Reports have it that African faith leaders would soon be issuing an open letter to the Gates Foundation demanding reparations for causing extensive damage to Africa’s food systems with its aggressive push for industrialised agriculture, much of it under the banner of AGRA, formerly the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
The open letter, endorsed by hundreds of civil society and farmer groups, is coming ahead of the African Food Systems Summit, taking place from September 2 to 6, 2024 in Kigali, Rwanda, where they say AGRA and its allies would be using the platform to further entrench agricultural models that do not align with the needs and realities of African farmers. In a statement, the press conference is slated for August 28, 2024 at 8am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), 12noon Greewich Mean Time (GMT), and 3pm East Africa Time (EAT,) via Zoom while registration can be done ahead of the event at: https://bit.ly/green-
Quoting Gabriel Manyangadze of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI), the statement said, “The Green Revolution has not only failed to increase food security in Africa, but has also inflicted deep ecological and social wounds. As faith leaders, we have a responsibility, as custodians of the Earth, to call out this injustice”. It argued that AGRA’s initiatives, despite receiving more than one billion dollars in funding, have only worsened the plight of smallholder farmers by increasing dependence on costly inputs, eroding local seed varieties, undermining soil fertility, and weakening farmers’ resilience to climate shocks such as drought, saying a recent report by the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) had demonstrated how the “collapse” of Zambia’s food system had been partly due to adopting such Green Revolution policies.
The statement observes that despite a proven track record of failures, as highlighted in AGRA’s own donor-commissioned report, AGRA and its lead funders, namely: the Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), continue to push industrial agriculture using their outsized resources and power. Civil society and farmers on the ground have witnessed AGRA’s widespread influence through lobbying and exerting undue pressure on policymakers. AGRA’s political manipulation threatens to derail efforts to transition to a more sustainable and locally-driven agro-ecological practices while Million Belay, General Coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) said, “AGRA’s fingerprints are all over African agriculture policy, and represent an attack on African farmer sovereignty”.
AFSA, known to be Africa’s largest civil society movement, brings together farmers, pastoralists, fishers, indigenous faith groups, women’s movements, youth and consumer associations in a united voice for food sovereignty on the continent with a network of networks operating in 50 African countries and reaching 200 million people. During the press conference, farmers and community leaders would be opportune to present an open letter from African faith leaders, demanding that Gates Foundation provide reparations for the damage it had caused with its Green Revolution programmes; the devastation caused by the Green Revolution agenda in Zambia, where corn production has fallen by half and hunger is severe; while results from new research by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa on AGRA’s extensive, undue policy influence at local, national and continental levels, which is said to be undermining efforts to promote farmer-led ecological agriculture.
Expected speakers include Million Belay, General Coordinator of AFSA, talking on AGRA’s Africa-wide efforts to interfere with alternatives to the Green Revolution; Ferdinand Wafula, Kenyan farmer, Bio Gardening Innovations, speaking on AGRA’s efforts to undermine local agroecology initiatives; Bishop Takalani Mufamadi, Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI), handling the faith communities’ call for just, ecological stewardship of the land; Mary Sakala, Zambian farmer, examining the urgent food crisis unfolding in Zambia; while Anne Maina from the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya, is moderator at the press conference.
