How International Agricultural Aid Shapes Farming in Africa: The AGRA Experiment

In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), one of the most ambitious and expensive agricultural development initiatives in modern history. The premise was straightforward: if Africa adopted the same high-input farming techniques that had transformed Asian and Latin American agriculture during the original Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s — improved seed varieties, synthetic fertilizers, mechanization, and commercial market integration — it could dramatically increase crop yields, lift millions of smallholder farmers out of poverty, and slash food insecurity across the continent.

Twenty years later, the results are in, and they are deeply contested. Two major reports released in August 2026 — a working paper by Tufts University researcher Timothy A. Wise and an analysis by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) — present the most comprehensive assessments to date of whether the Green Revolution model has delivered on its promises. This article examines the history of the AGRA experiment, what the data show after two decades, what critics and defenders say, and what the evidence suggests about alternatives.

The Original Green Revolution and Its Legacy

Understanding AGRA requires understanding the historical model it was built on. The original Green Revolution — a term coined by USAID administrator William Gaud in 1968 — refers to the transformation of agriculture in parts of Asia and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. The effort was driven by the development of high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice at research institutions funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, particularly the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines.

The results were dramatic. India’s wheat production roughly doubled between 1965 and 1972. The Philippines became self-sufficient in rice. Global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000. Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist who led the development of semi-dwarf, disease-resistant wheat varieties, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work.

But the original Green Revolution was never a purely technical achievement. It required a package of complementary inputs — irrigation infrastructure, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, mechanization, credit systems, and market access — that were not equally available to all farmers. Over time, scholars documented significant downsides: concentration of land ownership as wealthier farmers who could afford the full input package outcompeted smaller neighbors; loss of crop genetic diversity as traditional varieties were replaced by a narrow range of HYVs; groundwater depletion from intensive irrigation (Punjab, once the poster region for the Green Revolution, now faces a groundwater crisis that threatens future agricultural production); soil degradation from heavy fertilizer use; pesticide poisoning among farmworkers; and the displacement of nutritious traditional crops by calorie-dense but nutritionally limited cereals.

These criticisms did not deny that the Green Revolution had increased food production. They argued that it had done so at costs — ecological, social, and nutritional — that were not adequately accounted for, and that the benefits had been distributed unevenly, often bypassing the poorest and most vulnerable farmers entirely.

What AGRA Promised

AGRA was founded on the argument that a new Green Revolution for Africa could avoid the mistakes of the earlier one while replicating its productivity gains. The alliance pledged to double the yields and incomes of 30 million smallholder farming households in its target countries and to cut food insecurity in half by 2020. The initial focus countries included Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Niger, Malawi, and Senegal — spanning a wide range of agroecological zones, governance structures, and agricultural systems.

To achieve these goals, AGRA invested in several interconnected areas: developing and distributing improved (often hybrid) seed varieties, with a heavy emphasis on maize; increasing access to synthetic fertilizers through government subsidy programs; training farmers in intensive agricultural techniques; lobbying African governments to adopt seed certification laws and fertilizer subsidy policies; and building agricultural market infrastructure to connect smallholders to commercial supply chains.

The total investment was substantial. The AGRA initiative drew more than $1.5 billion in donations, approximately two-thirds of which came from the Gates Foundation. African governments spent an estimated $1 billion per year in subsidies for fertilizer and other inputs in AGRA’s target countries — expenditures that AGRA actively promoted through policy advocacy. AGRA’s backers, particularly Bill Gates, argued that modern agricultural science, combined with targeted investments, could transform African farming within a generation.

What the Data Show: Twenty Years of Evidence

The most comprehensive evaluation of AGRA’s performance during its first fifteen years came in February 2022, when an independent assessment by the consulting firm Mathematica — commissioned by the Gates Foundation itself on behalf of AGRA’s major donors (the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development) — found that AGRA had failed to meet its core goals.

