Contesting Africa's New Green Revolution

Biotechnology and Philanthrocapitalist Development in Ghana

Jacqueline A. Ignatova

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786996589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Genetically modified crops have become a key element of development
strategies across the Global South, despite remaining deeply controversial. Proponents hail them as an example of 'pro-poor' innovation, while critics regard them as a threat to food sovereignty and the environment. The promotion
of biotechnology is an integral part of 'new Green Revolution for Africa' interventions and is also intimately linked to the rise of 'philanthrocapitalism, ' which advances business solutions to address the problem of poverty. Through interviews with farmers, policymakers and agricultural scientists, Jacqueline Ignatova shows how efforts to transform the seed sector in northern Ghana – one of the key laboratories of this 'new Green Revolution' – may serve to exacerbate the inequality it was notionally intended to address. But she also argues that its effects in Ghana have been far more complex than either side of the debate has acknowledged, with local farmers proving adept at blending traditional and modern agricultural methods that subvert the interests of global agribusiness.

Chapter 1

Green Revolution Discourse, Structural Adjustment, and the “Enabling Environment” for Agribusiness

I. Introduction

Florence Wambugu, a Kenyan plant pathologist and virologist, the CEO of Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International, and a vocal proponent of genetically modified (GM) crops, makes a claim common to proponents of GM crops and a “new Green Revolution for Africa”: “We may have missed the green revolution, which helped Asia and Latin America achieve self-sufficiency in food production, but we cannot afford to be excluded or to miss another major global technological revolution” (Wambugu 2001). Suggested here is that it is the absence of these technological revolutions that accounts for African countries’ supposed inability to be self-sufficient food producers. As such, a new Green Revolution for Africa appears to be self-evidently positive and necessary and a means for better inclusion in the technological changes happening globally.

The “Green Revolution” is a referent to the high crop yields that countries in Asia and Latin America experienced in the mid-20th century through the introduction of scientific seeds, agro-chemicals, irrigation, and linkage to markets, and also suggests a benign, if not positive, effect on the environment. This “new Green Revolution” (hereafter nGR) is a political project advanced by a global assemblage of actors that includes governments, international and bilateral aid agencies, foundations, international and national agricultural research institutions, and global agribusiness corporations. However, efforts to modernize agriculture in Africa are not new, and the idea that reforms in small-scale agriculture can lead to a “transformation” in African economies has been repeatedly invoked in African agricultural policy since the 1960s (Wiemers 2015: 104; Amanor 2009; Holmén 2005). What is new is who leads: whereas in the 1960s the state led efforts to modernize agriculture, now public–private partnerships take the lead (Amanor 2009: 247; Moseley 2017; Brooks 2005: 362). I discuss the composition and power of these public–private partnerships in the following chapter.

I consider two effects of the framing of this African Green Revolution as “new” and necessary. First, I look at how this narrative of an excluded Africa views the limited agricultural research and development in Africa as a product of the absence of delivery of technical products from the West, rather than policy failure. Second, the idea that the Green Revolution “missed” Africa obscures how national agricultural development programs were undermined by some of these same actors promoting the new Green Revolution for Africa agenda. This chapter not only examines the political utility of framing these interventions as novel and necessary but also evaluates what, if anything, is new about the new Green Revolution. This query is further expanded in Chapters 2 and 3. Central to this analysis is the shifting roles of the public and private sectors in agricultural research and development in Ghana.

The chapter is organized as follows. First, I examine the key characteristics of the first Green Revolution and highlight its dominant framing of agricultural development as a problem of production. I also critique the notion that the first Green Revolution missed Africa. Second, I discuss the changing role of the state in agricultural research and development to that of an “enabler,” noting shifts both in funding and in the roles of the public and private sectors. Then I connect the legacy of structural adjustment to the logic of the new Green Revolution for Africa by questioning the origins of the deficiencies the nGR agenda is intended to address. I identify a number of key continuities between the two “revolutions” that have been obscured by their depoliticized presentation as a technical endeavor. In the final section I analyze the language of “enabling environment” that is frequently invoked by development planners and actors advancing a new Green Revolution and show that this discourse reveals continuity with the rationale of structural adjustment. I conclude with a critique of the new Green Revolution agenda that reveals it to be an ahistoric productivist lens that views problems of African agriculture as fundamentally issues of production and that ignores the past roles that its proponents played in promoting policies that have undermined African agricultural development.

II. The First “Green Revolution”: An Overview

The first Green Revolution is characterized by a technological breakthrough in the development of hybrid varieties of cereal grains; increased mechanization, irrigation, and fertilizer application; the growth of international and national agricultural research institutes; and the geopolitical context of the Cold War (Oasa 1987: 40; Griffin 1974; Perkins 1997; Evenson and Gollin 2003). The term “Green Revolution” was coined by William Gaud, former director of USAID, to contrast it with a “Red Revolution” of the spread of communism or a “White Revolution’ ” of land redistribution in Iran (Patel, Holt-Giménez, and Shattuck 2009).¹ Supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the US government as a means to stop the spread of communism, Green Revolution programs initiated in Mexico in 1941 and India in 1956 were designed to promote high-yielding agricultural practices. Faced with a plant disease that led to a significant decline in yields, Mexico was targeted as the first site for the Rockefeller Foundation’s agricultural assistance under the leadership of biologist Norman Borlaug. This choice was strategic given that the Roosevelt administration “wanted neither a socialist nor a fascist state on its southern border” (Perkins 1997: 9). The first Green Revolution was a geopolitical project, not merely a technical endeavor.

