By Witness Radio team.
African faith leaders, along with hundreds of civil society and farmer groups, are convening a media briefing to call on the Gates Foundation to offer reparations for the extensive damage caused to Africa’s food systems by the Foundation’s aggressive promotion of industrialized agriculture through AGRA (formerly the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa).
AGRA claims on its website that its mission is to inspire an inclusive agricultural transformation across Africa, aiming to reduce hunger, improve nutrition, and enhance climate resilience.
However, these faith leaders say this much-pampered agricultural model has failed to improve African food security. Instead, it is exacerbating hunger and inflicting deep ecological and social wounds on the environment and the people it is supposed to benefit.
“The Green Revolution has failed to increase food security in Africa and inflicted deep ecological and social wounds. As faith leaders, we have a responsibility as custodians of the Earth to call out this injustice.” — Gabriel Manyangadze of Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute (SAFCEI) said.
While the Gates Foundation and other corporate giants push for large-scale agriculture, research shows that small-scale farmers are the backbone of global food production. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in its 2021 report, “Which farms feed the world and have farmland become more concentrated?” found that small-scale farmers are responsible for producing a third of the world’s food.
Without considering the damage this model has caused in countries like Zambia and India, where it has been implemented, AGRA’s initiatives—despite receiving over a billion dollars in funding—have only deepened the struggles of smallholder farmers. These initiatives have increased dependence on expensive inputs, eroded local seed varieties, degraded soil fertility, and weakened farmers’ resilience to climate shocks like drought.
Zambia’s collapsing food system, as cited in a recent report titled Zambia’s collapsed food system: never-ending debt, climate shocks, biodiversity loss, and fisps by the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) and India’s hunger and malnutrition, attribute the crisis to policies influenced by India’s Green Revolution as the root cause of the problem.
According to the African Faith leaders, the demand for reparations will be formally presented in an open letter ahead of the African Food Systems Summit, scheduled to take place in Kigali, Rwanda, from September 2 to 6, 2024. Furthermore, the leaders express concerns that AGRA and its allies may use the platform to entrench further agricultural models that do not align with the needs and realities of African farmers.
The annual food systems summit aims to elevate the continent’s efforts to build healthier, more inclusive, sustainable, resilient, and equitable food systems. This has the potential to fast-track the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Africa by 2030. However, initiatives from giants like the Gates Foundation could jeopardize these goals by undermining the progress needed to achieve them.
On Wednesday, August 28, 2024, a press conference will be held where African faith leaders and community representatives will discuss the devastating impact of AGRA’s Green Revolution agenda, focusing on the collapse of Zambia’s food system.
The conference will also unveil new research from AFSA, exposing AGRA’s undue policy influence across Africa and undermining efforts to promote sustainable, farmer-led agroecological practices.
The press conference will be aired live on Witness Radio at 3 PM EAT. Don’t miss it. You can download the Witness Radio App on Play-Store or you can listen live on www.witnessradio.org
