[A] new vision is emerging in the global dialogue on African agriculture… . The new vision reflects a changing narrative for the African agriculture sector. The vision centers on a new face for agriculture in Africa. It is the face of a woman farming. She has a mobile phone in her hand, connecting her with markets and providing access to real-time weather information and financial services. Her work is increasingly mechanized with access to processing facilities thanks to a growing network of roads and power. The new narrative focuses on agriculture as a business opportunity rather than a subsistence lifestyle, a charity or development program. It features agriculture as an economic engine for rural economies and a stabilizing force for social systems. The narrative includes governments as “innovators,” developing institutions and policies that will incentivize opportunities for market-based solutions. This vision reflects the private sector’s sharply increasing investment in agriculture and services along the entire value chain. It is a uniquely African form of agriculture and an African model of economic and social stability that may look different than its western counterparts.
—Kofi Annan Foundation, 2014Introduction
In 2014, a decade after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan put out a clarion call for a “uniquely African green revolution” to tackle the scourge of chronic hunger and lift the continent out of poverty, his Foundation released the above snapshot of African agricultural transformation (KAF & Meridian 2014:11). The quotation is long, but it rewards close reading, for it captures a promethean vision of African agricultural transformation that has become widely promulgated in the international development community over the past fifteen years. In this vision, agricultural production is not only a vehicle for alleviating poverty and food insecurity but also the motor of economic growth and transformation. Smallholder farmers, who provide the backbone of African agriculture, are its principal propellants. This is a positive, but also quite recent, vision.
At the time that Kofi Annan called for an African green revolution, the global dialogue on African agriculture among development agencies, donor organizations, and African governments was decidedly gloomy. In addition to poor soils and seed supplies, long histories of import substitution industrialization, urban bias, declining terms of agricultural trade, and low agricultural commodity prices had led to low levels of agricultural productivity among African farmers. Moreover, donor-mandated structural adjustment strategies generated deep reductions in public spending on agricultural research, extension, and education (World Bank 2000). While donors maintained their commitment to such strategies, many politicians and policymakers saw investment in agriculture as a losing proposition. By the early 1990s, agriculture had fallen out of favor with both donors and African governments as a target of development investment, precipitating a long and devastating decline in public investment in agriculture (Paarlberg Reference Paarlberg2008; USAID 2013). Against this background, the emergence of the “new vision” for African agriculture trumpeted by the Kofi Annan Foundation raises two important questions. First, how did interest in agriculture rebound? Second, how did this specific vision emerge, and who advanced it? In this article, we argue that the new vision emerged from several distinct initiatives to tackle food insecurity and poverty, launched in different locations by different actors. It was consolidated through a process of conversation, negotiation, and network-formation by actors based in the public and private sectors, transnational organizations, global philanthropies, academia, and non-profit organizations. Over time, the institutional, professional, and personal connections created through these interactions served to support the formation of an ideational and institutional architecture that informs the new narrative of African agriculture invoked in our opening quotation.
This architecture was not developed out of whole cloth. Rather, it was built in a piecemeal fashion by idea-mongers and policy entrepreneurs operating in increasingly overlapping research, policy, and development networks. Disparate and rudimentary at the turn of the millennium, these networks increasingly converged around a set of precepts, strategies, and institutional arrangements for placing Africa’s agricultural transformation at the heart of continental economic growth and resolving food insecurity. These arrangements represent an emerging mode of African agricultural governance incorporating new agenda-setting agents who possess strategic resources (money, information, knowledge, authority) and significant political power. Working beyond the national state and the public interest sector, these agents embrace a model of agriculture that assumes that capitalist market development leads to rural poverty alleviation, which leads to rural food security, and that agricultural development is best done by the private sector. This model has profound consequences for the policies that get adopted, for how money gets spent, and for the way rural social structures (and economic inequality) will evolve in the coming years. Although it is contested by a number of social movements, critically minded academics, and development practitioners who question the veracity of its assumptions and doubt that the model will achieve the goal of improving food security for many, it has attained dominance at the policy level.
This leads us to our effort to analyze both the processes of network formation that have given rise to the new architecture of African agricultural transformation and the ways in which governance has morphed as new actors have been enrolled in these networks. Our analysis highlights the roles played by key individuals as well as by organizations, because input from both kinds of actor is crucial to the construction of this new architecture and governance structure. Governance networks do not emerge organically. They require the development of specific ideational regimes that provide the causal frameworks in which policy solutions are conceived and articulated. Such regimes are constructed through the ongoing “communicative labor” of network entrepreneurs who bring distinct resources and interests to the task (Canfield Reference Canfield2018). These processes are inevitably power-laden, and they (re)configure power in the governance system. To understand the formation of new governance networks, therefore, it is important to know who does this work, for what purposes, and with what resources. As our analysis reveals, individual actors’ personal and professional biographies, their experiences, their perceived opportunities, and their social and professional networks influence the production of causal consensus and new policy landscapes. In this sense, our analysis goes beyond the political science literature that focuses almost exclusively on the organizational level.
Our narrative focuses on specific initiatives that have been important at different moments in the construction of this new vision. Its ideational and institutional architecture was established in three broad phases, though it is important to recognize the non-linearity of the process and the fact that the relationships between organizations and actors are complex; they are characterized by continuities and disjunctures, and they reflect shifting patterns of influence. The first phase, from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, involved an effort by policy entrepreneurs in the global North and within Africa to restore donor interest in agriculture. This phase principally involved large public agencies, national and multilateral, and was marked by debates over who should invest in African agriculture, how it should be done, and how such investment related to broader development issues. The second phase, incipient in the late 1990s yet gaining momentum in 2005, brought in a critical pair of private philanthropies, namely, the Rockefeller and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, which took a science-and-technology approach to transforming African agriculture and focused on promoting productivity-enhancing technologies for smallholders. The third phase began around 2009 in the wake of the global food crisis. It involved more actors, a broader focus including agribusiness, and a concerted effort to recognize agriculture as a business and to entice private capital into the sector. Table 1 (see Supplementary Materials) provides an overview of these three phases, including a partial list of the key moments and actors driving each.
