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With the passage of the highly competitive UN Food System Summit last month, the task of “feeding the world” has become more urgent.
But one thing that the summit attendees apparently failed to notice is that the “agricultural modernization” project that many of them have supported for decades will only worsen the food insecurity situation in recent years, especially in Africa.
Since the 2007-08 world food price crisis, Western governments and charities headed by the United States and the Gates Foundation have supported multiple programs across the African continent to increase farmers’ productivity and connect them to commercial supply chains. Together, these efforts are under the banner of “African Green Revolution”-this approach is no different from the previous green revolutions, which were mainly in Asia and Latin America.
But there is a fundamental contradiction at the core of this large-scale charity and government cause: We have been told that the “modernization” of agriculture will benefit smallholder farmers in Africa by providing advantages to farmers and entrepreneurs who own larger land. The result is a “revolution” that ostensibly aims to help the poor. In fact, it is difficult for anyone except the wealthiest, most well-connected, business-oriented, and “efficient” businessmen to live in the countryside.
In our research, we have all encountered the reality of the African Green Revolution in Ghana, a country that has experienced a surge in foreign aid in agriculture in recent years.
As the professors of geography Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Rachel Bezner Kerr mentioned in their 2015 paper, the British colonialists developed a production and market system to extract cocoa—a type of cocoa that was not widely consumed in the country. Today continues to attract large amounts of investment and subsidized crops. During the post-colonial period of the 1960s and 1970s, the Ghanaian government, with the support of Western government donors, introduced high-yielding rice and corn varieties, as well as imported chemical fertilizers.
In a 2011 paper, Kojo Amanor, a professor and anthropologist at the University of Ghana, also explained that from 1986 to 2003, it was founded by Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa and the initiator of the Asian Green Revolution, Norman Bolog The development organization Sasakawa Global 2000 tried and failed. Bringing new agricultural technologies to rural Ghana and most of sub-Saharan Africa. Sasakawa Global 2000 took over the previous role of the government, distributing low-interest credit programs to smallholder farmers willing to buy hybrid seeds, fertilizers and other agrochemicals, and became part of the global commercial supply chain.
Sasakawa Global 2000 found that many farmers are willing to accept their help. However, according to Amanor, many farmers who initially adopted the technology reverted to traditional practices and local seed varieties after the project ended. Even after working in rural Ghana for many years, the organization’s crop investment has only recovered 45%.
Today, there are many reasons why smallholder farmers do not cooperate with the “modernization” program of the African Green Revolution. A 2015 study by Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner Kerr found that even if the government and development organizations provide more “advanced” hybrid varieties, small farmers often prefer to grow their own corn varieties.
Farmers know very well that the more cold-tolerant native corn varieties they grow themselves are more drought-tolerant, require less labor, lower costs, and require little or no chemical fertilizers. In addition, unlike hybrid varieties, their broad leaves will block the sunlight from neighboring plants, and farmers can grow their own corn varieties next to peanuts, cowpeas and bambara beans-all nutritious crops are well adapted to the local ecology.
Development planners have long touted technologies such as hybrid seeds as “solutions” to many problems caused by climate change, and farmers sometimes resort to these technologies in the struggle to adapt to unpredictable ecological conditions. In a study, one of us found that many small farmers in northern Ghana reluctantly switched to these technologies to adapt to increasingly unstable rainfall, shortened growing seasons, and drier, less fertile soils.
But in addition to climate change, farmers are also using technology to solve the problems caused by the African Green Revolution itself, such as increasing competition for land as local businessmen (most of whom are men) purchase farms to use so-called programs to help smallholder farmers.
Despite the obvious need for more technology, smallholder farmers find themselves caught in a vicious circle, sacrificing tomorrow’s soil for today’s planting. Although some of the poorest farmers in Ghana also rely on chemical fertilizers to grow enough food for their livelihoods, some farmers say that without higher doses of chemicals, their soil will become barren. Or, as some people have said, this land is “addicted to chemicals”. This dependence increases the risk of their debts and land deprivation, especially for women.
The emphasis on expensive technology and business access is far from fair competition for any farmer to succeed. It will only make it more difficult for small farmers to survive on their own land. It also opens the door to local businessmen who see the green revolution in Africa. Investment Opportunities. As one farmer said, “[donors] It should help, but what do we see? […] You see the big car. The head of this district needs 50 acres, and the party leader needs 100 acres. “
As another person said, developers “treat farmers as stupid as they do.”
