Old fertilizer in new bottles: selling the past as innovation in Africa's green revolution

ABSTRACT

Rising global hunger in recent years has prompted calls for a broad reckoning over what is wrong with global food systems. Our changing climate has added urgency to the crisis. Many experts warn that our current agricultural practices are undermining the resource base - soil, water, seeds, climate - on which future food production depends. Now the global COVID-19 pandemic threatens to further exacerbate food insecurity for many of the world's poor. Africa is projected to overtake South Asia by 2030 as the region with the greatest number of hungry people. An alarming 250 million people in Africa now suffer from "undernourishment", the U.N. term for chronic hunger. If policies do not change, experts project that number to soar to 433 million in 2030. A growing number of farmers, scientists, and development experts now advocate a shift from high-input, chemical-intensive agriculture to low-input ecological farming. They are supported by an impressive array of new research documenting both the risks of continuing to follow our current practices and the potential benefits of a transition to more sustainable farming. The new initiatives have been met with a chorus of derision from an unsurprising group of commentators, many associated with agribusiness interests. They dismiss agroecology as backward, a nostalgic call for a return to traditional peasant production methods which they say have failed to feed growing populations in developing countries. For such critics, the future is innovation and innovation is technology the kinds of commercial high-yield seeds and inorganic fertilizers associated with the Green Revolution. This paper explores the ways in which this innovation narrative flips reality on its head, presenting Green Revolution practices of the past as if they were new innovations. It does so through the lens of the battle for Africa's food future, examining the disappointing results from the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA). In contrast, the real innovations in Africa are coming from soil scientists, ecologists, nutritionists, and farmers themselves who actively seek alternatives to approaches that have been failing small-scale farmers for years. A wide range of farmer organizations, scientists, and advocates offer a broad and diverse array of ecologically-based initiatives based on sound science. These are proving far more innovative and effective, raising productivity, crop and nutritional diversity, and incomes while reducing farmers' costs and government outlays.