We derive our data from three main sources. First, we read and triangulated dozens of discussion papers, reports, articles, and other documents produced by governments, national and international organizations, the agrifood industry, foundations, academics, and consultants. Some of these documents are published and have been circulated widely, while others represent unpublished “grey literature” available on the internet. Second, we conducted some ninety in-depth interviews with aid officials, foundation officials, staff at international organizations, academics, and industry actors over the ten years we have been studying these efforts to transform African agriculture. While we only draw upon a fraction of these interviews for this article, all of them have informed our understanding of the processes detailed here. Finally, we attended over a dozen international conferences and meetings, where we observed and documented interactions among the actors involved in building these networks as well as the ideas they espoused. One example of these is the annual World Food Prize meetings held in Des Moines, Iowa, a three-day international agriculture extravaganza that attracts thousands of attendees from around the world. These meetings, both official and non-official, are hotbeds of international networking. Before turning to our empirical analysis, we lay out our theoretical perspective and some key concepts.
Theorizing Transnational Policy Networks
There is a wide-ranging literature that theorizes transnational policy networks as a new form of governance. Much of this literature suggests that networks form to tackle complex policy problems that state agencies lack the technical resources or the flexibility to address effectively. Accordingly, the emergence of these networks has involved the development of complicated, and sometimes fragmented, hybrid regimes of governance that incorporate multiple non-state actors from think tanks, advocacy organizations, corporations, philanthropic organizations, and multilateral institutions in areas of policymaking that were previously dominated by state actors (Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson Reference Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson2006; Büthe & Mattli Reference Büthe and Mattli2011). These networks contribute to the design of public policy by helping to define the goals of policy as well as the terms in which policy successes and failures are determined and measured. They also help to set the norms and standards for the provision of public goods, and sometimes participate in policy implementation. As such, they exercise a kind of public authority. In all cases, however, the shifts in modalities and scales of governance they involve strengthen the public role of private and non-state actors.
Governance networks contribute to the process of policy production—the process of assembling the components of policies—which starts well before the drafting of policy occurs. This happens when research is conducted and data collected; information is shared and evaluated at conferences, workshops, and business meetings; policy reports are drafted; legal regimes are evaluated; “best practices” are identified; and priorities and strategies are hashed out collectively in power-wielding institutions. This part of the policy-formation process is important because it is from these disparate activities and actors that the organizing principles of a policy framework (as well as its key concepts and terms) emerge. The patterns of interaction between the actors engaged in these components of policy production work to develop the intersubjective knowledge—common understandings and causal frameworks, authoritative discourses, shared identities, and “communication codes,” for example—that help to constitute the policy challenge to be addressed. It is also in these interactions that putative solutions to a public policy problem get defined.
The patterns of participation and interaction through which networks operate vary according to the particular policy domain, the distribution of resources among network actors, and the institutional structures that channel their activities. Because different actors bring different power resources and sources of authority to the table, networks tend to be relatively flexible, fragmented, and “heterarchical” (Ball Reference Ball2012). They rest on relationships of interdependence, resource exchange, and agreement among actors pursuing their own interests. As such, the effective consolidation and sustainability of a network requires the construction of common goals, as well as a working consensus on ideas and strategies that are larger than the purposes and perspectives of the individual members. In effect, a relatively coherent authority to steer the behavior of actors must be crafted by ongoing ideational and political work. Network formation is thus an intensely political and power-laden process.
Different actors play different roles in this process of network formation. One key role is what Wendy Larner and Nina Laurie (Reference Larner and Laurie2010) call “travelling technocrats,” that is, individuals who move from one location or institution to another as part of their career trajectories and carry with them unique ideas, ways of doing things, and experiences of what works and what doesn’t. Thus, these travelling technocrats literally embody particular knowledges and ideational frameworks and move them from place to place as they travel between organizations. They draw their authority from various types of expertise—whether it be scientific, planning, engineering, or something else—and their influence from a variety of institutional homes—government agencies, research institutions, think tanks, and consultant organizations.
Some travelling technocrats are “international policy players,” who help to move ideas, norms, and discourses across international organizations. International policy players frequently have the ear of state officials, policymakers, and other influential actors in a variety of countries (including their own) and are closely connected to powerful actors and prominent offices in international agencies. Their influence thus often derives from their ability to “de-nationalize” policy challenges and to recast them as global public goods. Others, however, play the opposite role, exercising influence through their ability to localize policy discourses and solutions conceived elsewhere. We label these actors “domestic cosmopolitans,” who convey ideas, cultural norms, and discourses from one place to another, through their connections to decision-making elites in their own countries and in prominent external organizations. Domestic cosmopolitans often draw cachet from the fact that they have been trained outside their home countries and live a highly cosmopolitan, even jet-setting life.
Another role is represented by what we term “authoritative advocates.” These individuals command respect as a result of their expert reputations, experience, or credentials. Because of their authority, they are able to argue persuasively for particular ideas and actions. They are also able to move (authoritative) knowledge claims, causal schemas, and cognitive frames between different policy realms or sub-networks and introduce them into governmental circles. Because their voices are listened to, they offer legitimacy to certain discourses and also form and solidify connections between insider and outsider communities, which helps to spread favored ideas.
