AGRA Watch

The Gates Foundation "green revolution"is causing real harm! We have the solutions! Support agroecology & food sovereignty!

Africa’s Green Revolution threatens traditional foods The promotion of monocultures is hurting the production of much more nutritious and climate-resistant traditional crops.

AGRA has failed!

Bill Gates promised Africa a farm productivity revolution. The data show sluggish yield growth and rising hunger. AGRA promised to double African crop yields. Two decades and $1.5 billion later, new data shows yield growth lagged and hunger climbed 58%.

Join us in Seattle on October 3 to celebrate 25 years of solidarity with Global Justice movements!

Requiem for Africa’s Green Revolution
Timothy A. Wise reviews two decades of AGRA and argues that the initiative has failed to achieve its founding promises of dramatically raising farm productivity, incomes and food security. Drawing on United Nations and World Bank data, he finds that staple crop productivity grew more slowly during the AGRA period, hunger increased sharply and much of the rise in production came from expanding cultivated land rather than substantial yield gains. Wise argues that continued dependence on commercial seeds, synthetic fertilisers and subsidies has not generated the transformation promised to African farmers and calls for greater support for diversified and agroecological farming systems.

AGRA has failed again and again. Read the full article from Tim Wise:

Requiem for Africa’s Green Revolution Rising hunger, stagnant yields mark Gates initiative’s 20th anniversary

Twenty Years of the Green Revolution in Africa: The Evidence Says It Failed
AFSA’s new assessment compares AGRA’s original promises with eighteen years of evidence from its 13 focus countries and concludes that the model has failed to deliver the expected transformation. Since 2006, the number of chronically undernourished people across those countries rose 58 percent, fertiliser use more than doubled and cultivated land expanded 46 percent, while staple crop yield growth slowed compared with the period before AGRA. The report contrasts these outcomes with Senegal, which was not an AGRA focus country and cut hunger by half while maintaining more diverse farming systems. AFSA calls for agricultural finance to shift towards farmer managed seeds, soil health, diversified production and agroecology.

Read the report:

Twenty Years of the Green Revolution in Africa: The Evidence Says It Failed | AFSA Twenty years ago, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa launched with a promise: commercial seed, synthetic fertiliser and better market access would

#𝟏𝟕𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥 #𝐋𝐚𝐕𝐢𝐚𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐚 👩🏾‍🌾🗺️✊🏾🌽🚜 |
𝐅𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐒𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐖𝐚𝐫, 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐦, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐀𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝
La Via Campesina releases its position document on wars around the world, in the framework of the 30th anniversary of the International Day of Peasant Struggles.

#17April | Food Sovereignty in the Face of War, Imperialism, and the Hunger of Peoples Around the World | Via Campesina International Day of Peasant Struggles - La Via Campesina releases its position document on wars around the world, in the framework of the 30th anniversary of the International Day of Peasant Struggles

"Over the weekend, writers and journalists were left reeling after Megan McArdle, long-time columnist at The Washington Post, gushed about the benefits of using AI to optimize her writing.

“Think of your chatbot as a combination of an intern, a first-pass editor, and fact-checker,” she advised in a series of tweets that possessed the genteel tone of a telemarketer peddling a fraudulent scheme. While McArdle was emphatic about not using the technology to generate ideas, she praised its ability to take care of the “grunt work,” which she considers secondary to writing and thinking.

If you’re a media professional who’s been forced to relinquish the idea of earning a living from the work you love to hate, it’s hard not to feel taunted by this casual admission of corner-cutting from a successful and salaried writer at a legacy publication. .For all we know, McArdle’s endorsement of AI could be a shameless plug encouraged in a company-wide memo by the ghoulish Jeff Bezos, who seems hellbent on driving the publication that leaked Watergate into extinction. Paid ad or not, it still raises the question of why a writer with the luxury of institutional backing, staff support, and guaranteed income would pawn off the most vital parts of their job to a robot."

Africa Is a Country Weekend Special, Mar 31: I hate writing, but I love having written Over the weekend, writers and journalists were left reeling after Megan McArdle, long-time columnist at The Washington Post, gushed about the benefits of using AI to optimize her writing. “Think of your chatbot as a combination of an intern, a first-pass editor, and fact-checker,” she advised in...