Ways forward and ways past: examining the roots of the new Green Revolution in Africa

Since the turn of the century, African farmers and activists have voiced strong concerns over the Green Revolution model of agricultural development. From the 2007 World Forum for Food Sovereignty in Nyéléni, Mali to the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa’s campaign for agroecology, these calls have celebrated the diversity of agricultural practice, knowledge, and production within the African continent. And yet, the Green Revolution model – predicated on high yielding seed varieties, value chains, and generally “scaling up” agricultural production – remains the primary framing that agricultural development funders in Africa take as they seek to instigate a “new” Green Revolution in Africa (IPES Food 2020). Why, despite rejections from civil society, a dearth of critical scholarship, and contested legacies (Aga 2021), does the idea of the “Green Revolution” remain enduring for so many?

In Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa, American Studies scholar Aaron Eddens charts a “genealogy” of the Green Revolution’s legacies, networks, and discourses that first began in the mid 20th century and continue to circulate (Eddens 2024: 3). In doing so, Seeding Empire shows how and why the myth of the Green Revolution remains so strong, shaping philanthropic, educational, and policy landscapes today.

Over five chapters, an introduction and conclusion, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution is intricately linked to projects of capitalism, race, American exceptionalism, and empire.

Chapter 1 starts where many stories of the Green Revolution begin: in Iowa. Eddens brings the reader to the gathering of the World Food Prize, an annual event that celebrates the life and legacy of Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist labeled by some as the “father” of the Green Revolution. Eddens uses the gathering – and the larger chapter – to explore how the myth of Borlaug and the Green Revolution has become “a collective memory” within certain circles, circulating across university classrooms, corporate boardrooms, and agricultural discourses (2024: 18). Additionally, the chapter explores the origins of two concerns that would grip Borlaug throughout his life: the fear of a growing population, and the idea that hunger is linked to (under)production.

One component of Borlaug’s outsized mythical figure is something he is reported (by his granddaughter) to have said on his deathbed: “I failed Africa. I never brought a Green Revolution to Africa and I need five more years to try to do that” (Eddens 2024: 38). Chapter 2 shows how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation picked up this mantle and ran with it, helping to establish the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and spread the gospel of a new Green Revolution in Africa.

Chapter 3 returns to the site of the first Green Revolution, Mexico, and explores how American scientists – funded by the Rockefeller Foundation – transposed Darwinist and eugenicist ideas onto maize varietals, which they collected and organized by “race.” The outputs from this survey and Rockefeller’s subsequent work will be familiar to those working with agricultural development today: the supposed superiority of “hybrid” varieties, the alleged need to “improve” seeds and agricultural schooling, and the valuation of technical “expertise” over peasant knowledge.

These discourses undergird the new Green Revolution in Africa, where initiatives – funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Gates Foundation, US Agency for International Development, and others – seek to “improve” seed availability through the production and sale of hybrid and genetically modified seeds. Chapter 4 examines one such initiative, a public–private partnership between Monsanto (now Bayer) and African research organizations to develop a genetically modified maize called Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA). Utilizing expert interviews, Eddens explores the origins of the WEMA project, and how its coordinators struggled to balance Monsanto’s IP requirements and the project’s stated goals: to deliver an “improved” seed for African smallholder farmers.

Chapter 5 shifts in scope to examine initiatives that offer crop insurance to African smallholder farmers. Eddens argues that these initiatives are intrinsically tied to “the US security state” (2024: 111). Similar to the first Green Revolution – wherein Borlaug and his contemporaries argued that large peasantries were one missed meal away from revolting – today’s Green Revolution for Africa is built on discourses of climate security.

Throughout the book, Eddens convincingly weaves threads between Green Revolutions of now and then: the privileging of US agribusiness, the entanglements of US foreign policy and philanthropic funding, and the devaluation of diverse epistemologies.

For many working in the field of agroecology, these threads – along with larger stories and controversies surrounding the Green Revolution – will likely be familiar. Where this book makes its strongest contributions – and why agroecologists should read it – is its intricate look into the mechanisms behind and within the new Green Revolution and its architects. The book is based on dozens of interviews Eddens conducted with officials within the Gates Foundation, Monsanto, and global projects, organizations that are often difficult to penetrate. These expert interviews – some remarkably candid – reveal the internal motivations and ideological beliefs driving new Green Revolution initiatives, views that are not often shared publicly.

To this point, in Chapter 2 Eddens examines one of AGRA’s flagship projects, the Program for Africa’s Seed Systems (PASS). PASS, as articulated by AGRA, supports the development of hybrid seed companies under the banner of strengthening African seed systems. However, as Eddens shows, officials within the Gates Foundation – AGRA’s primary funder – imagined that African seed companies incubated by PASS someday become subsidiaries of larger multinationals. When asked about any uneasiness designing projects – such as PASS or WEMA – that benefit multinationals like Monsanto, a Gates Foundation official told Eddens, “we’re capitalists here” (2024: 44). As such, the Gates Foundation views the private sector as the pathway for development. “We’re always looking for an exit strategy,” one Gates Foundation official said to Eddens, and a robust private sector – fueled by multinationals or medium sized enterprises – is seen as the exit strategy (Eddens 2024: 44).

In taking a long lens to the Green Revolution (Patel 2013), Seeding Empire is a welcomed contribution to alternative histories of the Green Revolution (Laveaga 2020; Nehring 2022; Shiva 2016) and critical assessments of the new Green Revolution in Africa (Canfield 2022; Rock 2022). Alongside its qualitative insights, Eddens’ work around philanthrocapitalism is a helpful contribution to the wider field. Drawing from the work of Appel (2019), Eddens urges the reader to consider philanthrocapitalism as a “project, not a context” (Eddens 2024: 45). With this understanding, philanthrocapitalism and the new Green Revolution in Africa co-constitute one another. Seed projects in Africa, for example, allow officials in Seattle to justify their budgets, and allow Gates to bolster his public image. Considering philanthrocapitalism as a “project” causes the edifice to lose shine; philanthrocapitalism is not somehow technically superior, but rather, flawed like the rest, requiring those working within it to constantly tinker and rework ways forward. It also provides insight into why the Gates Foundation and AGRA have been so reticent to acknowledge their projects’ shortcomings (Belay and Mugambe 2021); doing so would introduce doubt into the larger project – philanthrocapitalism – at hand.

In highlighting the limitations of the new Green Revolution in Africa, Seeding Empire ultimately underscores the necessity of supporting bottom-up campaigns in Africa. Led by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa and others, these initiatives are fostering seed systems, foodways, and agricultural practice that respond to the diverse needs and contexts of the continent, not multinational companies. Seeding Empire suggests that one way of supporting this work is the task of “[insisting] upon a different way of remembering the Green Revolution’s past – and, in turn, charting [a] collective future” (Eddens 2024: 139).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).