Perhaps the most crucial conduit role is played by “policy entrepreneurs,” who “assemble and coordinate networks of individuals and organizations with the talents and resources needed to achieve change” (Ball Reference Ball2012:14). As Michael Mintrom and Sandra Vergari argue, policy entrepreneurs possess a combination of “intellectual ability, knowledge of policy matters, leadership and team-building skills, reputation and contacts, strategic ability, and tenacity” (quoted in Ball Reference Ball2012:14). They are rich in social and cultural capital and skilled at bringing people together (and knowing whom to bring together) to make things happen. They may also open up policy windows by constructing policy problems discursively. In short, they do not simply identify policy challenges, they actively constitute them as particular types of challenges (Ball Reference Ball2012:14).
In what follows, we trace the ways specific actors, playing these network-building roles in particular institutional and political settings, have helped to construct the institutional and ideational architecture for transforming Africa’s agriculture.
Phase One: Generating Ideas and Momentum
At the turn of the millennium, the international development assistance community was confronting a crisis. On the one hand, not only had global poverty proved to be an intractable challenge, but it was actually deepening, especially in much of Africa. The nexus between poverty, hunger, and agriculture demanded urgent attention. On the other hand, the apparent ineffectiveness of international aid had created a crisis of confidence within the aid enterprise and a sense of donor fatigue. Both the World Bank, the world’s largest multilateral donor, and the United States, the world’s largest bilateral donor, were ensnared in internal wrangles that sapped their leadership and lending activities. Many African governments, mired in crushing debt and lacking managerial capacity, were focused on negotiating debt relief with the international financial institutions. The aid community was floundering in search of new models. These political conditions, defined by both urgency and retreat, created a “network opportunity structure,” in which new ideas and policy actors could emerge and gain traction. In the late 1990s, the case for “bringing agriculture back” and for focusing on smallholders began to be made in a variety of disparate locations, establishing ideational and institutional resources that would become fundamental to the architecture of the African agricultural transformation project. Recognizing that these were not the only activities taking place, we focus on two important initiatives, one in the United States and one in Africa.
Structural Transformation and the PCHPA
The first proto-network comprised a loose collection of agricultural development researchers situated in the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Michigan State University (MSU), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Since the early 1980s, MSU had been engaged in an Africa-based project on food security research funded by USAID. This research generated vast amounts of data and in-depth knowledge of local agrarian dynamics, as well as strong working relationships between U.S. and African researchers, USAID field officers, and Africans in the policy-making establishment. In 1994, IFPRI launched its 2020 Vision for Food, Agriculture and Environment initiative, which focused empirical research on food security and poverty alleviation. Sharing expertise and knowledge through professional networks, as well as the movement of professional staff between institutions, these researchers built a theoretical argument for re-focusing development assistance on smallholder agriculture.
They constructed their case on the basis of three tenets. First, they exhumed the argument, sidelined since the 1970s, that agricultural investment can provide the basis for the broad-based economic growth that is necessary to overcome poverty. They also drew on World Bank research showing that the multiplier effects of investment in agriculture are two to three times higher than investment in any other sector (Mellor Reference Mellor1999). Moreover, they argued that the benefits of agricultural growth would spin off socially by boosting rural incomes and creating off-farm employment (Badiane Reference Badiane1999). Taken together, these researchers provided empirical and theoretical backing for the argument that rural poverty in Africa could be alleviated by investing in the farming sector and “jumpstarting the production of agricultural tradables,” an argument for which there was little appetite in the development world at the time (Delgado et al. Reference Delgado, Hopkins, Kelly, Hazell, McKenna, Gruhn, Hojjati, Sil and Courbois1998).
But ideas do not automatically gain traction in policy circles; they require advocates. In the United States, the loose coalition of researchers from MSU, USAID, and IFPRI built a “knowledge bridge” to the policy realm by constructing relationships with people in key institutional locations. One vector for this process was the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa (PCHPA), a Washington-based organization established between 2000 and 2002 to press the case for putting agriculture back on the development agenda (PCHPA 2002). The architects of the Partnership conceived it deliberately as a lobbying and networking vehicle to garner resources and build consensus on policy frameworks and strategies intended to advance agriculture-based economic development in Africa. Indeed, one early report described the organization as “a networker, an information broker, an educational resource, a convener, and … a ‘project idea incubator’ for concepts that are spun off to implementing organizations …” (PCHPA 2003:6). In short, the impetus behind the Partnership was to move ideas out of the epistemic community of applied agricultural research into the transnational policy realm.Footnote 1
The Partnership operated by fostering the efforts of “authoritative advocates” and “traveling technocrats.” It was co-chaired by Peter McPherson, President of Michigan State University; Oumar Konare, President of Mali; Robert Dole, former U.S. Senator; and Lee Hamilton, Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center. McPherson, the driving force behind the network, had extensive political connections going back to his early career in the Ford administration and his subsequent post as USAID administrator under President Reagan. A consummate Washington insider, McPherson was a seasoned networker, problem-solver, and institution-builder. Under his leadership, the PCHPA became one of the earliest network brokers for a Green Revolution in Africa, exercising a mode of strategic network formation which, as we detail below, has become a prevalent feature of the African agricultural transformation project. The Partnership’s Technical Committee was composed mainly of MSU researchers, USAID officials, and one African, Akinwumi Adesina, who was employed at the time by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Partnership’s modus operandi was to convene key policy actors in Washington and Africa by organizing high-level meetings, workshops, panel discussions, and media briefings. For instance, its technology working group organized several workshops in Africa on agricultural biotechnology in order to engage African scientists and policymakers, and then brought some of those individuals to Washington to brief their American counterparts. Partnership members helped to write USAID’s new agricultural development strategy, the President’s Initiative to End Hunger in Africa (IEHA), which launched in 2002 and included an explicit emphasis on smallholder-based initiatives. The IEHA was led by USAID’s Jeff Hill, who was a member of the Partnership’s Technical Committee and worked through both the Initiative and his own personal connections to build a coordinated agricultural development framework that would align U.S. interests and strategies with local African leadership.
