African Green Revolution Research Articles

Beyond the ‘gender gap’ in agriculture: Africa's Green Revolution and gendered rural transformation in Rwanda

The African Green Revolution (AGR) aims to modernize, intensify, and commercialize agriculture through increasing technology adoption by smallholder farmers. AGR interventions also promote gender equality, aiming to close the ‘gender gap’ in agriculture by enhancing women's access to purchased inputs, technology, land, and finance. With an empirical focus on Rwanda, this article examines the gendered implications of the AGR. We critically reflect on the notion of gender gaps and the associated tendency of development research to treat gender as a variable, assessing outcomes for male-headed versus female-headed households in terms of their access to material assets. We argue that these assessments overlook (1) the differential impacts of AGR policies within households and (2) how agricultural modernization influences gendered access to material resources as well as immaterial responsibilities, norms, and identities. Our findings from a mixed-methods study with four Rwandan communities show how the AGR empowers men as ‘modern’ farmers while marginalizing women's agricultural spaces, labor, and crops. We argue that development research and practice should move beyond the narrow focus on gender gaps to additionally consider how technologies and policies are themselves gendered in ways that can constrict food security, entrench inequitable power dynamics, and further marginalize women.

The importance of farm management training for the African rice Green Revolution: Experimental evidence from rainfed lowland areas in Mozambique

The effectiveness of basic farm management training (e.g., seed selection, nursery bed setup, field leveling, bund construction, and transplanting) for the African rice Green Revolution has not been fully examined. This study evaluated a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of such training in the remote rainfed lowland areas of Mozambique. The training taught these practices without introducing modern varieties or inorganic fertilizers. The intention-to-treat (ITT) effect on paddy yield was 447–546 kg/ha (29 %–36 % of the control group average yield), with statistical significance at 7 %–8%. The results indicate that the adoption of these basic practices alone can improve paddy yield without relying on modern purchased inputs, which are usually not readily available in remote local markets or affordable to cash-constrained farmers. Complementarity among these basic practices is also suggested in that the yield increase had the highest statistical significance when all five practices were adopted.

A New Green Revolution (GR) or Neoliberal Entrenchment in Agri-food Systems? Exploring Narratives Around Digital Agriculture (DA), Food Systems, and Development in Sub-Sahara Africa

This paper adopts a document analysis to describe the expected developmental effects of agricultural digitalization in Africa and the potential drivers to the narratives that echoe such effects. Narratives show that digitalization is expected to bridge information and knowledge gaps in agriculture; promote food security; increase climate change/environmental sustainability; provide employment and empower the youth; promote gender and women empowerment; and enhance livelihood resilience in rural areas. With these findings, I argue that, though partly justifiable, private-sector led digitalization, with it’s optimistic technocratic narratives, follows, entrenches, and extends the ‘transformational rhetoric’ of the existing international development-driven African Green Revolution efforts to improve smallholder and rural lives through technological diffusion. However, without critical considerations of political-economic issues affecting its proliferation, as well as their implications on power structures and class restructuring, these narratives mask potential neoliberal incursions. Thus, issues of connectivity and the digital divide issues, the slow pace of technological adoption, scaling of digital solutions, and the weak enabling environments must be addressed to potentially make benefits inclusive. The initial suggested political-economic discussions of the narratives inject much needed critical perspectives into the early conversations by showing the potential drivers and motives of digitalization, as well as the tendencies to [among others] further concentrate power and restructure the dynamics of social classes in Africa.

