Arguments Against a Second Green Revolution: Bill Gates Is Wrong?

Food First Policy Brief No.12: Ten Reasons Why the Rockefeller and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ Alliance for Another Green Revolution Will Not Solve the Problems of Poverty and Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa

October 2006
By Eric Holt-Gimenez, Ph.D., Miguel A. Altieri, Ph.D., and Peter Rosset, Ph.D. Food First

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced a joint $150 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA),i provoking immediate criticisms that the proposal fails to take into account the failures of the original Green Revolution.The creators of AGRA claim the initiative will bring benefits to the African continent’s impoverished farmers who—they assert—until now have been bypassed by the first Green Revolution. A day later, probably in an orchestrated move, Jacques Diouf, Director General of UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), called for support for a “second Green Revolution” to feed the world’s growing population. UN boss Kofi Annan also weighed in to support the initiative.
The AGRA plan is remarkable given that, according to a World Bank evaluation, over the last twenty-five years the CGIAR—which brings together the key Green Revolution research institutions—has invested 40-45% of their $350 million/yr budget in Africa (The World Bank 2004). If these public funds were not invested in a Green Revolution for Africa, then where were they spent? If they were spent on the Green Revolution, then why does Africa need another one? Either the Green Revolution’s institutions don’t work, or the Green Revolution itself doesn’t work —or both. The Green Revolution did not “bypass” Africa. It failed. Because this new philanthropic effort ignores, misinterprets, and misrepresents the harsh lessons of the first Green Revolution’s multiple failures, it will likely worsen the problem. These are 10 reasons why:


1. The Green Revolution actually deepens the divide between rich and poor farmers.

In the 1960s at the beginning of the first Green Revolution, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations promoted industrial-style agriculture in the Global South through technology “packages” that included modern varieties (MVs), fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The high cost of these purchased inputs deepened the divide between large farmers and smallholders because the latter could not afford the technology. In both Mexico and India seminal studies revealed that the Green Revolution’s expensive “packages” favored a minority of economically privileged farmers, put the majority smallholders at a disadvantage, and led to the concentration of land and resources (Frankel 1973; Hewitt de Alcantara 1976).

2. Over time, Green Revolution technologies degrade tropical agro-ecosystems and expose already vulnerable farmers to increased environmental risk.

3. The Green Revolution leads to the loss of agro-biodiversity, the basis for smallholder livelihood security and regional environmental sustainability.

4. Hunger is not primarily due to a lack of food, but rather because the hungry are too poor to buy the food that is available. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has shown that famine is fundamentally a problem of democracy, poverty and food distribution. While the architects of AGRA dutifully recite the Green Revolution’s oft-trumpeted claims to success in raising agricultural yields, there is little understanding of the causes of hunger, or of the Green Revolution’s colossal failure: it did not effectively reduce poverty or hunger.

5. Without addressing structural inequities in the market and political systems, approaches relying on high input technologies fail. The growing hunger in Africa is largely due to the increased impoverishment of the very rural peoples who once grew food, but who have now left farming. Today’s African farmers could easily produce far more food than they do, but they don’t because they cannot get credit to cover production costs, nor can they find buyers or obtain fair prices to give them a minimal profit margin. Under such circumstances, what difference will a new “technology package” make? Without addressing the causes of why African farmers leave farming—or why they under-produce—AGRA will have little impact on this trend.

6. The private sector alone will not solve the problems of production, marketing and distribution The first Green Revolution was introduced through the massive institutional
support systems of the Indian and Mexican development states. Government agricultural ministries provided training, credit, research and extension, marketing, processing and distribution services to farmers who adopted Green Revolution technology. These heavy state subsidies created a market for private sector entry into the seed, fertilizer, machinery and trade activities in the Green Revolution. Few of these services are remotely available today.

7. Introduction of genetic engineering—the driving force behind AGRA initiative—will make smallholder systems more environmentally vulnerable in Sub-Saharan Africa.
AGRA’s directors openly admit that their conventional crop-breeding approach will pave the way for genetic engineering technology. Both the Gates and the Rockefeller Foundations are actively financing projects in genetic engineering (Bill Gates also has substantial private investments in GE). However, GE increases the risks of environmental failure on smallholder farms