The Partnership’s leadership, especially McPherson and Executive Director Julie Howard, were deeply engaged in Washington policy circles, briefing presidents, testifying before Congress, and brokering high-level meetings between visiting African leaders and American politicians. Howard, in particular, fostered dialogue and collaborations and traveled extensively to Africa to brief political leaders and promote the Partnership model. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, she helped persuade him to make food security a priority of his administration, and helped design the United States’ signature development initiative, Feed the Future, in 2010.Footnote 2 Howard left the Partnership in 2011 to become Chief Scientist in the newly-created Bureau for Food Security in USAID, but she still maintained connections with the Partnership and MSU.
In sum, by the early 2000s the MSU food security group and the Partnership had fostered an extensive network that played a critical role in forging a new “common sense” approach to African agricultural development. This common sense emphasized the importance of leveraging large-scale public investment into African agriculture and focusing strategic attention on value-chain and inter-sectoral linkages. It was forged by strategically located institutional actors building consensus around specific ideas and launching them, via the PCHPA, into the donor and African policy realms.
CAADP and African Policy Formation
At the same time that the importance of agriculture for development was being re-assessed within USAID, IFPRI, and the World Bank, similar stirrings were occurring in African policy circles. In 2001, African political leaders, frustrated and resentful of the continent’s global economic marginalization, as well as with the crushing levels of import-, debt-, and aid dependency, launched the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). While NEPAD focused on issues of political and economic governance and reform, it prioritized agriculture as a productive sector, using the argument that most Africans’ lives were tied to agriculture, and thus its development was crucial to reducing mass poverty.
Having selected agriculture as a priority area for investment, the NEPAD leadership in 2002 requested technical help from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) to develop a set of policy frameworks and action plans. The outcome was the launching of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which was conceived to provide an overarching and common framework for pro-poor national development strategies focusing on smallholder farming and implemented at both national and regional levels. Furthermore, it emphasized that such strategies should be comprehensive—simultaneously addressing productivity, markets, and hunger—and should first address urgent challenges rather than broad structural imperatives. At the same time, CAADP’s designers recognized that such an endeavor would be enormously expensive, requiring investments of some USD17.9 billion per year over the 2003–2015 period (FAO, IFAD, & WFP 2002; NEPAD 2003).
In an era of donor skepticism and low foreign direct investment, finding the money to support these initiatives posed a serious challenge. CAADP sought to answer this challenge through several mechanisms. First, in 2003 African heads of state adopted the Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security, which included the commitment to spend at least 10 percent of their annual budgets on agriculture and to aim for 6 percent annual growth in agricultural GDP within five years. Second, CAADP was designed to provide an institutional framework for evidence-based development planning, measured against a specific set of indicators and subject to stringent monitoring and evaluation. Such a framework was expected to earn the trust of international investors, secure the commitment of political leaders, and mitigate the risks perceived by private-sector investors (Badiane et al. Reference Badiane, Odjo and Ulimwengu2010).
Several network actors played a key role in driving this strategy. One was Richard Mkandawire, a Malawian development studies scholar teaching in South Africa, who was tapped in 2002 to lead the CAADP process. A long-term advocate for increasing agricultural investment, Mkandawire had been involved in CAADP’s conceptualization from the outset. But his vision diverged from the traditional project-oriented strategy pushed by the FAO, which he considered top-down and oriented toward short-term results. He envisaged a more ambitious objective which involved the construction of a continent-wide framework for strategic agricultural investment, based on a process of “decentralized, bottom-up implementation” that would allow countries to tailor CAADP activities to their own specific needs and circumstances.Footnote 3 Constructing this framework would require building African capacity (institutional and human) through inclusive policy dialogues, partnerships and alliances at all levels, and strategic networking. As Mkandawire (n.d.) noted in a subsequent interview, “I have spent my life building networks.”
To support these endeavors, Mkandawire worked with external allies who had access to institutional and financial resources. One was Ousmane Badiane, a specialist for Food and Agriculture Policy in the World Bank who was seconded to NEPAD as CAADP liaison in 2003. Before joining the World Bank in 1998, Badiane had been a Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI, where he was a proponent of the same linear structural transformation model of economic development that animated the MSU food security group; he was decidedly critical of the “bias against agriculture” that had crept into development theory. Another crucial ally was USAID’s Jeff Hill, who was not only attached to the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa but was also running USAID’s Initiative to End Hunger in Africa. Inter-organization networking to mobilize resources was Hill’s métier—an important skill for running an initiative under-funded by the Bush administration. Further, perhaps inspired by his personal history as a Peace Corps volunteer, Hill insisted on fostering African leadership in capacity-building. In alliance with Mkandawire and Badiane, Hill consistently stressed CAADP as the key African partner in IEHA initiatives and deployed IEHA resources to promote network-building activities.Footnote 4
Through their collaboration and networking, these policy entrepreneurs set out to launch CAADP, guided by the idea that CAADP would provide a firm but flexible framework for agricultural transformation. Such a structure would facilitate the coordination, coherence, and monitoring of development initiatives that could reassure donors, governments, businesspeople, and farmers’ organizations that they could commit resources with confidence if they aligned their plans with the framework. It was an aspirational vision that Mkandawire, Badiane, and Hill promoted energetically in multiple venues and that helped ensure that CAADP would become a ubiquitous presence on the landscape of African agricultural development. It is difficult today to find any agricultural development project involving international donors that is not situated within a CAADP framework. These actors have subsequently moved their influence into the wider network. Badiane, now Director for Africa at IFPRI, represented Senegal in the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program Steering Committee, and he currently chairs the Board of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (see below). Hill became a senior policy manager in the U.S.’s government-wide Feed the Future initiative, launched in 2010.Footnote 5 Mkandawire returned to the private sector as CEO of the African Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership. They continued to meet frequently at international conferences.
