Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 336

In 2006, two major American philanthropic institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, launched a multi-million-dollar investment project to improve agriculture in Africa. The project, named Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, attracted various other donors over the years and is ongoing today. The initiative has received much criticism, for not reaching its set goals and for promoting forms of production that expose African farmers to volatile markets and stringent credit suppliers.

The book by Jacqueline Ignatova provides a well-argued explanation of how foreign donor investments for a Green Revolution in African agriculture can lead to such effects. The book is not restricted to the initiative of the Rockefeller and Gates foundations. Ignatova’s analysis covers a variety of projects supported by foreign donors and national governments. The chosen focus and the way Ignatova elaborates this in the various chapters works well overall. The book’s central aim is to contest the notion that recent donor initiatives are ‘new, green, a revolution or pro-poor, the latter implied by its designation that it is for Africa’.

In the introduction Ignatova explains that Green Revolution initiatives operate through a set of three mechanisms. By reducing complex agricultural problems to a restricted set of technical and managerial issues, the knowledge of external experts who perceive ‘farming as a business’ is given prominence over local forms of knowledge that approach ‘farming as a way of life’. Secondly, a combination of ‘philanthrocapital and biocapital’ investments result in a preference for commercialized seed distribution. A third mechanism, implied by the former two, is that agricultural improvements overly rely on foreign, primarily US- and Europe-based, actors and disregard African people’s expertise and autonomy in deciding their agricultural futures. These arguments will sound familiar to readers conversant with the literature on the Green Revolution in Asia. In the six chapters that follow, Ignatova elaborates what makes the recent initiatives in Africa distinctive.

Although the Green Revolution in Asia in the 1960s and ’70s also focused on commercial inputs (mostly seeds and mineral fertilizers) much of the implementation and additional support to farmers was arranged by governments. Structural economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s stripped the protective layer of government support to farmers and turned governments into initiators of more market-based arrangements. This, Ignatova explains in chapter 1, created an ‘enabling environment’ for private-sector initiatives that, as she argues in chapter 2, opened the door for ‘philanthrocapitalism, a defining feature of the new Green Revolution’. Philanthropic agencies not only provide the money to cover the costs of agricultural inputs but also set the terms of how agriculture must change towards more market-oriented production.

The commercialization of African agriculture, Ignatova explains in chapters 3 and 4, is particularly focused on the development of genetically modified (GM) seeds. For Ghana the examples are GM varieties of cowpea and rice. The reader is well informed about the new research cooperation and changes in the legislation of plant breeding that were set up in Ghana to develop these GM varieties, both still waiting for official release. Ignatova uses these examples to show how the patenting system turns GM seeds into ‘biocapital’ and that the organizations involved create a ‘hype’ around future benefits of GM seeds.

In chapters 5 and 6 the effects on the research system are elaborated. A substantial part of the donor money is spent on scholarships to train African scientists, mostly at US universities, who then become employed in the various Green Revolution initiatives. Ignatova provides an example of a training workshop in which Ghanaian experts prepare farmers for commercial Mango production, showing how such workshops typically attract young male farmers, unrepresentative for the larger, often female, farming population. These skewed effects and other shortcomings of the new Green Revolution are not unnoticed in Ghana and Ignatova provides a very interesting account, in chapter 6, of the criticism on these initiatives among Ghanaian researchers, policymakers and activists.

As mentioned, the overall argument of the book is developed effectively and for that reason the book is recommendable for a broad audience of students and scholars. The choice of examples and cases is not always convincing and sometimes confusing. The philanthrocapitalism argument in chapter 2, for example, is illustrated with the promotion of soybean production, a crop hardly grown in Ghana before the 1960s. The promotion was mainly supported, Ignatova explains, by USAID and UNICEF, organizations one would not immediately think of as philanthropic.

Moreover, the material collected in Ghana is interesting and adequately used but sparse. Most of the text is devoted to the overall argument, occasionally repetitive and using a wide variety of sources. Again, it is well done but readers interested in recent changes in agriculture in Ghana will have a hard time developing a picture. Ghanaian farmers appear in the book very sporadically. There is an interesting interlude, between chapters 5 and 6, where Ignatova presents an argument about ‘mixing’ the benefits of donor-supported innovations and traditional practices. In the conclusion she refers to mixing as ‘critical for those activists and development planners alike that, for different reasons, tend to downplay the independence and pragmatism of African farmers’. Unfortunately, this important point is not sustained by empirical accounts of Ghanaian farmers’ practices. That in itself does not reduce the strength of the book, convincingly arguing that recent Green Revolution initiatives for Africa serve purposes outside of Africa.