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Posted in full at: http://ift.tt/2aaRFsp at July 27, 2016 at 10:09AM
First, some post-Green Revolution history.
The 1990s and early 2000s were not a good time to be involved in agriculture. The neoliberal bandwagon told poor country governments to leave agriculture to the private sector, so budgets for agricultural research and education were slashed, as were many subsidy programs (although not, let’s remember, subsidies in the US and EU). Then in 2007 the World Bank remembered that a) it’s supposed to care about reducing poverty and b) a hell of a lot of poor people are farmers, and focused its World Development Report on agriculture.
In 2008, the Rockefeller Foundation, major funders of the first Green Revolution, and the Gates Foundation, which had recently decided it wanted to get into agriculture, started the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Their vision for how to improve agricultural productivity and thus reduce poverty has been incredibly influential, and is based on three key axioms, which I will present here.
( this is basically an informal rough draft of part of an academic paper, so it may get a bit…dense. I’ll do my best. )
(Tumblr crosspost, for links that work go to tumblr because I am lazy)
First, some post-Green Revolution history.
The 1990s and early 2000s were not a good time to be involved in agriculture. The neoliberal bandwagon told poor country governments to leave agriculture to the private sector, so budgets for agricultural research and education were slashed, as were many subsidy programs (although not, let’s remember, subsidies in the US and EU). Then in 2007 the World Bank remembered that a) it’s supposed to care about reducing poverty and b) a hell of a lot of poor people are farmers, and focused its World Development Report on agriculture.
In 2008, the Rockefeller Foundation, major funders of the first Green Revolution, and the Gates Foundation, which had recently decided it wanted to get into agriculture, started the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Their vision for how to improve agricultural productivity and thus reduce poverty has been incredibly influential, and is based on three key axioms, which I will present here.
( this is basically an informal rough draft of part of an academic paper, so it may get a bit…dense. I’ll do my best. )(Tumblr crosspost, for links that work go to tumblr because I am lazy)
