Aaron Eddens (2024). Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa. University of California Press, Oakland, California.
by Mesay Berhanu Gemechu
In his 2024 book, Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens, a scholar in American Studies and Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, U.S.A., argues the need to maintain a broader perspective for a better understanding of the Green Revolution right from its historical roots. He questions the assumptions that frame Africa as a locus of “emergency”. He also itiques the longstanding racial logic which is bent on promoting the introduction of Western
technologies to smallholder farmers in Africa as a tendency that dehumanizes non-Western others as
“not yet” developed. Meanwhile, he highlights the possible danger of rewriting older scripts about
poverty, hunger and security in the contemporary discourses around food security and climate change.
The author views the future of the Green Revolution not so much different from its past as he underscores, “History is not just the past. It is the stories we tell about the past.” (p. 4). That is why it is
so important to look back to the earlier initiatives of the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Green
Revolution in Mexico starting in the 1940s and 1950s that was spearheaded by Norman Borlaug, and
how it is currently framed in the dominant narrative that upholds American scientific innovation
employed to overcome hunger and poverty in the Global South. Eddens highlights that this narrative
emphasizes the achievements of the Green Revolution in terms of increasing food supply while it glosses over the persistent hunger and poverty resulting from the widening economic inequalities in the same countries that supposedly benefited from the initiative. He also points out that the celebrated achievements of Borlaug’s Green Revolution ignore the impacts of the use of pesticide which poisoned indigenous communities and intensified the displacement of farmers from their land to urban slums.
Still, the author asserts that the book is not about the disputes around the propagation of biotech crops
and instead he presents it as an historical examination of the core ideas that underpinned the Green
Revolution from its earliest inception to the latest version of the Green Revolution projects in Africa. It is intended as a critique of the official narrative of the Green Revolution which focuses on the agency of
White Westerners coming to save the smallholder farmers in the global south through the transfer of
agricultural technologies. Accordingly, the dominant narrative overlooked the indigenous knowledge and agricultural practices which have been carried out by millions of smallholder farmers for over a span of thousands of years. According to the author, such narrative makes a clear distinction “between those deemed most vulnerable and those tasked with saving them” (p. 3). He also points out that the dominant narrative of the Green Revolution identifies the source of the problem in the Global South ignoring the relational dimension of the root causes of global inequalities.
Historically, Borlaug’s Green Revolution could not be viewed separately from the US foreign policy that
was broadly conceived as the battle between freedom and communism. Still, the book highlights that
the dominant narrative in the latest version of the Green Revolution maintains the US power that
remains central in defining the parameters of the Green Revolution in Africa while it obscures its ties to American empire. As a result, the author points out the connections across an American empire and its projection of “soft power” around the globe, emphasizing the entanglement of state and capital in such development initiatives.
The book shades light on how history has been used to drive contemporary agricultural development in
Africa without overemphasizing the role of the United State to avoid the risk of reproducing a kind of
imperial logic. The author also cautions the possible danger of reducing the Green Revolution in Africa to a singular story that fails to recognize the multidirectional forms of power across different locations and scales of the Green Revolution.
Gates’s “impatient optimism”
As a central figure in the latest version of the Green Revolution, Bill Gates’s “impatient optimism” (pp.
39) envisions a successful agricultural transformation in Africa in terms of large-scale interventions
introducing higher-yielding varieties of commercial crops like maize and rice. It is believed that this
requires shocking tradition-bound peasants with the power of high-yielding seeds. Aaron Eddens points
out that Gates’ view of poverty encourages an inability to see how geographical and historical relations
have produced global inequalities.
However, the author refrains from such criticisms of Gates that tend to depict him as a kind of evil
capitalist mastermind to make the rich richer at the expense of millions of poor farmers in the Global
South. He wants his arguments to be seen not necessarily as a critique of Gates himself but instead he
rather has chosen to present the philanthropist as a symptom of larger forces.
Bill Gates’s focus on smallholder farmers and what the farmers themselves might want in terms of
drought tolerant GM crops built on a tidy narrative about the introduction of improved seeds from the
West preventing impending famine in Asia. The author highlights such narrative is an oversimplification, ignoring geopolitical complexities and contradictory results of the Green Revolution.
The sense of urgency promoted in the Gates’s camp portrays farmers in Africa facing an emergency as
they are losing their maize crops to more frequent and increasingly severe droughts, while the varieties
they are using lack adaption to the changing conditions pushing millions of poor farmers to the brink of
starvation.
Gates argued, “poor farmers are not a problem to be solved – they are the solution, the best answer for
a world that is fighting hunger and trying to feed a growing population” (pp. 41).
The focus on the needs of small holder farmers is the central tenet of the development efforts of the
Green Revolution. However, farmers are still viewed as unable to provide the “solution” on their own
that calls for outside interventions to spur a radical shift in their approach to farming in terms of
purchasing seeds, using fertilizers, and selling their harvest.
“Market Failure”
In the Gates’s camp, poverty is conceived as “a market failure” while uneven distribution of the outcomes of economic growth is not necessarily considered inherent to capitalism per se.
Agribusinesses do not find it profitable to provide fertilizers to small-scale rural farmers, which calls for
an intervention by way of a philanthropic initiative to correct such market failure through the provision
of incentives to encourage increasing involvement of the private sector. Hence, the profit motive is still
used as the most effective tool in the philanthropic approaches informed by capitalist logic, succinctly
captured in the term “philantrocapitalism”. Hence, the Gates foundation’s collaboration with such
companies like DuPont Pioneer or Monsanto in the advancement of biotechnology projects has been
made on the premise of such shared underlying principles of capitalism.