Phase Two: Constructing a “Green Revolution for Africa”
In the early 2000s, the impetus for building an institutional architecture for African agricultural transformation moved more decisively toward the role of productivity-enhancing technologies. One early initiative was USAID’s Agricultural Biotechnology Support Program, a small but strategic project launched in 1990–91 and housed at MSU, that aimed to develop laboratory research in agricultural biotechnology and to provide training opportunities for developing country scientists and regulators in order to strengthen the research and policy environments for promoting agricultural biotechnology on the continent. Separately, in 2002 Kofi Annan commissioned a study by the Inter-Academy Council on how to harness “the best science and technology to increase the productivity of agriculture in Africa.” It was in the wake of the IAC’s report that Annan called for a new Green Revolution in Africa. This tighter focus on productivity-enhancing technologies was promoted by two other factors. First, African political leaders were highly susceptible to the lure of technology, as many felt that Africa had been bypassed by the first Green Revolution and did not want to miss out on the second. Second, powerful non-state actors with a technology bent became increasingly important players in African agriculture. The most prominent of these were the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), along with an organization founded jointly by the two foundations called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Over time, and backed by a mountain of Gates money, AGRA would become one of the most significant ideational and institutional actors in African agriculture.
Rockefeller’s Model for African Agriculture
The Rockefeller Foundation’s substantive focus on African agriculture began around 1997, in response to an analysis that focused on where the Foundation’s agriculture program should invest its energies.Footnote 6 At the time, international donor support for agriculture had dwindled to only three percent of overseas development assistance (FAO, IFAD, & WFP 2002), and Africa’s national agricultural research organizations had effectively collapsed. The only institutions doing serious agricultural research were international.
To launch its new program, then-Director of Food Security Dr. Robert Herdt hired a handful of agricultural specialists who had lived and worked in Africa.Footnote 7 Among them were three Africans (Akinwumi [“Akin”] Adesina, Malcolm Blackie, and Bharati Patel) and three Americans (John Lynam, Peter Matlon, and Joe DeVries) who had long histories of working on African agriculture. They also brought with them a multitude of professional and personal connections.
Examining the career trajectory of one prominent figure, Dr. Akin Adesina, offers a window into how these actors made connections and shared ideas. A good example of both a travelling technocrat and an international policy player, Adesina began his career in his home country of Nigeria. After studying at the University of Ife in the 1980s, he earned two advanced degrees in Agricultural Economics in the United States. In 1988, Rockefeller awarded him a post-doc position to work at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), one of the international agricultural research centers (IARCs) the foundation had helped establish in the 1970s. From there, Adesina moved to the West Africa Rice Development Association in Côte d’Ivoire and subsequently to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria. In 1998, the Rockefeller Foundation hired Adesina to work at its Nairobi office, where he collaborated with Joe DeVries and Gary Toenniessen, two other Rockefeller staff and central network actors. A decade later, Adesina became Vice President for Policy and Partnerships for AGRA, the organization that the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations had created. In each context, Adesina interacted with new colleagues, shared and absorbed ideas, and helped build the network. He brought his connections and ideas home in “domestic cosmopolitan” fashion when he became Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture.
Once the RF assembled its African agriculture team, it proceeded to diagnose what it considered to be the principal constraints on African agriculture, namely, poor quality seeds, heavily degraded soils, and the diverse agroecological conditions that had prevented the original Green Revolution from taking hold in Africa (Toenniessen et al. Reference Toenniessen, Adesina and DeVries2008). Based on this assessment, the foundation advocated for the need to breed locally adapted seed varieties and to improve soil fertility, mainly by increasing fertilizer application. It also espoused the need to develop output markets and a better policy environment to encourage investment. Better seeds, soils, markets, and policies became the core ideas promoted by the Foundation. They also formed the shared common sense that subsequently animated the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa’s grant-making decisions.
In the late 1990s, the RF made another decision that expanded its intellectual influence in African agriculture. Gary Toenniessen, the official in charge of developing Rockefeller’s microbiology program, became convinced that in order to improve global food security, farmers in the global South were going to need access to the biotechnologies that were revolutionizing plant sciences in the North. Acting as a policy entrepreneur, Toenniessen contracted with the Meridian Institute to help convene a group of biotechnology firms, donors, and scientists to create an organization called the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), the purpose of which was to facilitate technology sharing (Schurman Reference Schurman2017). After getting the relevant firms on board, Toenniessen recruited several prominent African scientists who could serve as “authoritative advocates” in championing the new organization and promoting these new agricultural technologies on the continent.
This evolving network also extended its reach deep into the private sector, incorporating actors from the world’s largest biotechnology corporations. A number of long-term research collaborations were established among the AATF, agricultural biotech firms, the IARCs, and the national agricultural research organizations. These included the Insect-Resistant Maize for Africa project, the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa project, and the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project. WEMA alone connected dozens of scientists and others from the AATF, five national agricultural research organizations in Africa, the International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center, and Monsanto. By funding these projects, the Gates Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and USAID also became important network actors. Indeed, these large scientific-project partnerships were mini-networks in and of themselves.
Through the new institutional arrangements and legal agreements they generated, these partnerships played an important role in legitimating a new crop breeding model in which national and international agricultural research institutions would collaborate with private firms to develop new crop varieties. The agricultural research institutions would provide their germplasm, knowledge of local ecosystems and the policy environment, and scientific staff, while the private firms would provide proprietary knowledge and technology. This helped normalize the idea that the resulting crop varieties should be protected by intellectual property rights, for the first time in these public institutions’ history. This became a commonsense notion among those seeking to transform African agriculture.