The evaluation, which covered AGRA’s core strategy (the Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa, or PIATA), reported mixed results at best. Yield increases were documented in only three of six evaluated countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, and Nigeria) but not in Tanzania, Burkina Faso, or Kenya. Only one country (Burkina Faso) showed evidence of increased farmer incomes linked to AGRA’s programs. The report described the farmer-level results as “mixed,” attributing shortfalls to “remaining farmer constraints in access to affordable inputs and output markets, as well as low per-farmer investment levels.”

The 2026 Twenty-Year Assessment

In August 2026, Timothy A. Wise, a senior research fellow at the Tufts Global Development and Environment Institute, published a comprehensive working paper reviewing 18 years of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Bank data from 2006 through 2024 across AGRA’s target countries. The findings were stark:

Yield growth was slower than before AGRA arrived. Averaged across staple crops in the 13 AGRA countries, yields per hectare grew by approximately 1.2% per year during the AGRA period — slightly slower than the 1.3% per year recorded in the 12 years before AGRA launched. This growth was not significantly different from yield trends in comparable non-AGRA African countries over the same period, meaning that the billions of dollars invested had not produced measurably better results than what would have happened without the program.

Production growth came from extensification, not intensification. Total cultivated area in AGRA countries expanded by 46% over the period — a significant expansion of farmland, often into marginal areas. Wise’s analysis found that production gains were driven primarily by this land expansion rather than by the yield improvements the program was designed to deliver.

Fertilizer use doubled, but adoption remained subsidy-dependent. Chemical fertilizer use increased substantially in AGRA’s target countries, but the increase was largely driven by government subsidy programs that AGRA had promoted. When subsidies were reduced or discontinued, adoption rates fell. The Mathematica evaluation had previously noted that AGRA’s farmer-facing interventions had only “modest impacts on farmers’ adoption of improved inputs.”

Food insecurity worsened dramatically. The AFSA’s companion report, published the same month, found that the number of undernourished people across AGRA’s focus countries had increased by 58% since 2006. The number of hungry people in the 13 AGRA countries nearly doubled over the most recent six-year period alone. This represents the exact opposite of AGRA’s stated goal of cutting food insecurity in half.

Country-Level Disparities

The aggregate numbers obscure significant variation among AGRA’s target countries. Ethiopia, for example, did see meaningful yield growth in maize and wheat, driven in part by a massive government-led Agricultural Transformation Agency that invested far beyond AGRA’s contributions. Ghana similarly showed some gains, though these were concentrated in cocoa and cash crops rather than the food staples that AGRA primarily promoted. In both cases, it is difficult to attribute the gains specifically to AGRA rather than to broader government investment programs that would have proceeded regardless.

At the other end of the spectrum, Kenya — one of AGRA’s flagship countries and the location of its headquarters — showed no significant yield improvement over the 18-year period despite being among the largest recipients of AGRA support. Tanzania and Burkina Faso similarly failed to show yield gains linked to AGRA programs, according to the Mathematica evaluation. In these countries, the gap between AGRA’s promises and its results was most pronounced.

Particularly striking is the case of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and largest agricultural producer. While the Mathematica evaluation recorded some yield improvements, Nigeria’s food security situation has deteriorated significantly since 2006. Conflict in the northeast, inflation, and currency devaluation have all contributed to a food security crisis that no agricultural input program could have prevented — but the case illustrates why measuring AGRA’s success by yield data alone, divorced from the broader food security outcomes the program was designed to achieve, produces a misleadingly favorable picture.

Sources: Mathematica PIATA Evaluation (2022); Wise, Tufts GDAE Working Paper 26-01 (August 2026); AFSA (August 2026)

The Malabo Scorecard

AGRA’s performance must also be understood in the broader context of the African Union’s own agricultural development framework. In 2014, African heads of state adopted the Malabo Declaration, committing to end hunger by 2025, double agricultural productivity, and halve poverty through agricultural growth. The AU measures progress through biennial reviews using the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) scorecard.

The results have been dismal. The number of countries judged on track fell from 20 in 2017 to four in 2019, one in 2021, and none in 2023. The fifth and final review, presented in February 2026, found that none of the 45 reporting states reached the overall benchmark and that the continent met none of its Malabo targets. This broader failure suggests that the challenges facing African agriculture run deeper than any single program — but it also means that AGRA’s model, which was supposed to be the primary vehicle for achieving these goals, has not provided a solution.

