AFRICA’S GROWTH INDUSTRY

A New Green Revolution for African Farmers and Their Families

One in three Africans suffers from hunger. And the problem is getting worse, not better. There are many reasons for this crisis. The soil is becoming less fertile as Africans have to farm it more intensively to keep up with population pressure. Meanwhile, African farmers don’t have access to four things essential to successful agriculture: improved, high-quality seeds that are well-suited to local conditions; farming inputs like organic and mineral fertilizers and irrigation; opportunities to learn and test new farming techniques; and commercial markets where they can sell crops.

To help African farmers and their families, we teamed up with the Rockefeller Foundation, which has decades of experience working on agriculture issues in Africa and has earned the trust of agricultural leaders in many African countries, to launch the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA). We want to support African farmers, who produce food under the most difficult conditions, by improving the agricultural sector from seed to market. Our goal is to help 30 million Africans, who now live in hunger and extreme poverty, live better lives.

The original Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, which fed hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Latin America who wouldn’t have had enough to eat, barely reached Africa.

In some places, the original Green Revolution contributed to inequity and environmental degradation. This new Green Revolution will heed the lessons of the past; it will increase productivity while also focusing on small farmers, protecting the environment, and reducing inequity.

AGRA’s first initiative, the Program for Africa's Seed Systems (PASS), exemplifies the results we hope to achieve. PASS is focused on reducing hunger and growing the economy in rural areas by increasing the production of nutritious crops, including African staples (such as cowpea, millet, and sorghum) and species widely adopted by African farmers (such as maize, cassava, and beans).

PASS is investing $150 million to develop and distribute new crop varieties in 16 countries.

Currently, 75 percent of African farmers don’t use any form of improved crops. But we hope that in the next five years the program will introduce 100 well-adapted crop varieties and distribute these improved seeds, train hundreds of Africans in agricultural science, build community seed systems, and help set up 10,000 small agro-dealers who can work with small farmers to improve their equipment and practices.

In the near future, AGRA will add more partners and launch additional initiatives aimed at issues such as improving the health of soils and expanding farmers’ access to markets.