Subsidies and the African Green Revolution: Direct Effects and Social Network Spillovers of Randomized Input Subsidies in Mozambique

The Green Revolution, which bolstered agricultural yields and economic well-being in Asia and Latin America beginning in the 1960s, largely bypassed sub-Saharan Africa. We study the first randomized controlled trial of a government-implemented input subsidy program (ISP) in Africa intended to foment a Green Revolution. We find that this temporary subsidy for Mozambican maize farmers stimulates Green Revolution technology adoption and leads to increased maize yields. Effects of the subsidy persist in later unsubsidized years. In addition, social networks of subsidized farmers benefit from spillovers, experiencing increases in technology adoption, yields, and beliefs about the returns to the technologies. Spillovers account for the vast majority of subsidy-induced gains. ISPs alleviate informational market failures, stimulating learning about new technologies by subsidy recipients and their social networks. (JEL O13, Q12, Q16, Q18)

Can a ‘modern’ irrigation system and a traditional smallholder gravitational system coexist? A view from Marakwet, Kenya

ABSTRACT Irrigation and improved agricultural inputs have been promoted by the New African Green Revolution to close yield gaps in Sub-Saharan Africa. Can this approach coexist with local indigenous irrigation systems? We examine an irrigation scheme financed by both the Kenyan and Canadian Red Cross and put in place in 2015 in Marakwet, Kenya, where a gravity irrigation system has been operated by local people for three centuries. Grounded on ethnographic data, we show how the current rhetoric and operationalization of top-down irrigation projects disregard, instead of harnessing, local agricultural knowledge which would ensure sustainable farming in the context of resource-poor and climate-challenged communities.

Divergent understandings of agroecology in the era of the African Green Revolution

Agroecology is increasingly recognized within mainstream development. Yet, this is controversial, due to disagreement over what it does and should mean. This article takes a ‘knowledge politics’ approach to show how different understandings of agroecology create contexts where contrasting agricultural development narratives thrive, albeit often unintentionally. It draws on literature and media review and 37 elite interviews with agricultural researchers and decision makers around the world. Four agricultural development narratives or ‘regimes’ are identified, each presented by different actor groups as part of their vision of what agricultural development should look like. Simultaneously, five different understandings of agroecology are described. A political understanding of agroecology is promoted to support the regime of agroecological agriculture. Simultaneously, an understanding of agroecology as a descriptive science is conducive to the African Green Revolution narrative. Actor groups tend to emphasize the differences between these understandings and regimes. They pay less attention to unpacking the divergent ways agroecological science has been framed since the early 20th century. This has the effect of concealing the way different understandings of agroecology support different development paradigms, and thus the political nature of the construction of science.

A feminist political ecology of agricultural mechanization and evolving gendered on-farm labor dynamics in northern Ghana

Although agricultural mechanization is central to the renewed agenda for achieving an African Green Revolution, the increased deployment of mechanized technologies has been without critical analysis of the impacts on traditional agrarian labor division practices. Drawing on the experiences of smallholder farmers (n = 60) in northern Ghana using in-depth interviews, we examined the gendered labor implications of agricultural mechanization and how women and men may be responding to evolving on-farm labor dynamics. Our findings reveal a skewed deployment of mechanized technologies in favor of the culturally ascribed on-farm roles of men. This situation has produced a disproportionate labor burden on rural women who are compelled to endure manually in their non-mechanized culturally ascribed roles of sowing and harvesting even as farms are expanding. Although, generally, rural women bear the brunt of these incipient labor demands, certain intersecting vulnerabilities such as belonging to a monogamous household and having fewer or no female children tend to worsen the plight of some women. While gendered labor substitution could balance the disproportionate workload on women, the prevalence of strict culturally constructed gendered labor norms forestalls this potential. Given the painful routine choices rural women make to balance household labor demands, we highlight the need for gender-sensitive mechanization models and policy approaches that address prevailing social inequalities.

African Green Revolution, food sovereignty and constrained livelihood choice in Mozambique

ABSTRACTThis article examines the complicated food security agendas of the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty models in Mozambique. Drawing on fieldwork conducted by the author in Mozambique in 2014 and 2015, the paper analyses how smallholder farmers engage with these two agrarian models. Whereas the literature frequently presents the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty in oppositional frames, this paper finds that farmers in Mozambique utilize some of the tools that these models offer in complementary rather than competing ways. One such area is the use of commercial hybrid seeds and herbicides by some farmers associated with food sovereignty, an approach that runs counter to food sovereignty’s principles of agroecology. In Mozambique, farmers’ “lived experience” of food sovereignty is more a strategic response to their limited livelihood options, using whatever tools are available to them, rather than a resistance to power.