The Case for AGRA: What Defenders Say

AGRA and its supporters have responded to these criticisms with several arguments. The most important is that measuring AGRA’s impact purely against its original 2006 goals is misleading, because the organization has evolved significantly since then. In 2022, AGRA adopted a new strategic framework (“AGRA 3.0”) that shifted its emphasis from direct farmer-level productivity gains to food systems transformation and policy reform. Under this framework, AGRA positions itself primarily as a catalyst for government policy change rather than as a direct service provider to farmers.

Defenders also argue that AGRA’s work should be evaluated in the context of extraordinary external shocks that were impossible to predict in 2006: the 2007–2008 global food price crisis, the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, locust invasions in East Africa in 2019–2021, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which disrupted global fertilizer supply chains and sent input prices soaring. These events would have undermined any agricultural development strategy, regardless of its design.

Finally, AGRA and the Gates Foundation point to specific areas where their investments have produced results: the development of drought-tolerant maize varieties, improvements in seed distribution infrastructure, and the creation of agricultural policy frameworks in several countries. A November 2025 Gates Foundation announcement at COP30 pledged $300 million in new funding for smallholder farmer resilience, signaling continued commitment to the general approach if not to every specific element of the original strategy.

What Critics Say Went Wrong: A Structural Analysis

AGRA’s critics, who include African farmer organizations, agroecology researchers, and food sovereignty advocates, have raised several structural objections that go beyond questions of external shocks or measurement methodology.

Input Dependency and the Subsidy Trap

The Green Revolution model relies on purchased inputs — commercial seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides — that smallholder farmers must buy each season. Unlike traditional farming systems, where farmers save seeds from one harvest for the next planting and build soil fertility through composting, mulching, and crop rotation, the high-input model requires ongoing cash expenditure. When subsidy programs end or input prices rise (as they did dramatically following the Ukraine conflict), farmers who have abandoned traditional practices are left vulnerable.

Wise’s 2026 analysis found that the modest yield gains documented in AGRA countries often failed to cover the costs of more expensive inputs, leaving farmers in debt rather than lifting them out of poverty. The economic calculus is straightforward: if a farmer spends $50 more per hectare on improved seeds and fertilizer but harvests only $30 more in grain, the “improved” farming system has made them poorer, not wealthier.

Crop Homogenization and Nutritional Decline

AGRA’s primary focus on maize — its most heavily supported crop — has been criticized for reducing dietary diversity and displacing traditional crops that are better adapted to local growing conditions and provide more diverse nutrition. Millet, sorghum, cassava, cowpeas, indigenous vegetables, and other traditional African food crops are typically more drought-tolerant, require fewer inputs, and provide a wider range of micronutrients than maize monocultures.

Wise’s analysis documented that cultivation and yields of millet — a nutritious, climate-resilient staple — declined across AGRA countries over the past two decades, even as maize acreage expanded. This displacement has implications not only for nutrition but for climate resilience: as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns become more erratic across the Sahel and East Africa, crops that evolved in these environments are precisely the ones being pushed out by the Green Revolution model.

Policy Capture and Seed Sovereignty

AFSA and other African civil society organizations have documented AGRA’s role in lobbying African governments to adopt seed certification laws, fertilizer subsidy programs, and agricultural policies that favor commercial input suppliers over farmer-managed seed systems. A 2024 AFSA report detailed how AGRA-influenced policy reforms in several countries had effectively criminalized the sharing and selling of traditional farmer-saved seeds — a practice that has sustained African agriculture for millennia.

The seed sovereignty issue is particularly contentious. In traditional African farming systems, farmers save, select, and exchange seeds within their communities, creating locally adapted varieties over generations. Commercial seed certification laws, promoted by AGRA and the multinational seed industry, require seeds to meet standardized criteria (uniformity, stability, distinctness) that traditional varieties typically do not satisfy. Critics argue that these laws were designed for commercial agriculture in temperate climates and are inappropriate for the diverse, small-scale farming systems that feed most of Africa.