Even though the author does not seek to present the Green Revolution in Africa as a singular and
uniform effort, he still points out two distinctive features of the initiative as particularly prominent. One
is the recognition that farmers in Africa are lagging behind from their peers in other parts of the world,
and the second is the need for the presence of more seed companies in Africa.
The consensus in the Gates camp which highlights that Africa needs more seed companies paves the
way for an increasing role of the U.S. seed industry in Africa. Hence, the Gates foundation focuses on the promotion of a greater number of seed companies in Africa. This includes the provision of training to farmers about the power of seed, and the improvement of the regulatory environment for increasing
private sector involvement. With the goal intending to triple the amount of seed being sold in sub-
Saharan Africa, the Gates Foundation’s agriculture program provided a total grant of USD 2 billion in
2011. The “power of seed” has notably been demonstrated in the hybrid maize (corn) variety used in the
1930s that resulted in a dramatic increase in yield in the U.S. However, the author points out that such
an increment in yield was only achieved for one generation that necessitates farmers to purchase new
varieties each growing season.
“Yield Gaps”
The “yield gap” as an analytical tool is employed in the Green Revolution initiatives to show that there is
a huge gap in production of higher-yielding varieties of staple crops such as wheat, rice and maize (or
corn). Farmers in the U.S., for instance, produce five times more corn per acre in comparison to their
counterparts in Africa. However, Eddens indicates that such “yield gap” analysis is criticized for its
limitation that fails to account for other not less desirable traits farmers may choose to prioritize over
mere increase in yields, which again may not still be directly associated with poverty alleviation as
generally assumed. According to the author, “Yield Gaps” which prioritizes the volume of yield produced over other traits that may be considered not less important among the local farmers also assumes a linear association between yield maximization and poverty alleviation.
AGRA
In the latest approach of the Green Revolution, farming is viewed as a business. The Gates’s foundation’s flagship program that is based in Nairobi, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), has viewed smallholders as an engine of economic growth across the continent. With Africa’s
agricultural markets valued at USD 1 trillion by 2030 according to the World Bank’s estimate, Africa’s
smallholders are viewed as reliable consumers for agribusinesses that seek expanding markets for
commercial seeds, fertilizers, agri-chemicals, and credits.
However, Eddens questions the foundation’s formula that frames farmers as both successful small-
scale “agropreneurs” and a customer base for corporations. The assumption that what is good for
smallholder farmers is also good for the private sector still remains unproven, according to the author. He argues, “Nowhere has a large-scale agricultural transformation benefited both millions of
subsistence farmers and agribusinesses” (pp. 43).
AGRA which was established in 2007 has launched the Program for Africa’s Seed System (PASS) designed to promote the use of costly hybrid varieties each year over the open-pollinated maize varieties the local farmers routinely used. At the time, the structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on the developing countries to privatize and deregulate their economies also presented an opportunity for the development of private seed companies that eventually benefited transnational seed companies. Having incubated 114 small and medium-sized African seed companies by 2017, AGRA provided startup funds and business consultations by seed experts formerly employed at such multinational corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, and Syngenta.
Developing varieties of hybrid and genetically modified seeds with greater drought tolerance and pest
resistance has been used as a selling point to convince the farmers to buy the input supplies. However,
less than 3 percent of the farmers bought seeds from global companies around 2015, though AGRA
reported that 41 percent of increase in production was achieved as a result of the use of the hybrid
maize varieties.
“Rediscovering Africa”
Under the banner “rediscovered Africa”, aggressive moves by Monsanto and DuPont as well as Pioneer’s acquisition of the South Africa-based Pannar in 2013 which has doubled its market size overnight led to high profile mergers and acquisitions between 2015 and 2017. Consequently, the “big six” global agri-seed-chemical companies have become the “the big four”. The author noted that such mergers and acquisitions foster increasing dependence of poor farmers on the whims of global markets resulting less control on the part of the farmers on their farms.
For Gates foundation, having more capital and the resulting expansion should be considered a healthy
approach that has been a natural consequence of the process to reach more farmers across the
continent. The ethical standard the author raises about the foundation’s role in doing the bidding on the
part of the “greed agribusinesses” has been considered irrelevant. Hence, asking such ethical questions
about what is right and wrong is not relevant to the foundation’s function of expanding social relations
through the logic of capital to realize social change. Hence, the author points out that for Gates Foundation, presenting smallholder farmers as mere consumers of seeds and agricultural inputs to
generate revenue for multinationals is not at all an aberration.
Seeding Empire by Aaron Eddens – Paper – University of California Press (ucpress.edu)
About the Author:
Mesay Berhanu Gemechu is a graduate of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), Seoul, South Korea in the area of international development studies focusing on Africa. He served as deputy editor-in-chief of Addis Fortune, the largest English weekly in Ethiopia, and he was also the 2023 African Correspondent for Korea-Africa Foundation representing his home country. Mesay currently lives in Seoul, South Korea. The writer can be reached at: gmesayb24@gmail.com. Mesay Berhanu Gemechu (Image by Bereket Alemayehu / Pressenza)
