By: Joyce Gyekye
As AGRA gears up for the 2024 Africa Food Systems summit in Kigali, Rwanda, from September 2- September 6, representatives of smallholder farmers are up in arms over what they term as the destructive policies of the Gates-funded organization.
In 2017, the government of Ghana launched the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) initiative, which at its core is a seed and fertilizer subsidy program, with ambitions of boosting smallholder agricultural production and creating jobs along agricultural value chains through other complementary interventions.
Billed Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ): A panacea for productivity and welfare of rice farmers in Northern Ghana, the AGRA-supported programme had five implementation elements, with the first (Crops) aims to support food security, the immediate marketability of chosen food crops, and the creation of jobs.
The original implementation plan (MOFA 2017) projected a total budget of 3.3 billion Cedis over the four-year implementation, starting at 190 million cedis in 2017 but increasing exponentially to 1.6 billion cedis by 2020.
Yet despite these interventions, the World Bank reported that extreme poverty (living on less than 2 Dollars a day, or 24 Cedis) has increased from 2.2 percent to more than 27 percent the last two years with the worst affected being people living in rural communities, particularly small-scale farmers.
This is happening even when proponents of Green Revolution in Ghana have had over a decade in their efforts to claim better farming for smallholder farmers with little to no success.
Hence, the BIG question is: Will African governments and the farmers continue trying to replicate industrial farming models promoted by developed countries? Or will they move boldly into the uncertain future, embracing ecological agriculture? Is Green Revolution agenda in Ghana still viable? These are the questions on the minds and lips of many farmers and agroecology proponents in Ghana.
They say AGRA (until recently the Alliance for A Green Revolution in Africa) with its heavily funded promotion of commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizers has failed to bring progress for Africa’s farmers. Productivity has improved marginally, and only for a few chosen crops such as maize. Others have withered in a dry spell or drought due to climate change and neglect from governments to increase irrigation projects. Small-scale farm households, the intended beneficiaries of Green Revolution programs, seem scarcely better off.
Green Revolution proponents have had over 15 years to demonstrate they can lead Africa into a food-secure future, Ghana included to no visible success.
The PFJ1 encouraged the use of imported seeds, so there was an abundance of that. “The problem is accessibility. For instance, when the farmer lives in Golu in Northern Ghana but the seeds are in some warehouse in Accra, how will farmers know where the seeds are in Accra and how they can be delivered in a timely manner and in good shape for the famer to get value for money?” posed President of National Seed Trade Association of Ghana (NASTAG) Dr. Amos Rutherford Azinu.
Green Revolution proponents who have been advocating for use of “particular” types of seeds that only benefited multinational seed dealers at the detriment of the local seed developers. Many seed importers have made money, as a huge amount of money went to subsidize imported seeds for farmers. Some of the seeds were hybrid maize seeds, vegetable seeds like cabbage, and lettuce. A seed developer, Dr. Amos Azinu, criticized seed subsidies as it disadvantaged the local seed industry. He opined that the importation of seeds promotes corruption and suggested “land, irrigation, and machinery for seed processing as some of the things needed to enhance local seeds production.”
Under PFJ 2, which was launched in August last year, a credit system has been introduced where an aggregator works with a group of farmers and purchases fertilizers on their behalf and pays the input dealer after the harvest. “These hurts input dealers due to high interest rates by banks, particularly in the event of crop failure. They’ve changed the vehicle, but the content is the same,” said Dr Azinu.
While Green revolution proponents champion large use of synthetic fertilizers and “specific” types of seeds in Ghana, a former Executive Director of the Peasant Farmer Association of Ghana, Dr. Charles Nyaaba said small scale farmers constitute about 80 percent of the farmer population and supply more than 80 percent of the total food consumed in the country and for industries. “For smallholder farmers, agriculture is their livelihoods, that is their employment, that is what they depend on for everything and no matter the constraints that the sector faces, they will continue to farm,” said Dr. Nyaaba.
Dr. Nyaaba said local seed production should be enhanced as seed importation is mainly by medium and large-scale farmers who contribute only 20 percent to the food basket of the country. He said from his experience “the farmers know better than some of the seed breeders and the kind of selections they do is also seed breeding. They have been maintaining these seeds over the years and we condemn their way of breeding seeds.”
Food Sovereignty Ghana’s Edwin Baafour, said with the huge contribution of small-scale farmers in addressing the food needs of Ghanaians, it is undeniable that Ghana can be food secure by practicing agro-ecological farming. “Humans have destroyed the environment through overuse of synthetic chemicals backed by the developed countries to promote their own interest. This has created a planetary crisis which the world is trying to reverse by establishing the Sustainable Development Goals and all the climate conferences,” said Mr. Bafour.
The Green Revolution proponents in Ghana have been pushing for more yields through the promotion of chemical inputs and seed importation that small holder farmers are not able to afford. Bafour said the so-called ‘improved seeds’ that are pushed on Ghanaian farmers by these entities only produce good yields mostly in the first two seasons and after a few seasons they have diminishing returns. On the other hand, the pests that the chemicals pushed through excessive use of inorganic farm inputs are meant to destroy with time become resistant to the chemicals. Further, there is massive destruction of microbes using agro chemicals that have caused soil degradation and ecosystem imbalance leading to invasive weeds and insects.
“Research has shown that the poverty of highly impoverished people has risen by 31 percent in the 13 AGRA countries. This is AGRA’s legacy and so AGRA has been a complete failure in the poverty level of farmers but only to link them to the value chain of their own companies,” remarked Baafour.
The Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Organizational Development, CIKOD that is spearheading the promotion of agroecology in Ghana believes that agrochemicals have not been successful in promoting food security in Ghana because they are harmful to the environment and health of consumers. CIKOD’s Deputy Executive Director, Wilberforce Lartey, said the government was intentional with chemical fertilizer trials from 1986 to 1992 to promote agriculture and should approach agroecology the same way with state funds.
He cited the ban of Ghanaian vegetables to the EU market in 2014 following the detection of pests and chemical residues on aubergine, chili pepper, and other vegetables, which cost Ghana about 30 billion dollars and referred to a program by the European Union Good Agricultural Practices, EU-GAP that was introduced in Ghana more than a decade ago to address the misuse of in-organic chemicals, as some of the products were sent to the EU market.
Lartey says indigenous farming practices which are agroecological, can feed Ghana, and appealed to the government to support research into organic pesticides as donor funded research serves international interests. “Organic fertilizers produce the best soil fertility, water retention capacity, add micro-organisms to the soil and these are all dimensions that modern science is not trying to pay attention to as far as the importance of natural interactions are concerned. Further, the myth being peddled by Green Revolution proponents that the solution lies in ‘improved seeds’ is non-sustainable,” says Lartey.
He said with the “epic failure of the Green Revolution Agenda and the disruptive climate change impacts, Ghana needs to take a different path, one that focuses on ecological farm management using low-cost, low-input methods that rely on a diversity of crops to improve soils and diets.
The debate rages on, but for now evidence shows that agroecology – a practice that promotes crop diversity, keeping of crop cover, and the use of organic manures by animals as some of the measures to promote soil health and ultimately food security – remains the most viable solution to food security in Ghana. Even the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) when amid the Russia and Ukraine war, encouraged farmers to use organic fertilizers. This points towards the unreliability of imported synthetic fertilizers and seeds for smallholder farmers in Ghana.
The evidence is now convincing that the Green Revolution for Africa, with its heavily funded promotion of commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizers, has failed to bring progress for Africa’s farmers. Good yields are as a result of good soil and not artificially improved ones.