AGRA’s policy influence extends to government spending priorities. Several AGRA target countries now allocate substantial portions of their agricultural budgets to fertilizer subsidies — a policy that AGRA has actively promoted. Critics argue that these subsidies primarily benefit fertilizer importers and distributors (often multinational companies) rather than farmers, and that the same resources could produce greater food security impacts if directed toward irrigation infrastructure, soil conservation, agricultural extension services, or support for diverse cropping systems.

Environmental Costs

Intensive fertilizer use promoted by the Green Revolution model has documented environmental consequences. Studies in Kenya and Tanzania have found significant soil acidification in areas where farmers adopted high-input practices without adequate soil management. Nitrogen fertilizer runoff has been linked to water pollution in agricultural watersheds across East Africa. And the production and transport of synthetic fertilizers generate substantial greenhouse gas emissions — a concern that becomes more pressing as African agriculture is expected to intensify in the coming decades.

Phosphorus, a key component of synthetic fertilizers, presents a particular long-term challenge. Global phosphate rock reserves are concentrated in a small number of countries (Morocco and Western Sahara hold an estimated 70% of global reserves), creating a geopolitical vulnerability for any agricultural system dependent on imported phosphate fertilizers. Unlike nitrogen, which can be fixed from the atmosphere, phosphorus is a finite mined resource.

The Fertilizer Price Crisis and Its Aftermath

The vulnerability of the Green Revolution model to input price shocks was demonstrated dramatically during the fertilizer crisis triggered by Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russia and Belarus together account for roughly 40% of global potash exports and a significant share of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer production. When Western sanctions disrupted trade flows and energy prices spiked (natural gas is the primary feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer production), global fertilizer prices more than doubled within months.

The impact on African smallholder farmers who had adopted the AGRA-promoted high-input model was immediate and severe. Farmers who had become dependent on purchased fertilizer suddenly faced input costs that exceeded the value of their expected harvest. Those who could not afford fertilizer at the new prices saw their yields collapse, because the improved seed varieties promoted by AGRA are specifically bred to respond to high levels of fertilizer application and typically underperform traditional varieties under low-input conditions.

The African Union’s June 2022 Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in Nairobi, convened in response to the crisis, highlighted the continent’s dependence on imported fertilizers — Africa produces less than 10% of the fertilizer it uses. The summit adopted a 10-year roadmap to triple continental fertilizer production, but this goal underscored rather than resolved the structural problem: the Green Revolution model had made African food production dependent on a globally traded commodity over which the continent has little market power.

By contrast, farmers who had maintained agroecological practices — building soil fertility through composting, legume intercropping, and animal manure rather than synthetic fertilizer — were largely insulated from the price shock. This differential resilience has become one of the strongest empirical arguments in the agroecology camp’s favor, not because agroecological systems are inherently superior in all contexts, but because they are less vulnerable to the kind of exogenous shocks that periodically disrupt global commodity markets.

Alternative Approaches: Agroecology and Diversified Food Systems

Critics of the AGRA model do not argue that African agriculture needs no investment — they argue that the investment should support fundamentally different approaches. The primary alternative framework is agroecology, which integrates ecological science with traditional farming knowledge to build productive, resilient food systems that work with natural processes rather than replacing them with purchased inputs.

What Agroecology Looks Like in Practice

Agroecological methods include crop diversification (growing multiple crops in complementary combinations rather than monocultures), intercropping (planting different crops together in the same field to maximize use of light, water, and nutrients), composting and mulching (building soil organic matter from on-farm materials), biological pest management (using natural predators and companion planting rather than synthetic pesticides), water harvesting and conservation (capturing rainfall through terracing, swales, and mulching rather than depending on expensive irrigation), integration of livestock and crop production (using animal manure as fertilizer and crop residues as feed), and agroforestry (integrating trees into farming systems for shade, soil improvement, windbreaks, and additional food and income sources).