Expanding the Network, Solidifying the Model
In the mid-2000s, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation came onto the scene. Seeing a strong affinity between the RF’s science-and-technology orientation and its own technological bent, BMGF officials approached Rockefeller about working together in Africa. In 2006, the two foundations established an “Africa-based” and “African-led” organization, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, with the expressed intent to improve smallholder agriculture, and funded it with a start-up grant of USD150 million. Creating such an organization would not only bring African voices to the fore but would also build local capacity, a central concern of the Rockefeller Foundation (Herdt Reference Herdt2012). The Gates Foundation also set up its own mammoth agricultural development program in Seattle. The enormous financial resources the Gates Foundation devoted to agriculture—over USD5.7 billion between 2006 and 2020—effectively turbocharged the network and installed the BMGF as the network’s driver.Footnote 8
Within a few years, AGRA became a key network actor. As the RF and BMGF had planned, it was mainly led by Africans. Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, was appointed as the first Chair of AGRA’s Board of Directors. Dr. Namanga Ngongi, a Cameroonian agronomist who had received his PhD from Cornell, was hired as AGRA’s first president. Within three years of its founding, AGRA had successfully recruited twenty-seven professional staff members, twenty-one of whom were African (AGRA 2009:33).
Other than two senior staff members who came directly from Rockefeller’s African agriculture program (Joe DeVries and Akin Adesina), AGRA’s professional staff were largely recruited from the IARCs, Africa’s national agricultural research organizations, or African business organizations. Their professional trajectories ran through multiple countries, with many having earned advanced degrees at European or U.S. universities. These biographies imbued these actors with rich personal and professional connections in the public and private sectors. Anne Mbaabu, Director of the Markets Access program, for example, had worked at the Eastern Africa Grain Council and other agribusiness organizations before taking the job at AGRA. AGRA’s Director of Soil Health, Dr. Bashir Jama, formerly worked at the UN Development Program and then spent two decades at the World Agroforestry Center. And Dr. Jane Ininda, Program Officer in AGRA’s seed program, had been a plant breeder at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute.
During the organization’s first decade (2006–2015), AGRA built explicitly on the Rockefeller Foundation’s model, focusing on raising farmer productivity via improved seed technology and increased fertilizer use. Engaging the private sector and working to change government policies to be more business-friendly were central to AGRA’s vision. AGRA’s Program in African Seed Systems (PASS) not only supported many seed breeding projects but spawned dozens of private seed companies that could produce new crop varieties and thousands of private agro-dealers who could sell them. AGRA’s Soils program sought to increase smallholder farmers’ use of fertilizer. Indeed, the explicit assumption guiding AGRA’s programs was that farming is a business and that Africa’s smallholder farmers are natural entrepreneurs. Given the right policy environment, AGRA officials hypothesized, Africa’s agribusiness as well as its farmers would thrive.
AGRA’s significance derived not only from its economic power but also from its ability to spread ideas across Africa through the projects, partnerships, and networks it fostered. For example, AGRA initiated a USD32 million agro-dealer program that provided training, capital, and credit to thousands of agricultural input suppliers (AGRA 2009). AGRA’s role as a change agent grew over time, as the organization funded more projects, gained experience, and built its reputation. Reflecting its growing influence, it began receiving support from additional bilateral aid agencies, Mastercard Foundation, UN FAO and the World Food Program, and the African Development Bank, among others (AGRA 2017, 2018). In 2017, AGRA produced a major strategy outlining its future in which, instead of speaking simply in terms of fostering a Green Revolution for Africa, it embraced a discourse of African agricultural transformation and positioned itself as the primary agent to coordinate this process (AGRA n.d). With an international board chaired by Hailemariam Desalegn, former Prime Minister of Ethiopia and Chair of the African Union (AU), AGRA arguably became the most powerful agricultural convener, connector, and provider of policy advice on the continent.
As it evolved, AGRA also moved to form closer partnerships with the private sector. As detailed below, these moves reflect the current phase of the transformation project, which regards agriculture as a business and foregrounds the developmental role of agribusiness.
Phase Three: Toward Agriculture as a Business
In July 2011, the RF hosted a summit in Abuja, Nigeria, on the theme of “Realizing the Potential of Africa’s Agriculture: Catalytic Innovations for Growth.” The summit brought together African Agriculture and Finance Ministers as well as other leaders in what Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin described as “an unprecedented conversation to identify concrete ways to strengthen African agricultural markets and value chains to benefit smallholder farmers” (Financial Times 2011:2). One perceived imperative was to shift the mindset of African policymakers away from viewing the agriculture sector as a realm of donor aid or government assistance, and to present it as a dynamic economic sector capable of providing a motor of development and driving an African economic resurgence. In the words of Akin Adesina, at that time Agriculture Minister of Nigeria, “We were not looking at agriculture through the right lens. We were looking at agriculture as a developmental activity, like a social sector in which you manage poor people in rural areas. But agriculture is not a social sector. Agriculture is a business… .” (Financial Times 2011:8). This energetically proclaimed interest in treating African farming as a business rather than as a pro-poor development imperative represented a significant re-orientation in the framing of African agricultural transformation. Rather than stressing the imperatives of agriculture for development, Adesina and others emphasized a vision of agriculture beyond development. This was a promethean vision, and it precipitated a great deal of networking labor to consolidate and elaborate the institutional and ideational architecture that was already under construction.
This strategic re-framing of the African agricultural transformation project occurred in the wake of the dual financial and food price crises of 2007–2008, which had both highlighted the complex vulnerabilities of the rural poor and brought into sharp relief the vast investment gap between the resources available and the resources necessary to attain the MDGs (Fan & Rosegrant Reference Fan and Rosegrant2008). The agricultural investment environment was indeed challenging; by 2009, only six African countries had met the CAADP spending target and only one (Rwanda) had signed a CAADP compact. Multilateral and bilateral aid was also sputtering, as donors sought to deal with the impact of crisis-driven shrinkage on their tax base and to shift the investment load toward private funding (Richey & Ponte Reference Richey and Ponte2014). It took the food crisis to galvanize a funding response from the international community. In 2009, the G8 countries met in L’Aquila, Italy, and pledged USD22 billion over three years to achieve global food security. In that same year, the multilateral Global Agriculture and Food Security Program was launched under the management of the World Bank, and in 2010 the U.S. launched its signature Feed the Future program to address global food security. In 2012, the G8, led by the United States, established a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN), which was aimed at leveraging new flows of private capital into African agriculture. The real challenge, however, was to provide aid funding that would crowd in rather than crowd out private investors.