The expansion of transgenic maize and soybean monocultures in Africa will not only narrow the genetic base of indigenous agriculture but will also cause environmental risks. There are many widely accepted environmental risks associated with the rapid deployment and widespread commercialization of genetically engineered (GE) crops (Altieri, 2004; Altieri et al 2005; Altieri and Rosset, 1999a,b; Independent Science Panel, 2003):
a. the spread of transgenes from GE crops to related weeds via crop-weed hybridization enhancing the fitness of sexually compatible wild relatives leading to development of weed species resistant to herbicides;
b. reduction of the fitness of non-target organisms (especially local varieties) through the acquisition of transgenic traits via hybridization;
c. the rapid evolution of resistance of insect pests—such as the stem borer—to Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis);
d. accumulation of the insecticidal Bt toxin, which remains active in the soil after the crop is ploughed under and binds tightly to clays and humic acids with unknown
effects on soil biota;
e. disruption of natural control of insect pests through intertrophic-level effects of the Bt toxin on natural enemies;
f. Herbicide resistant crops can also indirectly affect soil biota through effects of glyphosate that appears to act as an antibiotic in the soil inhibiting mycorrizae,
antagonists and nitrogen fixing bacteria. Scientists have shown that root development, nodulation and nitrogen fixation is impaired in some transgenic soybean varieties that exhibit lower yields, and that effects are worse under drought stress or infertile soils;
g. unanticipated effects on non-target herbivorous insects (i.e. monarch butterflies) through deposition of transgenic pollen on foliage of surrounding wild vegetation);
h. vector-mediated horizontal gene transfer and recombination to create new pathogenic organisms, and;
i. contamination of non-GE crop varieties, with the added risk that this contamination may contribute to the genetic deterioration of local crop varieties that are critical to
food security.

When transgenic varieties are used in the complex, diverse and risk-prone cropping systems of peasant farmers, the risks are much greater than in large, wealthy farmer systems, or farming systems in Northern countries. The widespread crop failures reported for transgenics due to stem splitting, boll drop, etc., pose economic risks that can affect poor farmers much more severely than wealthy farmers. If consumers reject their products, the economic risks are higher the poorer one is. Also, the high costs of transgenics introduce an additional antipoor bias into the system (see next topic below). The most common transgenic varieties available today are those that tolerate proprietary brands of herbicides, and those than contain insecticide genes. Herbicide tolerant crops make little sense to peasant farmers who plant
diverse mixtures of crop and fodder species, as such chemicals would destroy key components of their cropping systems. Transgenic plants which produce their own
insecticides, usually using the ‘Bt’ gene, closely follow the pesticide paradigm, which is itself rapidly failing due to pest resistance to insecticides. Instead of the failed "one pest-one chemical" model, genetic engineering emphasizes a "one pest-one gene" approach, shown over and over again in laboratory trials to fail, as pest species rapidly adapt and develop resistance to the insecticide present in the plant. Bt crops violate the basic and widely accepted principle of "integrated pest management" (IPM), which is that reliance on any single pest management technology tends to trigger shifts in pest species or the evolution of resistance through one or more mechanisms. In general, the greater the selection pressure across time and space, the quicker and more profound the pests’ evolutionary response. Thus IPM approaches employ multiple pest control mechanisms, and use pesticides minimally, only in cases of last resort. An obvious reason for adopting this principle is that it reduces pest exposure to pesticides, retarding the evolution of resistance. But when the product is engineered into the plant itself, pest exposure leaps from minimal and occasional to massive
and continuous, dramatically accelerating resistance. Most entomologists agree that Bt will rapidly become useless, both as a feature of the new seeds and as an old standby natural insecticide sprayed when needed by farmers that want out of the pesticide treadmill. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has mandated that farmers set aside a certain proportion of their area as a ‘refuge,’ where non-Bt varieties are to be planted, in order to slow down the rate of evolution by insects of resistance. Yet it is impossible for poor, small farmers in the Global South to set aside precious land for such refuges, meaning that resistance to Bt could occur much more rapidly under such circumstances.

8. The introduction of GE crops into smallholder agriculture will likely lead to farmer indebtedness. The expansion of GE crops in the Global South is driven by powerful
transnational corporations that—in the face of growing public rejection of GE foods in the industrialized world—are desperately attempting to expand their markets in the Global South.
While touted as the latest “silver bullet” in the war against hunger, GE crops will likely impoverish poor farmers by making them dependent on expensive external inputs

9. AGRA’s assertion that “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) ignores the many successful agroecological and non-corporate approaches to agricultural development that have
grown in the wake of the Green Revolution’s failures. Truly reducing hunger requires policy changes that are far more important than technology fixes. To use crude economics language, we could say that any “supply side” (i.e. seeds and fertilizers) approach is useless until “demand side” problems (fair prices) are resolved. At best, the “right technology” plays only a complementary role. In this context, only agroecological technologies that have positive effects on the distribution of wealth, income, and assets, that are pro-poor, can have a synergistic effect in the reduction of hunger. Thousands of examples of the application of agroecology are at work throughout the developing world, where yields for crops that the poor rely on most—rice, beans, maize, cassava, potatoes, barley—have been increased by severalfold, relying on local biodiversity, family labor and new and traditional agroecological knowledge.

10.AGRA’s “alliance” does not allow peasant farmers to be the principal actors in agricultural improvement. The Rockefeller and Gates Foundations consulted with the
world’s largest seed and fertilizer companies, with big philanthropy, and with multilateral development agencies, but have yet to let peasant farmer organizations give their views on the kind of agricultural development they believe will most benefit them.

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