The evolution of agricultural input subsidy programs: contextualizing policy debates in Malawi’s FISP

Malawi has been associated with the re-emergence of agricultural input subsidy programs in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since its launching of the Farm Inputs Subsidy Program (FISP) in 2005. It has also been at the center of policy debates regarding its capacity to launch a uniquely African Green Revolution within a marketized and capitalist configuration, and in a context of constrained public resources. Such debates have been informed by the evidentiary literature, which has been mixed and sharply divided. This paper, using qualitative methods, explores how such debates have shaped Malawi’s food security policies and brought about recent alignment in government and donor policy positions. The results indicate that the recent change in FISP policy is intimately linked to wider concerns to commercialize agriculture and the general reconfiguration of food security policy to more accurately reflect presumed ‘possibilities’ and what is fiscally pragmatic. The paper highlights some of the complexities that have been faced by policy makers in the process of devising appropriate pro-poor agricultural and food security policies within the broader enterprise of economic growth in a rather challenging context. It contributes to scholarly efforts to untangle Malawi’s food security-development policy paradox™ which might be relevant to other countries in SSA.

Saving Africa: The GMO Cold War and the Battle for Africa

The situation in Africa is dire … On average, agriculture accounts for 70% of full-time employment … , 33% of national income, and 40% of total export earnings … . Yet its performance in recent decades has been one of the worst in the world. (K. Otsuka, D. F. Larson, & P. B. R. Hazell, An Overview , in An African Green Revolution: Finding Ways to Boost Productivity on Small Farms 1, 2 (K. Otsuka & D. F. Larson eds, Springer 2013).) Africa’s food crisis calls out for answers … . One new technical option is the development of new crop varieties through genetic engineering techniques. (R. Paarlberg, Are Genetically Modified (GM) Crops a Commercial Risk for Africa? 2 Int’l J. Tech. & Global. 81, 81–82 (2006).) Africa poses a conundrum. On the one hand, it has the largest percentage of undeveloped arable land in the world and deploys the largest percentage of labour in agricultural production. Yet, on the other hand, its agricultural productivity is about one third of the world ’ s average; it is a net food importer; and it suffers from the highest level of hunger in the world. Proponents of genetically modified organisms (GMO) crops have opened a new front of the GMO cold war in Africa by crusading for the adoption of GMO in Africa as a solution to increasing its agricultural production and alleviating hunger. Opponents of GMO crops have responded by vociferously opposing the adoption of GMO in Africa. Africa is torn between these opposing forces. This article examines the ongoing GMO cold war and how it is playing out in Africa. The article finds that there is a stalemate: there is minimal adoption of GMO in Africa and yet its food deficit and attendant consequences is escalating.

White science and indigenous maize: the racial logics of the Green Revolution

ABSTRACTIndigenous maize from Mexico has become crucial for a wave of contemporary agricultural development initiatives seeking to cultivate a ‘Green Revolution for Africa’. Plant breeders developing disease-resistant hybrid maize for Africa use cutting edge technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 to mine the genomes of maize collected in Mexico 75 years ago, during the Green Revolution’s earliest incarnation. Historicizing this transnational linkage, this paper argues that Green Revolution science appropriates indigenous maize through racial logics rooted in whiteness. In the 1940s, American scientists sent by the Rockefeller Foundation to improve Mexico’s agriculture negotiated their own racial subjectivity through their encounters with Mexico’s indigenous people. In the process, they constructed a racial hierarchy that equated whiteness with scientific superiority and indigeneity with underdevelopment. This racialization undergirded a maize program led by E.J. Wellhausen that collected and catalogued hundreds of varieties of Mexico’s maize – and then distributed them to American seed companies. Wellhausen’s seeds formed the genetic backbone for subsequent Green Revolution projects. The ‘white science’ he embodied expanded as the Revolution sought out nonwhite agriculture across the global South. Today, the Green Revolution’s racial logics are re-articulated along its geographical and technological frontier, as indigenous maize provides the seeds for the African Green Revolution.

