” corporations. Nevertheless, the alternatives to AGRA
are there — now is the time to fight for their realization.

_This article draws on a recent study of Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA)’s record in Africa, “False
Promises.”
[[link removed]]_

_Jan Urhahn heads the Food Sovereignty Program at the
Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung in Johannesburg, South Africa._

_Loren Balhorn is a contributing editor at Jacobin and co-editor,
together with Bhaskar Sunkara, of Jacobin: Die Anthologie (Suhrkamp,
2018)._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]