Twenty Years of the Green Revolution in Africa: The Evidence Says It Failed
Twenty years ago, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa launched with a promise: commercial seed, synthetic fertiliser and better market access would lift yields, raise incomes and cut hunger across the continent. This week, as AGRA marks that twentieth anniversary with a continent-wide celebration tour, a new report from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) puts that promise against the record — and finds it broken.
The Green Revolution Has Failed Africa: Twenty Years of Evidence and What Works Instead, released today, is the most detailed independent assessment yet of what two decades and billions of philanthropic dollars actually bought the thirteen countries AGRA prioritised. The numbers are stark. The count of chronically undernourished people across those countries has risen 58% since 2006 — nearly double the 31% increase already flagged in an earlier assessment in 2020. That’s against a programme that set out, explicitly, to cut hunger in half.
Fertiliser use more than doubled over the same period. Cropland expanded by 46%, as forests and grazing land were cleared for cultivation. Yet staple-crop yield growth actually slowed compared with the twelve years before AGRA began. Much of the additional food produced came from farming more land, not farming it better — and the crops that historically carried households through drought, millet and sorghum among them, lost ground as maize monocultures spread.