The Globalist’s Green Revolution Scam
The Alliance for a Green Revolution, an NGO started by Bill Gates in 2006 and funded by both his foundation and the Rockefeller foundation since then, spent $524 million in agricultural subsidies in 13 African countries between 2006 and 2020 with dismal results. AGRA met none of the goals they promised to achieve by 2020 which included doubling productivity in crop yield and farmer incomes for 30 million smallholder farmers. The NGO promised this doubling of productivity and income would be obtained by 9 million smallholders directly and 21 million indirectly through their integrated soil fertility management programs which in theory included poly-culture and rotating fields and land conservation but in practice was just a means for agro-chemical conglomerates from the global north to gain a captive market in Sub Saharan Africa to hawk hybrid and GM seeds, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides because inter-cropping is not possible with the hybrid and GM seeds they subsidize and Sub Saharan smallholder farmers do not have enough land or money to stop growing commodity crops mainly maize. AGRA spent sparsely on helping Small hold farmers develop better irrigation for their fields such as tube wells and failed to reduce undernourishment in program countries.
In 2020 AGRA reported that 1.86 million farmers across their 11 remaining program countries were using their integrated soil fertility management, well short of their goal of reaching 9 million farmers. An assessment of national level data for AGRA program countries reveals that they didn’t come close to any of their goals by 2020. Instead of doubling productivity as promised with higher yielding crops, AGRA has mainly increased agricultural productivity by subsidizing the appropriation of additional land for growing a narrow set of commodity crops for the global market. Although AGRA promised their programs would double cereal yields by 2020, by 2018 crop yields had only increased 27% and their grants only benefited farmers with large land holdings who are already connected to commercial networks. The commodity crop AGRA subsidized the most, maize, only grew 29% in yield over 12 years, well short of doubling production and this increase was not achieved in all program countries; maize production by yield actually declined 4% in Kenya, stagnated in Burkina Faso and only grew 7% over the same 12 years in Nigeria, the largest maize producer in the AGRA programs. Among the top 6 maize producing countries within AGRA's programs only Mali and Ethiopia experienced yield growth rates for maize greater than those they had before AGRA. For overall staple crop productivity only Ethiopia and Malawi increased yields by 50% or more while staple crop productivity declined in Nigeria, Kenya, and Burkina Faso and stagnated in Uganda. These modest gains in staple crop yields for the global market came at the expense of declines in productivity for cereals that are traditionally grown such as millet, which decreased 24% and Sorghum production which stagnated 3% in yield during the first 12 years of AGRA's existence. AGRA's programs also diminished the production of more nutrient dense tubers such as sweet potatoes, which declined 7%, cassava which decreased 6% and groundnuts which declined 23% in yield over the same 12 year period.
They didn’t reduce hunger either. The absolute number of Africans suffering severe undernourishment in countries where AGRA set up increased by 31 million between 2006 and 2018. The absolute number of people suffering undernourishment in sub Saharan Africa increased by 50 million while the proportion of the population suffering undernourishment slightly declined by 2%. However, in four AGRA countries the proportion and absolute number of undernourished increased. This includes Kenya, Niger, Nigeria and Uganda.
AGRA is not the only globalist organization promoting high input cost industrialized farming practices in Sub Saharan Africa and is in fact dwarfed by efforts undertaken by the World bank who has made $12 billion in loans through the same region. Just four agro-chemical conglomerates control 60% of global agro-chemical sales and 50% of the global commercial seed market: Corteva, BASF, Syngenta, and Bayer Science. These four agro-chemical conglomerates are the main beneficiaries of World bank loan conditions that create captive markets for them by subsidizing the purchase of their patented hybrid and GM seeds, fertilizers and pesticides and encouraging African governments to enact seed certification laws that make it illegal to sell indigenous seeds. These impose higher overhead costs on farmers because Certified seeds are 1.5x to 2x more expensive than indigenous seeds. Farmers that purchase patented hybrid and GM seeds from these conglomerates are stuck buying the entire package as the GM seeds are engineered to be resistant to pesticides made by the same conglomerate. Patenting seeds drastically increases the price of seeds so while farmers might temporarily experience higher yields they’ll also be burdened with higher input costs. The introduction of GM soybean seeds increased the price of soybean seeds 300% in just 16 years. Seed certification laws that restrict the exchange of indigenous seeds are an existential problem for African farmers who still get 80% of their seeds through informal exchanges and develop their own varieties of seeds. To make matters worse, the agro-chemical conglomerates develop seeds for crops with large global markets i.e. commodity crops. Since they have no incentive to develop indigenous seeds of each region the adoption of their products leads to less diversity in the food supply that is more vulnerable to external price shocks.
