BOSTON and KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 29 (IPS) – Regardless of its dismal report, the Gates Basis-sponsored Alliance for a Inexperienced Revolution in Africa (AGRA) introduced a brand new five-year technique in September after rebranding itself by dropping ‘Inexperienced Revolution’ from its title.
Rebranding, not reform
As an alternative of studying from expertise and altering its method accordingly, AGRA’s new strategy guarantees extra of the identical. Ignoring proof, criticisms and civil society pleas and demands, the Gates Basis has dedicated one other $200 million to its new five-year plan, bringing its complete contribution to round $900 million.
Stung by criticism of its poor outcomes, AGRA delayed saying its new technique by a 12 months, whereas its chief government shepherded the controversial UN Food Systems Summit of 2021. Following this, AGRA has been utilizing extra UN Sustainable Improvement Targets rhetoric.
Therefore, AGRA’s new slogan – ‘Sustainably Rising Africa’s Meals Programs’. Likewise, the brand new plan claims to “lay the inspiration for a sustainable meals systems-led inclusive agricultural transformation”. However past such lip service, there’s little proof of any significant dedication to sustainable agriculture within the $550 million plan for 2023–27.
Regardless of heavy authorities subsidies, AGRA promotion of economic seeds and fertilizers for just some cereal crops did not considerably improve productiveness, incomes and even meals safety. However as a substitute of addressing previous shortcomings, the brand new plan nonetheless depends closely on extra of the identical regardless of its failure to “catalyze” a productiveness revolution amongst African farmers.
The title change suggests the 16-year-old AGRA needs to dissociate itself from previous failures, however with out acknowledging its personal flawed method. Not too long ago, a lot greater fertilizer costs – following sanctions in opposition to Russia and Belarus after the Ukraine invasion – have worsened the lot of farmers counting on AGRA really useful inputs.
It’s time to change course, with insurance policies selling ecological farming by lowering reliance on artificial fertilizers as acceptable. However regardless of its new slogan, AGRA’s new technique intends in any other case.
Final month, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa rejected the technique and title change as “beauty”, “an admission of failure” of the Inexperienced Revolution mission, and “a cynical distraction” from the pressing want to vary course.
Productiveness beneficial properties and losses
Regardless of spending nicely over a billion {dollars}, AGRA’s productivity gains have been modest, and just for a couple of extra closely sponsored crops comparable to maize and rice. And from 2015 to 2020, cereal yields haven’t risen in any respect.
In the meantime, conventional meals crop manufacturing has declined below AGRA, with millet falling over a fifth. Yields really additionally fell for cassava, groundnuts and root crops comparable to candy potato. Throughout a basket of staple crops, yields rose solely 18% in 12 years.
Farmer incomes haven’t risen, particularly after elevated manufacturing prices are taken under consideration. As for halving starvation, which Gates and AGRA initially promised, the variety of ‘severely undernourished’ individuals in AGRA’s 13 focus nations elevated by 31%!
A donor-commissioned evaluation confirmed many adverse farmer outcomes. It discovered the minority of farmers who benefited had been primarily better-off males, not smallholder girls the programme was ostensibly meant for.
That didn’t deter the Gates Basis from committing extra to AGRA regardless of its dismal monitor report, failed technique, and poor monitoring to trace progress. Judging by the brand new five-year plan, we are able to count on even much less accountability.
The new plan doesn’t even set measurable targets for yields, incomes or meals safety. Because the saying goes, what you don’t measure you don’t worth. Apparently, AGRA doesn’t worth agricultural productiveness, although it’s nonetheless on the core of the group’s technique.
Final month, the Rockefeller Basis, AGRA’s different founding donor and a pacesetter of the primary Inexperienced Revolution from the Nineteen Fifties, announced a discount in its grant to AGRA and a decisive step again from the Inexperienced Revolution method.
Its grant to AGRA helps college feeding initiatives and “alternate options to fossil-fuel derived fertilisers and pesticides by the promotion of regenerative agricultural practices comparable to cultivation of nitrogen-fixing beans”.
Enterprise in cost
AGRA’s new technique is constructed on a sequence of “enterprise traces”, e.g., the “sustainable farming enterprise line” will coordinate with the “Seed Programs enterprise line” to promote inputs. Non-public Village Based mostly Advisors are supposed to present coaching and planting recommendation on this privatized, industrial reincarnation of the federal government or quasi-government extension providers of an earlier period.
The UN Meals and Agriculture Group efficiently promoted peer-learning of agro-ecological practices through Farmer Field Schools after efficiently field-testing them. This took place after research confirmed ‘brown hoppers’ thrived in Asian rice farms after Inexperienced Revolution pesticides eradicated the insect’s pure predators.
China misplaced a fifth of its 2007-08 paddy harvest to the pest, triggering a value spike within the thinly traded world rice market. In search of assist from the Worldwide Rice Analysis Institute, situated within the Philippines, a Chinese delegation found its Entomology Division had misplaced most of its former capability on account of under-funding.
Earlier worldwide agricultural analysis collaboration related to the primary Inexperienced Revolution – particularly in wheat, maize and rice – appears to have collapsed, surrendering to company and philanthropic pursuits. This bitter expertise inspired China to step up its agronomic analysis efforts with a better agro-ecological emphasis.
Empty guarantees?
The brand new technique guarantees “AGRA will promote elevated crop diversification on the farm stage”. However its advisers cum salespeople have a vested curiosity in promoting their wares, somewhat than good native seeds which don’t require repeat purchases each planting season.
AGRA shouldn’t be strengthening resilience by selling agroecology or lowering farmer reliance on expensive inputs comparable to fossil gasoline fertilizers and different, usually poisonous, agrochemicals. Regardless of many proven African agroecological initiatives, assist for them stays modest.
The brand new technique stresses irrigation, key to most different Inexperienced Revolutions, however conspicuously absent from Africa’s Inexperienced Revolution. However the plan is deafeningly silent on how fiscally strapped governments are to supply such essential infrastructure, particularly within the face of rising water, fiscal and debt stress, worsened by international warming.
It’s usually stated stupidity is doing the identical factor over and over, anticipating totally different outcomes. Maybe that is as a result of technophile conceit that some favoured innovation is superior to every little thing else, together with scientific data, processes and agro-ecological options.
IPS UN Bureau
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© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