Even at the smallest scale, agriculture is more than just a livelihood. Research shows that a large part of the world’s food is grown by small farmers. However, many critical agricultural thinkers like Henry Bernstein believe that small-scale farming is becoming more and more difficult, even impossible in some places. Development aid mainly flows to agri-food companies and well-capitalized businessmen, while small farmers have lost the farmland they depend on. This is undoubtedly one of the fundamental reasons for this phenomenon.
It is easy to view mass displacement as an unintended consequence of the Green Revolution in Africa. However, since smallholder farmers are rarely seen as part of a supply chain managed by other stronger players, such efforts rarely lead to displacement and marginalization.
In Ghana, several organizations including World Vision, the Gates-funded African Green Revolution Coalition, and the World Bank have authorized relatively wealthy business people to provide farmers with assistance that the state once provided. As part of a project we studied, USAID supported a group of relatively wealthy “core farmers” to distribute seeds and promote occasional tractor services for small farmers in exchange for some of their crops. The aid agency and its contractors stated that this multi-year project will end in 2020, directly involving tens of thousands of poor farmers, and aims to modernize one of the country’s agricultural processing chains.
But when one of us went to Ghana in 2016 and asked some core farmers how they deal with smallholders’ problems, despite receiving assistance, they still could not grow enough soybeans to compensate them. These agricultural entrepreneurs revealed the plan The dark side. Under their guidance, struggling small farmers borrowed money from local banks, bought snacks and sold them on the side of the road to repay their debts. A core farmer said that when a farmer repeatedly fails to grow enough crops, he will instruct the farmer to let others take over their land for the rest of the season. Although some will return next season, many do not.
When asked about these results, an executive who managed the development contractor of the program followed standard practices. The core farmers are “independent enterprises.” How they deal with farmers is not an issue they care about. But the fact that small African farmers are leaving the farm is not something to worry about.
“This is an evolutionary process,” this person said. “I don’t think this is something anyone is trying to refute.”
When facing unpleasant stories about life in rural Africa, supporters of the African Green Revolution often use this reasoning: small farmers are leaving the countryside, but this is their choice. If it is not their choice, their departure is only part of a natural process that no one can control. In any case, when small farmers set down their hoe and head to the nearest city, they do it just to find a better livelihood.
But among like-minded people, enthusiasts tend to make their stand on the issue of rural population decline. In Kigali, Rwanda, in 2018, Rajiv Shah, Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of Africa’s most prominent supporters of the Green Revolution, spoke to several African heads of state and numerous development contractors. Listeners said: “A unique African agricultural revolution aims to defeat hunger by making food more accessible and accessible. But this revolution also aims to create a diversified modern economy in which food production no longer Dominate the way countries distribute most of their labor.”
Like other development planners who cheered the collapse of smallholder agriculture in Africa, Shah-who led the United States Agency for International Development under the Obama administration and the Gates Foundation’s agricultural projects-did not acknowledge the demographic transition brought about by this demographic shift. Some more bleak consequences: the increase in slums and unemployment in Africa. Cities (and cities on other continents), growing food insecurity, and rural areas are increasingly dependent on monocultures and other environmentally damaging agricultural techniques.
Instead, he went on to say that from 2003 to 2018, the population of Sub-Saharan Africa increased from 700 million to more than 1 billion, while the proportion of people working in agriculture on the African continent fell from 65% to 57%.
“True progress,” he said. “But the 8% drop in the proportion of the agricultural labor force over the past 15 years is too small to be celebrated.”
In other words, the large-scale migration of smallholder farmers is not a natural process or side effect of the African Green Revolution. This is exactly what development planners want and expect.
As many grassroots organizations representing smallholder farmers in Africa and around the world understand, this story is fundamentally about who should farm and get rewards from Africa’s farmland. This is one of the reasons why many of them boycotted the September Food System Summit. But to be successful, groups supporting smallholder farmers must continue their efforts in many other areas.
We call on activists to continue telling the truth about the Green Revolution in Africa and oppose the donors, philanthropists, diplomats and scholars who support it. Let us appeal to those who claim to help small farmers but actually work hard to drive them out of their land.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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