From the archive
7 Sep 2026
Twenty years ago the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa launched with a simple offer: commercial seed, synthetic fertiliser and better markets, in exchange for higher yields and less hunger. Billions of philanthropic dollars followed it into thirteen countries. Now, as the alliance marks its twentieth anniversary, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa has published the most detailed independent audit of what that money bought. AFSA has its own programme to sell - but its figures come from the public record, and they are uncomfortable.
The programme aimed, explicitly, to halve hunger. Instead, the number of chronically undernourished people across those thirteen countries has risen 58 per cent since 2006. Fertiliser use more than doubled over the same period. Cropland grew by 46 per cent, much of it cleared from forest and grazing land, yet staple yields grew more slowly than they had in the twelve years before the programme began. The extra food came mostly from putting more acres under the plough rather than raising what each acre gives.
There is a tell inside the audit's own history. An earlier assessment in 2020 put the rise in undernourishment at 31 per cent; five years on, the same ledger reads 58. The deterioration steepened while the programme ran. Meanwhile millet and sorghum, the grains that carried families through drought, lost ground as maize planted alone spread. Maize feeds people well in a good year and badly in a dry one - precisely the trade the older crops existed to soften.
Twenty years is long enough for a promise to be checked against the record. AFSA's report argues for its own alternative rather than simply delivering a verdict, and that alternative deserves the same scrutiny the audit applies to AGRA. But the record itself is not in dispute: more inputs, more land, slower yield growth, more hunger - and nearly half as much cropland again, carved out of forest and grazing land, to produce it.
Before supporting any agricultural-development programme, ask two questions of its annual report: does it count meals eaten or tonnes grown, and does it fund the crops people rely on in a drought year? Ten minutes of reading answers both, and most glossy reports fail the first.
Regeneration International · Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa · Read the source