In some quarters, there was considerable optimism about the potential for investment in African agriculture. Between 2010 and 2013, a number of agencies produced reports extolling the potential of agribusiness development in Africa. They stressed the prodigious growth of African economies in the new millennium; the dynamic African business class ready to partner with international capital; and the huge “frontier” consumer markets that Africa’s rapid urbanization and expanding middle class offered. Yet these reports also suggested that, while the African investment opportunities for agribusinesses were indeed attractive financially, without such investment African agricultural transformation would fail (see especially, World Bank 2013:4). The agencies promoting this development found a receptive audience among global agribusiness interests associated with the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) New Vision for Agriculture initiative, which had been launched in 2009 to mobilize agricultural value chain partnerships to improve food security, environmental sustainability, and economic opportunity through market-based, country-driven, multi-stakeholder initiatives (WEF 2012).
However, the challenge of enticing private investment into African agriculture remained daunting. Even in a post-financial crisis world in which capital was looking for new places to roost, the investment environment in Africa—especially African agriculture—was still considered to be exceptionally risky. Moreover, in a context of volatile global prices, increasingly complex value chains, and the deepening challenge of consumer scrutiny and activism, value chains themselves could be risky investments. Accordingly, agrifood corporations tended to be interested in investing only in safe places and safe value chains. They were not reassured by the influx of new aid dollars or the prominent role of philanthropies, given the danger that donor funding might stagnate or decline, and the resources available for development might diminish (Ingram & Lord Reference Ingram and Lord2019). Moreover, private-sector actors complained that the specific advantages and resources that they brought to the table—their “core competencies”—were not being incorporated into donor frameworks (WEF 2006).
In short, while agrifood corporations sought to be seen as pro-poor development actors, they wanted reassurance that they could manage their own operational environment and would not be left holding the development baby. Consequently, their interest was tempered by their concerns about market protection and risk mitigation. These conditions established huge challenges to aligning the interests of international private investors with those of donors and African states and underwrote what one organization characterized as the “investment paradox,” namely that “food and agricultural products are in high demand, the potential for thriving agribusiness is great, and billions of dollars are currently ‘un-invested’ and ‘un-lent,’ yet supply of agri-capital fails to meet the needs or demands” (Grow Africa Reference Africa2013:10).
Clearly, in order to convince private capital to invest in African agriculture, a great deal of network-building needed to be done to foster agreement, align interests, and generate commitment among private and public sector actors, as well as between development partners. This became the overriding challenge for the putative architects of Africa’s agricultural transformation. It involved embracing Adesina’s vision of African agriculture as a business and shifting the core message from the promotion of smallholders, with an emphasis on agricultural productivity, to the promotion of agribusiness, with an emphasis on value chains. Implicitly, the new emphasis insisted that what is good for agribusiness is good for farmers, and therefore good for poverty alleviation and consequently good for food security. The preferred vehicle for this approach would be multi-stakeholder initiatives, the most significant of which was Grow Africa.
Grow Africa
Grow Africa was established in 2011 as a collaboration between the WEF, the African Union Commission, and NEPAD (WEF 2016). It was tasked with facilitating collaborations between governments, private companies, and smallholders that would both lower the risk and cost of investing in African agriculture and mobilize investment into priority value chains. It would accomplish this by convening “multi-stakeholder platforms to align public and private sector interests” around these value chains. Thus, it was constructed as a high-level broker with “networking and convening power,” intended to foster agreements which would support increased investment. For instance, its first Investment Forum, held in 2013, was attended by (among others) the CEO of NEPAD, the chair of the African Union Commission, the CEO of Yara International, the CEO of Syngenta, and the USAID Administrator, Rajiv Shah. Shah immediately announced a USD9.5 million grant to sustain Grow Africa’s momentum, and USAID subsequently remained a major funder (Grow Africa Reference Africa2013). Grow Africa aligned itself with the CAADP process in order to secure greater political commitment from governments via their national development frameworks and through established strategic partnerships with donors. Its initial strategy was to crowd in private investment by securing Letters of Intent from private companies to make large investments in specific initiatives.
Initially, Grow Africa operated with a small secretariat; it relied on support from AGRA, USAID, McKinsey, and Yara, ensuring that the organization was internationally well networked. The first Executive Director was Arne Cartridge, a Director in the WEF and specialist in developing public-private partnerships, who had been chief communications officer with Yara until 2009. Cartridge had played a key role in organizing the 2006 Oslo Conference on Private-Public Partnerships for an African Green Revolution, and when he left Yara in October 2009 to establish a consultancy, he continued to support Yara’s African initiative. In short, as both a professional networker and a strong proponent of the “new vision” for African agricultural transformation, he played the role of policy entrepreneur.
Grow Africa’s role as a connector received a tremendous boost within a year of its founding, when the G8 launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. Represented as “a shared commitment and partnership between African leaders, donors, and private sector partners to achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth and raise 50 million people out of poverty,” the Alliance aimed to catalyze private sector investment in African agricultural value chains (USAID 2013). Again, the AU approached Grow Africa, asking that they work with NAFSN to generate private company commitments to invest in African agriculture. Such commitments were to be matched with individual African governments’ political will through the CAADP framework. In this way, Grow Africa rapidly became situated as a critical investment broker, bringing together potential development partners and investors to build relationships.
