As the 10th edition of the African Green Revolution Forum comes to an end in Rwanda, a group of African lobby groups want the host, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa- AGRA to release verified accounts of its achievements.
The forum that started on Monday was held virtually for the first due to the Covid-19 pandemic in Kigali, Rwanda. The forum brought together government officials, civil society, private sector, research community and development partners.
Anne Maina of Biodiversity and Biosafety Association in Kenya, who spoke on Thursday on behalf of the African organisations said AGRA presents no reliable estimates of the number of small-scale food producer households reached, improvements in their yields, household net incomes or food security, or its progress in achieving its own ambitious goals.
Other co-publishers of the report are Bread for the World, FIAN Germany, Forum on the Environment and Development, INKOTA, IRPAD, Participatory Ecological Land Use management- PELUM in Zambia, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement.
The civil society groups that took part in a study titled ‘False Promises’, took issue with the initiative’s lack of transparency and accountability.
The study carried out by a coalition of German and African civil society organisations backed by research from Tufts University in the US, found that AGRA had missed its own set objectives.
It found that instead of the revolution halving hunger as promised, the situation had worsened in the 13 focus countries, with the number of people going hungry rising by 30 per cent during the AGRA years. The study covered Kenya, Mali, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania.
However, Agriculture PS Hamadi Boga came to AGRA’s defence, saying it was a catalyst whose main goal should be to drive political will towards more progressive agricultural policies.
“Fertiliser programmes in specific countries should be better managed to give value for money. In Kenya we realised this and have now moved to e-voucher,” said Boga.
Andrew Cox, AGRA's Chief of Staff and Strategy said the initiative had helped move Africa where it had had stalled for 56 years.
AGRA also says on its website that since inception 22.6million smallholder farmers have been reached, 119 African seed companies established, 44,000 agro-dealers supported.
However, the lobby groups said 14 years later, the initiative is under increased scrutiny from critics for being ineffective and opaque.
“We did a study of AGRA's progress against its own stated goals of doubling yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder families while cutting food insecurity in half by 2020. We used national data to see what evidence there was of progress toward these goals now that we are in 2020,” said Tufts University’s Tim Wise, who was the lead researcher.
The study, he said, found only small yield increases, little evidence of income gains, and a 31 per cent increase in the number of undernourished in the alliance’s 13 target countries since 2006.
“The failures are all the more striking in light of the far larger sums being spent by African governments to subsidise the purchase of Green Revolution inputs,” he said.