Dimension	Green Revolution / AGRA Model	Agroecological Approach
Seed source	Commercial hybrid or improved varieties, purchased each season	Farmer-saved, locally adapted, open-pollinated; community seed banks
Soil fertility	Synthetic fertilizers (N-P-K), purchased and imported	Composting, cover crops, legume intercropping, animal manure, biochar
Pest management	Synthetic pesticides, Bt-engineered crops	Companion planting, biological control, push-pull technology, crop rotation
Crop diversity	Focus on 2–3 staple cereals (primarily maize)	Diverse cropping systems including legumes, roots, indigenous vegetables
Climate resilience	Dependent on stable input supply chains and predictable weather	Diversified systems buffer against climate variability; drought-adapted crops
Cash requirements	High per-season input costs; subsidy-dependent	Lower cash costs; most inputs generated on-farm
Knowledge system	Top-down technology transfer from research institutions	Farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchange; integration of traditional and scientific knowledge

Evidence for Agroecological Approaches

A growing body of research suggests that agroecological methods can match or exceed conventional yields for smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly when the full costs of production (including purchased inputs) are accounted for. A 2019 meta-analysis published in Global Food Security reviewed 56 studies comparing agroecological and conventional farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa and found that diversified farming systems produced equivalent or higher yields while requiring significantly lower input costs, resulting in higher net incomes for participating farmers.

One of the most successful examples of agroecological innovation in Africa is the push-pull technology developed by the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Nairobi. The system uses companion planting to manage the two most devastating pests of cereal crops in Africa: stem borers and the parasitic weed Striga. Farmers plant a repellent crop (Desmodium) between rows of maize or sorghum to push stem borers away from the crop, while planting an attractive grass (Napier or Brachiaria) around the field border to pull the pests toward the trap crop. The Desmodium also suppresses Striga through chemical exudates in the soil, fixes nitrogen, prevents soil erosion, and provides nutritious livestock fodder.

Controlled trials have shown that push-pull technology can increase maize yields by 50–200% while eliminating the need for synthetic pesticides and substantially reducing the need for fertilizer. The system has been adopted by more than 300,000 smallholder farmers across East Africa, and its developers have received multiple international awards for sustainable agriculture innovation.

A 2020 report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) reviewed the evidence on agroecological transitions and concluded that agroecology could address food security, nutrition, environmental sustainability, and farmer livelihoods simultaneously — but that it required supportive policy environments, investment in research and extension services, and protection of farmers’ rights to save, exchange, and sell their own seeds.

Senegal: A Counterexample

Senegal, which was not among AGRA’s 13 focus countries, offers a striking counterexample. Wise’s 2026 analysis noted that Senegal had succeeded in halving hunger — the very goal that AGRA failed to achieve in any of its target countries. Senegal’s agricultural policies were more diversified than AGRA’s model, supporting a wider range of crops (including rice, groundnuts, and horticulture rather than a narrow focus on maize), investing in local processing and value addition, and maintaining stronger protections for traditional seed systems. While Senegal’s success cannot be attributed to any single factor, its divergence from the AGRA model’s results is noteworthy.

The Broader Context: Power, Philanthropy, and Food Governance

The debate over AGRA is part of a larger question about the role of private philanthropy in shaping public food and agricultural policy. The Gates Foundation is the largest private funder of agricultural research in the world, and its priorities significantly influence which farming approaches receive research funding, which technologies are developed, and which policies are promoted across Africa and other developing regions.

This concentration of influence raises governance questions that go beyond the specific merits of any particular agricultural model. When a single private foundation can shape the research agenda, policy priorities, and institutional frameworks of an entire continent’s food system, the accountability mechanisms that exist for public institutions — democratic oversight, freedom of information requirements, electoral consequences — do not apply.

AGRA itself has been criticized for a lack of transparency. Prior to the 2022 Mathematica evaluation, AGRA had resisted calls for independent assessment of its impacts and had not published detailed performance data that would allow external researchers to evaluate its programs. The August 2026 AFSA report noted that AGRA’s own annual reports consistently emphasize success stories and anecdotal evidence while avoiding the kind of systematic, national-level data analysis that Wise’s working paper provides.