Sowing the Seeds of Poverty: How the World Bank harms poor farmers
The Worldbank is not the only bankster institution creating a captive market for agribusiness conglomerates. During the pandemic, the IMF encouraged 33 African countries to pursue austerity, the opposite of what they told European countries, including cuts to agricultural spending. 13 of the 15 loan programs they negotiated during the second year of the pandemic required new austerity measures (i.e. spending cuts). 14 of 16 West African countries were pressured to cut their budgets by a combined $70 billion, the largest of which was Nigeria by $30 billion, and 9 countries were pressured to levy VATs on essential items like food and hygiene products. Oxfam further relates that the deepest cuts have been made not only to fuel subsidies and social welfare payments but agriculture expenditures as well. Three-quarters of African Union governments cut agriculture spending to 3.8% of their budget on agriculture while spending 6.4% on weapons pushing. This had the effect of pushing 20 million more Africans into food instability and malnutrition. It also gives multinational conglomerates like Bayer an opportunity to offer their GM seed-Glyphosate Herbicide combo as a panacea to world hunger and global population growth.
The Worldbank doesn’t limit the use of its financial leverage over the global south to giving agro-chemical conglomerates control over the food supply. They also finance the land theft business for foreign investors in mining and export oriented agriculture. Because 90% of Agricultural land in Africa is untitled it is easy for national governments, heavily indebted to the world bank or IMF, to reclassify the untitled land as vacant or idle, seize it, evict the original inhabitants and then grant concessions, either through leasing or sale, to foreign agribusiness and mining companies. As I mentioned in How WEF and World Bank Facilitate Land Theft for Factory Farms and Green Energy Tech, they indirectly financed the seizure of untitled agricultural land from the same smallholder farmers they claim to help through IFC backed commercial lenders and private equity for cash crops and mining concessions. Many of these land grabs, done with state security forces, have amounted to ethnic cleansing. For instance, a little over a decade ago Ethiopia began evicting 1.5 million people right before they were preparing to harvest their maize crops, so they could lease the land to foreign investors for export oriented sugarcane, corn and palm oil plantations. At least one of those investors, Karuturi Global, which acquired a lease for 100,000 hectares of the seized land was financed by an IFC intermediary. In 2015, a thousand residents of a village in Northern Guinea were forced to sign away their land at gunpoint and evicted to make way for a mining concession for a South African company whose operations were financed by an IFC intermediary bank. 150,000 people still live in its mining concession area and could face future evictions. As I mentioned 7 years ago Conservation is a Pretext For Genocide (part 3), a group of traditional societies known as Bushmen were ethnically cleansed from Central Kalahari Park in Botswana, by the national government, to make way for Kalahari Park diamonds, a diamond mining concession leased to foreign mining companies who received loans for exploration in the area from the Worldbank.
Like it or not, if you are a U.S. taxpayer you are a participant in Bill Gate’s and the Worldbank’s agenda here. USAID has had an active partnership with Gate’s AGRA since 2011 and has provided them with over $116 million in grants since that year with over 95% of that money going to their program in Kenya where staple crop productivity has declined since AGRA arrived and the proportion and absolute number of undernourished people has increased. The U.S. is also the largest shareholder in the Worldbank (17%) and the treasury secretary sits on their board of governors.