Twenty years after AGRA’s launch, a report built on 18 years of FAO data paints a contrasting picture: fertiliser use and crop area surged, overall yields disappointed and undernourishment rose in the focus countries.
On 24 August 2026, a report presented in Dakar for the twentieth anniversary of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) scrutinised nearly two decades of public and philanthropic support for a model built on fertilisers, commercial seeds and subsidies, just as the African Union fine‑tunes its 2026‑2035 agricultural strategy. Drawing on 18 years of FAO data for 13 countries targeted by AGRA, the document concludes that input use and cultivated area have risen sharply, while productivity gains have been more modest than expected and undernourishment has increased significantly.
According to the analysis, fertiliser use in the focus countries more than doubled between 2006 and 2024, while cultivated area grew by 46 %; yet average annual yield growth for the main crops reached only 1.2 %, compared with 1.3 % in the twelve years preceding AGRA’s creation. This finding echoes work published a few days earlier by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and a Tufts University researcher, who argue that the original promise to double smallholders’ yields and incomes while halving hunger has not been met in the participating countries.
Maize‑centred gains at the expense of crop diversity
The authors point out that maize, the flagship crop of this approach, shows contrasted performance: yields are reported to have increased by 40 %, but on the back of a 71 % expansion in maize area, while yields for millet fell by 17 %, for roots and tubers by 10 % and for groundnuts by 11 %. This reallocation has reduced the share of millet and sorghum in cultivated land from about 26 % to 16 %, even though these cereals remain central to diets and climate resilience across large Sahelian and Sudanian zones.
Farmer networks and agroecology experts stress that this shift of land and public support towards hybrid maize and nitrogen fertiliser has increased farms’ dependence on imported inputs and weakened food systems built on traditional cereals, legumes and root crops.
Rising undernourishment in the focus countries
The report links these technical choices to food security trends: in the studied countries, the number of chronically undernourished people is estimated to have risen from 94.6 million in 2004‑2006 to 149.6 million in 2022‑2024, a 58 % increase, with Nigeria accounting for a large share of the deterioration. This trajectory matches the estimates used by AFSA and its partners, who recall that AGRA originally set a goal of halving undernourishment in its focus countries, a target later revised under the AGRA 3.0 strategy.
The authors underline, however, that national situations diverge: Ethiopia and Ghana have reduced the number of undernourished people, while Nigeria accounts for more than half of the increase and countries such as Malawi have seen hunger rise despite higher cereal yields.
Senegal as a comparator outside the AGRA focus group
Beyond the AGRA countries, Senegal is used as a comparator; the report notes stronger performance on some yield indicators without claiming causality, and highlights the role of greater crop diversity and locally anchored agroecological initiatives. Senegalese agroecology specialists recall that the country combines targeted input schemes with support for value chains such as millet, cowpea and irrigated horticulture, partly limiting the monoculture effects observed in some AGRA focus states while leaving open questions around soil fertility and exposure to external markets.
The 2026‑2035 agricultural strategy shaped by AGRA’s scorecard
As the African Union finalises its 2026‑2035 continental agricultural strategy under the CAADP/Malabo framework, AGRA’s evaluations are feeding a broader debate on how to combine public investment, development‑finance institutions and family farming in transforming food systems. A report released in March 2026 by AFSA on African Development Bank‑backed farm projects already pointed to a persistent bias towards input‑intensive models, at the expense of diversification, soil fertility and farmer‑managed seed systems.
The Dakar report explicitly recommends that African agricultural policies give more weight to crop diversification, agroecology, farmer‑managed seed systems, soil fertility, public research and extension services, instead of treating commercial inputs as the sole engine of transformation.
Upcoming AFSA report on twenty years of the Green Revolution
These findings will feed into the discussion around AFSA’s report The Green Revolution Has Failed Africa: Twenty Years of Evidence and What Works Instead, to be launched on 24 August 2026 at a continental webinar on lessons from the AGRA experience and farmer‑led alternatives. AGRA, for its part, is marking its twentieth anniversary by highlighting a shift in its mandate towards food systems and policy support, emphasising closer partnerships with governments, research centres and the private sector to strengthen the foundations of agricultural productivity.
For now, the quantified scorecard presented in Dakar and the parallel release of AFSA’s review send a clear signal that the coming decade of African agriculture will have to arbitrate more explicitly between subsidies for inputs, crop diversification and the scale‑up of agroecological models before the 2026‑2035 strategy is formally adopted.
Source: capmad.com
