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 (...)