The relationship between private philanthropy and public policy is especially complex in the context of agricultural aid. African governments that receive AGRA-supported technical assistance and policy advice are simultaneously receiving development aid from the same bilateral donors (USAID, DFID, GIZ) that fund AGRA. This creates an environment in which the policy recommendations of a privately funded alliance are difficult to distinguish from the conditions attached to development aid — a dynamic that some African civil society organizations describe as a form of soft conditionality that undermines agricultural sovereignty.

What Comes Next

As AGRA marks its 20th anniversary in 2026, the organization faces a crossroads. Its original goals have been abandoned, its strategic framework has been overhauled, and the evidence base for its core model has been challenged by both independent researchers and its own donor-funded evaluations. At the same time, the underlying challenge — ensuring food security for a rapidly growing African population in the face of climate change, resource constraints, and economic volatility — is more urgent than ever.

Several African organizations, led by AFSA, have called on the Gates Foundation and other AGRA donors to redirect their funding toward farmer-led research, agroecological extension services, and the protection of traditional seed systems. The February 2026 African Union CAADP review’s finding that no African country met its Malabo targets suggests that incremental reforms to the existing model are unlikely to be sufficient.

The central question is not whether African agriculture needs investment and innovation — it clearly does — but whether the investment model should continue to prioritize commercial input supply chains and export-oriented production, or shift toward diversified, locally adapted food systems that build on Africa’s own agricultural knowledge and biodiversity. Two decades of data from the AGRA experiment have made that question impossible to avoid.

The Seed System Debate

At the heart of the AGRA controversy is a fundamental disagreement about seeds — what kinds of seeds African farmers should be using, who should control them, and what policies should govern their development and distribution.

AGRA has invested heavily in developing and distributing improved seed varieties, primarily hybrid maize. Hybrid seeds offer higher yields under optimal conditions (adequate rainfall, sufficient fertilizer, good soil), but they come with a critical limitation: farmers cannot save hybrid seeds from one season’s harvest and plant them the next season, because second-generation hybrids lose their yield advantage. This means farmers must purchase new seeds every planting season, creating a recurring dependency on commercial seed suppliers.

Traditional open-pollinated varieties (OPVs), by contrast, can be saved, replanted, shared, and gradually improved by farmers through selection over generations. These varieties are adapted to local growing conditions, pests, and diseases in ways that commercial hybrids often are not. They also provide the genetic raw material for future crop improvement — the broader the genetic diversity maintained in farmers’ fields, the more options plant breeders (both formal and informal) have for developing varieties adapted to new challenges, including climate change.

The tension between these two seed systems — commercial and farmer-managed — has real policy implications. AGRA has lobbied for seed certification laws that require all commercially distributed seeds to meet formal registration and certification standards. These standards are designed for commercial hybrid varieties and involve expensive field testing, registration fees, and bureaucratic processes that are prohibitively costly for community seed networks. In several AGRA target countries, these laws have been interpreted to restrict or criminalize the sale and exchange of traditional farmer-saved seeds, even at local markets.

Defenders of AGRA’s seed system approach argue that commercial seed certification protects farmers from low-quality or fraudulent seeds and ensures that the varieties farmers plant have been tested for performance and disease resistance. Critics respond that certification systems designed for commercial hybrids are inappropriate for the diversity of traditional farming systems, and that farmers themselves are sophisticated selectors who have been maintaining and improving their seed stocks for millennia without formal certification.

The seed sovereignty debate also has intellectual property dimensions. As commercial seed companies invest in developing improved varieties, they seek to protect their investments through plant variety protection (PVP) legislation and, in some cases, patents. These legal frameworks can restrict farmers’ traditional rights to save, exchange, and sell seeds, and can limit the ability of public research institutions to use protected varieties in further breeding. The African Model Law on the Protection of the Rights of Local Communities, Farmers and Breeders, developed by the African Union, attempts to balance plant breeders’ rights with farmers’ rights to save and exchange seeds, but implementation has been uneven.

The Role of International Institutions

AGRA does not operate in isolation. It is part of a broader ecosystem of international institutions that shape African agricultural policy, including the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), bilateral aid agencies, and multinational corporations in the seed, fertilizer, and agrochemical industries.

