Mary and Bill Gates with their farmer in Kenya. (Photo courtesy of Gates Notes)
aAfrica has the fastest growing population on Earth. By 2050, the continent's population could exceed 2.4 billion. Feeding all of them is the biggest policy challenge facing African leaders.
The scale of the problem is frightening, given that we can't even maintain what we already have.
The number of people living in food shortages has reached 1.5 billion. Of the 1.5 billion people living in Africa today, around 10% are severely food insecure, meaning they may not have enough food to eat for an entire day. Hundreds of millions more don't always know where their next meal will come from.
Add another 900 million people to the mix. Something has to change. The people tasked with figuring out what this change looks like are coming together next week in Kigali at the Africa Food Systems Forum. With the participation of the African Union, the forum is
We will discuss and advance a 10-year plan to accelerate and transform agriculture in Africa.
The premise is deceptively simple: to feed people, we need to improve farms, especially the continent's 33 million smallholder farmers. These farms produce 70 percent of Africa's food but have some of the lowest yields in the world.
But there is an increasingly fierce debate about how to improve these farms while protecting the farming community.
The most influential figure in this debate is not an African farmer or political leader, but an American software engineer who has never worked in the fields in his life, although he owns an estimated 109,265 hectares of land in 19 US states.
The American Dream
Bill Gates, the world's seventh richest man, believes that modern industrial farming practices can solve world hunger. In the United States, he has used his estimated $129 billion fortune to buy up lots of farmland, making him the country's largest farmland owner.
American agriculture is quite different from African agriculture: the average American farm is 100 times the size of an African farm, and American farmers tend to grow a single cash crop, such as corn or soybeans, from genetically modified “hybrid” seeds.
The seeds cannot reproduce themselves, so new seeds must be purchased every year from industrial agriculture companies such as Bayer or Syngenta.
Chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides.
All these inputs mean the model is expensive, and farmers need access to capital to make it work. But when it works, it pays off: Maize yields in the United States are about 11 tons per hectare. In Kenya, the average is just 1.4 tons per hectare.
For Gates, the solution to hunger in Africa lies in closing the gap between these two numbers: To feed more people, African farmers need to produce more food. And to do that, they have to learn how to farm like American farmers.
Farms need to get bigger. African farmers need access to modern hybrid seeds.
Capital to buy. Weary soil needs the help of chemical fertilizers, and crops
They need to be protected from pests and diseases, and their harvests need to be sold in the market rather than stored for subsistence.
It may sound simple, but in reality this would represent nothing less than a revolution in African agriculture, upending centuries-old traditional methods.
That is exactly the kind of revolution Gates is proposing: In 2006, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations created the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), and the two foundations have committed more than $1 billion to restructuring national and continental agricultural policies.
But the revolution is not going according to plan.
A collapsing food system
Last month, the African Biodiversity Centre released a report that sought to answer the question: Is Zambia's food system collapsing?
The country is suffering from the worst drought in its history.
Cultivation has been lost and the price of this staple crop has risen by 30%.
More than six million of Zambia's 20 million people are at risk of severe food insecurity and malnutrition.
This was not Bill Gates' vision, and successive Zambian governments have been some of the most enthusiastic adopters of policies recommended by the Gates Foundation.
The country is a poster child for Agrarian efforts to industrialize agriculture in Africa, and in 2009 introduced a new subsidy system to encourage farmers to switch to commercial seeds and intensive fertilizer use. More than a million farmers have done so.
But far from boosting yields, the new approach has only made farmers more vulnerable to climate shocks like the current drought, the new report concludes.
The use of hybrid seeds and imported fertilisers is degrading the soil, making it difficult to grow other crops, and efforts to replace subsistence crops with cash crops have failed, leaving farmers and their families hungry.
“We used to grow a variety of crops,” said Mary Sakala, a Zambian farmer and chairperson of the Rural Women's Council, which commissioned the report, “but now the government and agribusiness are pushing farmers into input-dependent monocultures. Their plan has left us all vulnerable.”
This is not just a Zambian problem. Broader, continental-wide studies have also cast doubt on the effectiveness of Agra's policy proposals, including one commissioned by the Gates Foundation itself and Agra's other funders. Published two years ago, that study concluded that “Agra has not achieved its key objectives of increasing incomes and food security for 9 million smallholder farmers.”
Another study, by Tufts University in the US, found no evidence in country-level data from the 13 major countries targeted by Agra that “Green Revolution policies had any meaningful positive effects on agricultural yields or food security”.
Agra disputed the findings but at least appears to have taken some note of them: In 2022, it dropped “Green Revolution” from its name and is now known only by the acronym.
“Playing God”
“Bill Gates and the big agricultural companies are playing God,” said Bishop Takalani Mufamadi, a Durban cleric. “They claim to be the saviors of the hungry and the poor, but…
But their industrial approach meant they were unable to deliver results.
It degrades soils, destroys biodiversity and puts corporate profits above people.
It is immoral, sinful and unfair.”
Speaking on behalf of the Southern African Faith Communities Environmental Institute last Wednesday, Mufamadi called on the Gates Foundation to commit to “reparations” to repair the damage its agricultural policies have done to Africa.
He did not give specific figures, but said the foundation must work with affected people to “restore the land and groundwater.”
This call was echoed by a private organization called the African Food Sovereignty Alliance.
An umbrella organization that claims to represent more than 200 million smallholder farmers, pastoralists and indigenous people across the African continent.
“The path they are taking us down is one where you can't farm without using pesticides,” general coordinator Million Belay said.
This, he argues, leaves farmers vulnerable to extreme weather events and fluctuations in the prices of inputs such as fertiliser, which are usually imported.
Beley's criticism goes a step further, arguing that the Gates Foundation has used its enormous political and financial influence to eliminate alternatives.
“I'm not saying African governments don't have the power – they do – but they are tied up in debt and other funding issues, which means the Gates Foundation and other big donors can come in and influence our policies and strategies.”
The Gates Foundation rejected these criticisms.
“Our support to many organisations like Agra is helping countries prioritise, align and effectively implement national agriculture development strategies based on national plans to achieve this goal.”
Enock Chikaba, director of agricultural supply systems at the Gates Foundation, continued: “We also believe that open dialogue with diverse voices in Africa, including farmers themselves, is critical to our work, and we will continue to seek constructive dialogue to address food and nutrition security about our common goals and how best to achieve them.”
But for now, those conversations do not include groups such as Belay's African Food Sovereignty Association, which will not be attending next week's forum in Kigali where Agra will play a key role, with the support of development partners such as the Gates Foundation and industry partners including Bayer and Syngenta.
This means that once again, Bill Gates’ vision for the future of African agriculture is likely to shape continental policy for the next decade, whether it is successful or not.
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