Why institutional environments for agroforestry seed systems matter

AbstractRethinking the logic of institutional environments aiming to facilitate agroforestry smallholders in economic development, this article compares smallholder input supply systems for crop and tree seeds in sub‐Saharan Africa and reflects on two basic challenges: (1) how to develop a large number of relevant tree crops for different agroecologies, (2) how to reach smallholders in rural areas. Policy options for improving agroforestry input supply systems are discussed, whereby our article concludes with suggestions how sectoral approaches for crop seed systems can be modified to agroforestry seed‐seedling systems. Biophysical differences have practical implications for how the logic of the ‘African green revolution’ would be translated into a corresponding revolution for agroforestry.

In Pursuit of an African Green Revolution: Views from Rice and Maize Farmers' Fields edited by Keijiro Otsuka and Donald F. Larson, Tokyo, Springer, 2016, xxiii + 208 pp.

In Pursuit of an African Green Revolution: Views from Rice and Maize Farmers' Fields edited by Keijiro Otsuka and Donald F. Larson, Tokyo, Springer, 2016, xxiii + 208 pp.

A sustainability assessment framework for the African green revolution and food sovereignty models in southern Africa

Two vastly different approaches to food security and sustainability have become increasingly prominent in Sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade. One is the African Green Revolution model, impleme...

Factors explaining the low and variable profitability of fertilizer application to maize in Zambia

AbstractIt is widely recognized that an “African green revolution” will require greater use of inorganic fertilizers. Often‐made comparisons note that fertilizer use rates in Africa are just 10–20% of those in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Most attempts to explain relatively low‐adoption of fertilizer assume yield responses to inorganic fertilization warrant higher application rates and hypothesize that observed use rates are limited by market‐based factors. Another explanation may be that application rates are low because African yields are less responsive to inorganic fertilizer than yields in other regions, and less responsive than analysts perceive. Examining the case of Zambia, we evaluate whether yield response to fertilizers could explain adoption and application rates. A model of yield response is constructed and a combination of estimators is employed to mitigate potential biases related to correlation between fertilizer use and unobserved heterogeneity as well as stochastic shocks. Results indicate higher fertilization rates would be marginally profitable or unprofitable in many cases given commercial fertilizer and maize prices. Phosphoric fertilizer is particularly unprofitable on acidic soils, which are common in Zambia and other areas of sub‐Saharan Africa. We propose feasible recommendations for diversifying the current government strategy to enhance crop productivity.

Modernising agriculture through a ‘new’ Green Revolution: the limits of the Crop Intensification Programme in Rwanda

Over the past decade, African agriculture sectors have been the object of numerous initiatives advancing a ‘new’ Green Revolution for the continent. The low productivity of African smallholders is attributed to the low use of modern, improved agricultural inputs. In short, African countries are expected to catch up with the Green Revolution in other parts of the world. This paper is a contribution to the debate on the new African Green Revolution. We analyse the Rwandan Crop Intensification Programme (CIP) as a case study of the application of the African Green Revolution model. The paper is based on research at the macro, meso and micro levels. We argue that the CIP fails to draw lessons from previous Green Revolution experiences in terms of its effects on social differentiation, on ecological sustainability, and on knowledge exchange and creation.

Why new crop technology is not scale-neutral—A critique of the expectations for a crop-based African Green Revolution

Poverty reduction during the Asian Green Revolution has been attributed to the inherent scale neutrality of new crop varieties making them equally beneficial to small-scale and large-scale farmers. The term ‘scale-neutral’ is now reappearing in debates on agricultural development in Africa with claims that crop technology is inherently scale-neutral and that African smallholders will significantly benefit from new crop varieties not specifically developed for their contexts. Using a social shaping of technology (SST) perspective and the concept of biological embeddedness, this paper critically examines whether it is helpful to describe crop technology as scale neutral when drawing lessons from the Asian Green Revolution about how new crop technology can be of benefit to African smallholders. The paper describes how political commitment, rather than inherently scale-neutral crops, was central for the outcome of the Asian Green Revolution. It also highlights that while the effects of crop biology are often disregarded in adoption studies, biology significantly affected the ability of Green Revolution crop technology to benefit smallholders, and continues to do so today. Using maize and GM crops as examples, this paper suggests that GM crops in their current form have reinforced a technological trajectory established with hybrid technology and directed it away from smallholder practices and agroecologies. Consequently, describing crop technology as inherently scale-neutral is not helpful for understanding how crop technology works in Africa today and prevents important lessons being learned from the Asian Green Revolution.