The World Bank and the African Development Bank have been major promoters of the Green Revolution model through their agricultural lending programs. World Bank projects in Africa have frequently included conditions that require recipient governments to adopt policies favorable to commercial agriculture, including seed certification laws, fertilizer subsidy programs, and land tenure reforms that facilitate commercial farming. These policy conditions create structural incentives for African governments to adopt the Green Revolution model regardless of AGRA’s specific interventions.

The CGIAR system, which includes 15 international agricultural research centers, is the world’s largest publicly funded agricultural research network. The Gates Foundation is the CGIAR’s largest private funder, and its priorities have influenced the direction of CGIAR research toward genetic improvement of staple crops and input-intensive farming systems. Critics argue that this has come at the expense of research into agroecological approaches, traditional crops, and farmer-led innovation — the very areas that may offer the most promising pathways for sustainable African food security.

The interconnection between these institutions means that the Green Revolution model is not simply a program that can be evaluated in isolation. It is an institutional ecosystem with its own momentum, funding streams, career incentives, and policy networks. Changing the direction of this ecosystem — from input-intensive monoculture toward diversified agroecology — would require not just new evidence (which is increasingly available) but new institutional arrangements, funding priorities, and power relationships.

What Comes Next

As AGRA enters its third decade and African agricultural policy moves into the post-Malabo period, several developments are worth watching.

First, the evidence base for agroecological alternatives continues to grow. Long-term farming systems trials in multiple African countries are generating data on the productivity, profitability, and sustainability of diversified farming systems compared to high-input monocultures. Early results suggest that while agroecological systems may produce somewhat lower peak yields for individual crops under optimal conditions, they often produce higher total system productivity (when all crops, livestock products, and ecosystem services are counted), are more profitable for smallholder farmers (because of lower input costs), and are more resilient to weather variability and market shocks.

Second, the African Union’s post-2025 agricultural policy framework, as outlined in the January 2025 Kampala CAADP Declaration, will shape the institutional and policy environment for African agriculture through 2035. Whether this framework continues to prioritize the Green Revolution model or incorporates meaningful support for agroecological alternatives will have major implications for hundreds of millions of African farming families.

Third, the role of African farmer organizations and civil society in agricultural policy debates is growing. The AFSA coalition, which represents millions of farmers across the continent, has articulated a clear alternative vision for African food systems based on food sovereignty, agroecology, and farmer-managed seed systems. These organizations are increasingly influential in continental policy discussions and are demanding that African agricultural policy be shaped by African farmers’ priorities rather than by external donors and multinational corporations.

Finally, the climate crisis is forcing a reexamination of agricultural models everywhere, including in Africa. As droughts, floods, and temperature extremes become more frequent and severe, the resilience of farming systems becomes as important as their peak productivity. The Green Revolution model, which optimizes for maximum yield under ideal conditions, may be structurally less resilient than diversified agroecological systems that spread risk across multiple crops, varieties, and farming practices. The coming decades will test both models under increasingly challenging conditions, and the results will shape the future of food in Africa and beyond.

References

1. Mathematica. Independent Evaluation of AGRA’s PIATA Strategy. February 2022. Commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on behalf of PIATA donors.
2. Wise TA. Failing Africa’s Farmers: An Impact Assessment of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Tufts Global Development and Environment Institute Working Paper No. 26-01, August 2026. sites.tufts.edu/gdae
3. Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). The Green Revolution Has Failed Africa: Twenty Years of Evidence and What Works Instead. August 2026. afsafrica.org
4. Gates Foundation. Press Release: Smallholder Farmers Investment, COP30, November 2025. gatesfoundation.org
5. IPES-Food. From Uniformity to Diversity: A Paradigm Shift from Industrial Agriculture to Diversified Agroecological Systems. 2016, updated 2020. ipes-food.org
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9. Kerr RB, Madsen S, Stüber M, et al. Can agroecology improve food security and nutrition? A review of agroecological evidence. Global Food Security. 2019;22:23–27.
10. African Union. 5th CAADP Biennial Review Report. February 2026. au.int
11. AGRA. Annual Reports, 2006–2025. agra.org

Last updated: September 26, 2026