Grain, an international NGO that “promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity” has issued a somewhat jaundiced review of the recent anouncement by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation of a new Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Grain insists that the first Green Revolution did not bypass Africa: “It failed. It was unpopular and ineffective.” The NGO goes on to say that on the evidence available, the new effort will fail for the same reasons, because the approach it adopts is unchanged.
What do you think? Do African farmers need new technology, such as improved varieties and fertilisers? Or are there other approaches that will help societies there to develop and feed themselves more effectively?
How can Green Revolution be implemented in a slash-and-burn agricultural system context? The areas under such a system are still very extensive in Africa.
It is evident that we need new technologies in order to shift from shifting cultivation system to more permanent agricultural system, from labour productivity based system to capital productivity based system.
It is admitted that the shifting cultivation technology, as it is applied nowadays, is very different from the traditional shifting cultivation technology, it is “avili” as we state it in french, i.e it has evolved to the worse. It is now damaging to the environment, increasing food insecurity… We have to change this course of things but not in the AGRA way.
Excuse me for my bad english. I am from a french speaking country,the Dem. Rep. of the Congo.