Over a fifth of all Africans — 281.6 million people — faced hunger in 2020. This was due partly to conflicts in central Africa and the Sahel, but also to ‘climate variability and extremes’ and ‘economic slowdowns and downturns’ linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a joint United Nations and African Union (AU) report.
Today, with grain prices soaring as the war in Ukraine disrupts supply, famine is even more likely: 25 African countries import over a third of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine, and Benin and Somalia rely on them entirely.
African governments’ agricultural policy and food system choices are rarely criticised; most take a productivist approach. A meeting of African Union leaders in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, in 2014 committed to ‘ending hunger’ by 2025.
To achieve this, they would ‘accelerate agricultural growth by at least doubling productivity’ through ‘access to quality and affordable inputs’ (fertilisers, pesticides, seed) among other things. As in 1960s India, the idea is to boost local production with a ‘green revolution’.
Since 2006, this approach has also had the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) as part of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). AGRA’s board, chaired by former Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Dessalegn, also includes Jakaya Kikwete, a former president of Tanzania. As of 2020 the BMGF had reportedly donated two thirds of the $1bn in funding AGRA had received.
But so far, AGRA has failed in its objectives. In 2006 the goal was to double agricultural output and halve food insecurity by 2020, but productivity is up by only 18%. East Africa has performed best: between 2006 and 2018 maize production (heavily subsidised) rose by 71% in Ethiopia, 66% in Rwanda and 64% in Uganda; but over the same period malnutrition increased by 30%.
The region has only a quarter of Africa’s population, but more than half of its malnourished. Yet a ‘green revolution’, based on intensive monoculture, prioritises calorie availability and sacrifices dietary diversity — a ‘luxury’ according to Agnès Kalibata, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy to the 2021 Food Systems Summit and chair of AGRA. In Rwanda, maize and rice have replaced sorghum and millet, though these are richer in nutrients and more resistant to climate variability.
‘Land had become too degraded’
Despite these problems, AGRA has stuck to its guns with the support of international and African national organisations, but there is resistance. Economist An Ansoms reports that many Rwandan smallholders faced with a ban on traditional staples such as sweet potato and sorghum started growing them secretly, and some decided to stop cultivating altogether.
In certain locations, entire terraces were left uncultivated because of disappointing experiences in the years before, or because land had become so degraded that it was no longer worth the effort.’ President Paul Kagame, though an advocate of intensive farming, eventually decided to allow some traditional crops.
There is also opposition from institutions. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), representing over 200 million small-scale food producers, has urged its donors to shun the AGRA-BMGF approach. AFSA’s coordinator Million Belay condemns the pressure he claims has been put on the African Union Commission(the AU’s secretariat) to ‘change laws and regulations governing what we plant’ to conform to international dictates (Al Jazeera, 22 September 2021).
“When a single cash crop is grown year after year, without rotation, the rich biodiversity and genetic capital of African food systems is reduced, leaving communities more dependent on foreign aid.”
Francesca De Gasparis
Since 2011, AFSA has promoted agroecology. The UN Committee on World Food Security’s high level panel of experts on food security and nutrition describes this as ‘a science, a set of practices and a social movement’ whose goal is to ‘reduce the use of purchased inputs [and] create more diverse, resilient and productive agroecosystems’.
As practices vary between territories and situations, AFSA studies everything from the spacing of teff (a cereal grass) seedlings in northern Ethiopia to the use of natural fertilisers in Uganda and digging of trenches to collect rainwater in Tanzania. Broadly, it focuses on ‘diversification …biological pest control; improvement of soil structure and health; biological nitrogen fixation; and recycling of nutrients, energy and waste’.
None of this interests the international organisations that met in Brazzaville (Republic of the Congo) in March 2021. They presented agroindustry as the ‘new oil’, which could generate as much as $1tn in revenue by 2030, but stressed that unlocking its potential would entail boosting productivity.
This meant overcoming ‘a persistent slow rate of adoption of improved production technologies’. However, they were happy that African farmers, who walked an average of 30km to buy inputs in 2006, only had to walk 10km in 2020.
AFSA’s Belay condemns this as a victory for the chemical industry; he claims the BMGF is doing more to open up African markets to agrochemicals and genetically modified organisms than it does to help smallholders.
A study by the NGO Grain confirms that between 2003 and 2020 nearly half the BMGF’s agriculture-related grants went to advocates of intensive monoculture: AGRA, CGIAR (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research), the African Agricultural Technology Foundation and UN agencies.
Trojan horse for big seed companies
So, far from being altruistic, the BMGF’s grants are a Trojan horse for big seed companies such as Bayer, which is also a world leader in phytosanitary products. In 2010 the BMGF bought 500,000 shares in Monsanto (now part of Bayer), which makes the world’s most widely used herbicide, Roundup.
Though the BMGF maintains 80% of its funding is intended to help African farmers, Grain says ‘82% was channelled to groups based in North America and Europe while less than 10% went to Africa-based groups.’
An open letter from the South African Faith Communities’ Environmental Institute (SAFCEI) accuses the BMGF of supporting an expansion of industrial-scale agriculture, which is ‘deepening the humanitarian crisis, rendering people landless and undermining environmental resilience’.
SAFCEI’s executive director Francesca De Gasparis emphasises that ‘when a single cash crop is grown year after year, without rotation, it becomes vulnerable to pests and disease, soil fertility is destroyed, and the rich biodiversity and genetic capital of African food systems is reduced. Experiences from around the world provide further evidence that industrial monocropping will leave African communities worse off and even more dependent on foreign aid, not less’.
Is agroecology the solution? Since 2015 the FAO has been piloting it in Senegal, where the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, believes it has the support of ‘a strong smallholders’ movement’ including many independent associations, some of whose leaders are members of local decision-making bodies with links with other West African organisations.
However, researchers Patrick Bottazzi and Sébastien Boillat are concerned about the influence of NGOs and international donors on agroecological practices, likening it to the introduction of pesticides by French agronomists during the colonial and postcolonial periods.
The influence of the agrifood industry is a factor everywhere. At the UN Food Systems Summit in New York in September 2021, Secretary-General António Guterres talked of the ‘need to re-think how we see and value food — not simply as a commodity to be traded, but as a right that every person shares’ and to change food systems, which ‘generate one third of all greenhouse gas emissions [and] are responsible for up to 80% of biodiversity loss’.
But the interests of major industrial groups dominated the summit, which was held in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. Fakhri sees this as an anomaly in the history of food conferences. Indeed, from the foundation of the FAO in 1945 to the major food conferences of 1974, 1996 and 2001, the right to food and the role of civil society dominated international debate. Twenty years on, they have been displaced by the interests of agribusiness. As a result, hundreds of organisations, including AFSA, boycotted the UN event and held their own summit.