Global market integration increases likelihood that a future African Green Revolution could increase crop land use and CO2 emissions.

There has been a resurgence of interest in the impacts of agricultural productivity on land use and the environment. At the center of this debate is the assertion that agricultural innovation is land sparing. However, numerous case studies and global empirical studies have found little evidence of higher yields being accompanied by reduced area. We find that these studies overlook two crucial factors: estimation of a true counterfactual scenario and a tendency to adopt a regional, rather than a global, perspective. This paper introduces a general framework for analyzing the impacts of regional and global innovation on long run crop output, prices, land rents, land use, and associated CO2 emissions. In so doing, it facilitates a reconciliation of the apparently conflicting views of the impacts of agricultural productivity growth on global land use and environmental quality. Our historical analysis demonstrates that the Green Revolution in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East was unambiguously land and emissions sparing, compared with a counterfactual world without these innovations. In contrast, we find that the environmental impacts of a prospective African Green Revolution are potentially ambiguous. We trace these divergent outcomes to relative differences between the innovating region and the rest of the world in yields, emissions efficiencies, cropland supply response, and intensification potential. Globalization of agriculture raises the potential for adverse environmental consequences. However, if sustained for several decades, an African Green Revolution will eventually become land sparing.

Scaling-Up Sustainable Renewable Energy Generation from Municipal Solid Waste in the African Continent: Lessons from eThekwini, South Africa

The three processes of urbanization, industrialization and globalization are positively correlated with municipal solid waste generation and energy consumption in global urban centers. Heavy reliance on fossil fuels in most world cities has contributed not only to global warming and climate change, but also to astronomical increases and volatility in the prices of energy sources. Africa has suffered from energy shortages and climate change as well, for it depends on very limited oil reserves and on finite, toxic coal resources. Thus, the need for innovation in renewable energy generation is more urgent now than ever. Africa is home to many renewable energy sources, ranging from sun and water to municipal solid waste andwind. This article discusses the conversion of waste to energy in the eThekwini municipality, a South African metropolis, and describes prospects for implementing a similar model in other African countries. The study unearths cutting-edge work by the Department of Cleansing and Solid Waste of eThekwini municipality, which has adopted modern municipal solid waste management and treatment systems. For almost a decade now, the municipality has demonstrated the potential for African cities to achieve two primary objectives: first, to generate clean renewable energy sources that contribute to economic development, and second, to reduce urban social and environmental problems resulting from improper waste disposal. The municipality’s success also reveals tremendous opportunities to improve wastemanagement, financial investments, technological take-up, and skillsets to support the African green energy revolution.

Smallholder Perspectives on Soil Fertility Management and Markets in the African Green Revolution

The African Green Revolution (AGR) describes a drive by governments and international philanthropic and research organizations to raise agricultural production through Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) and improved access to input and output markets. This article draws on data from three studies that took place in Northern Ghana as the AGR unfolded between 2008 and 2012, focusing specifically on soil fertility management (SFM) and access to credit markets. It finds that the AGR idea does incorporate some elements farmers find useful, indeed, that they are implementing autonomously, such as use of organic soil amendments. However, the underpinning emphasis on commercialization does not allow room for them to practice site-specific SFM and subsistence mechanisms that they have developed as responses to risk. Some aspects of the AGR are themselves disadvantageous, for example repayment of credit at harvest time, the emphasis on inorganic fertilizer and land titling schemes. Despite advocating farmer choice, the current hegemonic implementation of the AGR makes it unlikely to support farmers’ sustainable agroecological practice.