The Green Revolution promotes “plant improvement” and crop productivity as central to development and has been supported by international agricultural research centers such as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA); bilateral aid agencies; the Rockefeller, Ford, and Kellogg Foundations; agribusiness corporations; and national agricultural research institutions. The Green Revolution programs introduced high-yield dwarf varieties of wheat and rice and hybrid maize as well as pesticides, fertilizers, and improved irrigation technologies. This capital-intensive agriculture was at the time attributed with averting famine in India and helping Mexico become an export-oriented agricultural economy; later these agricultural practices were linked to ecological degradation and social disparities in the agricultural sector (Weissman 1990; Shiva 1991; Patel 2013; Freebairn 1995; Sobha 2007). High-yield varieties of rice, wheat, and maize were developed in Asia and Latin America suited to their respective local agroecological context. By contrast, Asian varieties of grains were either brought to African countries without similar adaptations or prioritized traits that required formulaic and time-sensitive applications of “seed-water-fertilizer” in order for yields to increase (Berry 1993: 199). Both approaches generated disappointing results in the African context (e.g., Evenson and Gollin 2003).

The first Green Revolution aimed to achieve agricultural transformation through a change in process as it enabled a new method of producing particular crop commodities (Griffin 1974: 48). In order to realize the benefits of these high-yielding varieties, a new process of the use of supportive agricultural technologies—fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation—changed agricultural systems and the landscape upon which they were grown. In addition to creating a commercial seed sector, this shift toward input-intensive agriculture led to growth in agro-chemical, farm machinery, irrigation supply, and other supporting sectors. The Green Revolution worked to standardize agricultural practices and generate surplus through the adoption of more limited number of cereal varietals and a more formulaic application of inputs. This standardization in process rendered legible agricultural systems for global markets.²

One of the overriding concerns of the Green Revolution was the overall increase in agricultural productivity measured in aggregate terms, and this was achieved in certain staple food grains. In India, whose agricultural programs during this period were frequently given as a Green Revolution success story, yields for rice increased from 902 kg/ha in 1953–4 to 2,240 kg/ha in 2010–11, whereas those for wheat increased from 750 kg/ha in 1953–4 to 2,938 kg/ha in 2010–11 (Basu and Sholten 2012: 111).³ It should be noted, however, that there is much debate over the reliability of statistics that demonstrate a “revolution” in agricultural productivity in India, although there is greater consensus that there were agricultural yield gains between the mid-1960s and early 1970s (Jervens 2014; Rudra 1982). Such increases in yield in these cereal grains were generated through the “productive power” of industrial inputs that substituted (and undervalued) the “reproductive power” of nature (Yapa 1996a: 82; Shiva 1991; Sobha 2007). The components of farming reliant on the reproductive power of nature—seed saving, rainfall, composting, intercropping, the use of manure and animal labor—were substituted by the purchase of scientific seeds, the establishment of irrigation systems, and the application of fertilizers and herbicides. Furthermore, “women and peasants who were traditional agricultural experts” were displaced by techno-scientific expertise that generated and disseminated Green Revolution technologies (Sobha 2007: 107; Richards 1985).

This introduction of Green Revolution technologies marks a shift from a labor-intensive agriculture dependent upon the reproductive power of nature and community labor to a capital-intensive system dependent upon industrial inputs and mechanization (Yapa 1996a; Shiva 1991). In this sense, Green Revolution technologies were landowner- and elite-biased, offering differential results to peasant farmers that both did not have access to capital and were considered too high-risk to have access to credit. Griffin (1974: 30) argues that “unequal access to land and capital frequently is accentuated by unequal access to water and technical knowledge.” In other words, landed wealth frequently goes hand in hand with political influence and, with that, privileged access to scarce means of production (i.e., tractors, subsidized fertilizer, the most fertile land) (Griffin 1974: 18). These existing patterns of inequality were deepened by technological change and government policies that privileged improvements in wealthier farming regions like rich river valleys that generated aggregate productivity gains, rather than improving the conditions at the household level through attention to peasant farmers reliant on rain-fed agriculture. Large-scale commercial farmers were given subsidies to mechanize production, whereas p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Author Biography
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Green Revolution Discourse, Structural Adjustment, and the “Enabling Environment” for Agribusiness
• Chapter 2 Philanthrocapitalism and the Politics of Public–Private Partnerships
• Chapter 3 Biocapital, “Pro-Poor” Biotechnology, and Legislative Changes in the Seed Sector1
• Chapter 4 Technological Savior or Terminator Gene? Biotechnology, Food Security, and the Political Economy of hype
• Chapter 5 Experts, Entrepreneurs, and the “Last Mile User”
• Interlude: On “Mixing”
• Chapter 6 Neocolonial Anxieties
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page