In 2016, Grow Africa made two strategic moves. First, it migrated its operations out of the WEF and into NEPAD, thereby situating itself more firmly within CAADP and emphasizing the importance of countries’ National Agricultural Investment Plans. At this time, Executive Director Arne Cartridge returned to Yara and was replaced by William Asiko, a Kenyan who had served as president of the Coca Cola Africa Foundation. The co-chairs of the Steering Committee were Ibrahim Mayaki, CEO of NEPAD, and Strive Masiyiwa, CEO of Econet Wireless and one of Africa’s few billionaire private entrepreneurs. Masiyiwa had been a member of the Rockefeller Foundation board since 2002 and was also board chair of AGRA at the time. Asiko himself would join the Rockefeller Foundation in 2019 as Managing Director of the African Region Office. In effect, these authoritative advocates and policy players were creating interlocking leaderships aimed at strengthening the mutual imbrication of public and private development agents.
At the same time, Grow Africa shifted its strategic focus from trying to mobilize private investment through Letters of Intent toward “a more structured value chain development approach that encompasses all value chain stakeholders and is better aligned to National Agricultural Investment Plans” (Grow Africa Reference Africa2017). The aim was to move Grow Africa more directly into the operational side of development by supporting specific value chain platforms that would anchor commodity-based, sector-wide initiatives. These two moves were significant because they captured the re-orientation of the larger Green Revolution project away from smallholders toward agribusiness in an effort to align public and private sector development interests and to leverage private finance into African agriculture. They involved Grow Africa working with NEPAD to develop a Country Agribusiness Partnership Framework, with the aim of “de-risking” private finance and investment in African agriculture. At the macro-level, Grow Africa entered strategic partnerships with a variety of multilateral development actors, including AGRA, the African Development Bank, and the German development agency GIZ. At the value chain level, it pursued business case-building strategies, funding project implementers to build value chains in strategic commodities (Grow Africa Reference Africa2017).
The emergence of Grow Africa, combined with its expanding efforts to merge public development frameworks and private investment interest through the creation of multi-stakeholder initiatives, reflects in part the longer-term ambitions of African leaders to “globalize Africa.” The location of Grow Africa within NEPAD/CAADP depicts a vision of this process as led by Africans, drawing on (and building) African networks, and supported by African political commitment. At the same time, the substantive embrace of WEF’s New Vision for Agriculture ideology placed a market-privileging and private-sector-driven framework for African agricultural transformation at the heart of that vision. As such, it was part of a larger, transnationally networked effort to move African agriculture “beyond development.” Even as new authoritative advocates such as William Asiko and Strive Maseyiwa entered this landscape of networks to imbricate linkages and sharpen the “new vision,” established players such as Akin Adesina still wield enormous influence. In 2015, Adesina was elected president of the African Development Bank, where he launched the “Feed Africa” strategy as a Bank priority. He envisions the Bank as playing a catalytic role in Africa’s economic transformation, and under his leadership it has energetically strengthened institutional relationships with the BMGF, RF, USAID, and AGRA. His voice in African policy circles is ubiquitous. In 2017, he was awarded the World Food Prize.
Conclusion
By 2016, the new narrative of African agricultural transformation with which we began could be traced within an increasingly dense and interlocking network of personal and institutional connections that spanned both the public and private sectors across transnational space. These networks were constructed over time through the professional movement, strategic coalition-building, and communication work of key network actors seeking to offer smallholders a specific set of pathways out of poverty and to convince investors to open their wallets and enter into productive partnerships.
We have focused analytical attention on key individual players to demonstrate how the roles and relationships such actors (literally) embody comprise a crucial constitutive element in governance network formation. These actors were situated within a variety of institutional and geopolitical settings. They played different roles—travelling technocrat, authoritative advocate, or policy entrepreneur, to name a few—and drew on different kinds of public or epistemic authority to advance their ideas. In each of these roles, they worked to forge consensus around the particular ideas, explanatory frameworks, and public narratives that underpin the new vision for African agricultural transformation. By attending the same international meetings and workshops, assembling and serving on interlocking committees and boards, speaking from the same public platforms, and rubbing shoulders at international expos such as the World Food Prize meeting, they built a “new common sense” around the causal narrative of the development model. They constructed connections between technical agencies and policy agencies, deploying their interpersonal relationships to enroll new network actors. They knew whom to call in order to advance, evaluate, or seek funding for specific strategies or initiatives. Through these activities they built up not only the institutional linkages that define and advance this new governance regime but also the robust relationships of trust and cooperation that span space and policy realms and that actively advance the authority and the agenda of the development model.
Indeed, it is significant that the discourse and vision these actors share and articulate has been increasingly incorporated into the operations of many other development actors engaged in policy formation and implementation. These include other national aid agencies, international and African firms and business organizations, management consultants such as McKinsey, and development contractors such as TechnoServe and the Dutch Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH). Perhaps most indicative of an emerging new governance regime for African agriculture is the construction of high-level umbrella partnerships among the most powerful players, such as the Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa, established in 2016 by AGRA, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, and USAID, and funded by the African Development Bank, the African Union, NEPAD, and Yara International. In short, the “global dialogue on African agriculture,” fragmented, scattered, and cacophonous at the turn of the millennium, today passes through an increasingly well-defined and integrated institutional infrastructure. The influx of money that was precipitated by the global food price crisis and that comes from aid donors, international institutions, and global philanthropies has places to flow, ideas to absorb it, and people to spend it.
It is clear that this emerging governance structure for African agricultural development wields enormous power through the networked ideational and institutional architecture that has been built up across the last two decades. Influential African institutions such as AGRA and the AATF have been established, some African states have incorporated themselves into this architecture, and African voices have moved increasingly to its center. This architecture leverages substantial amounts of development funding and, within the development community, reigns hegemonic in terms of ideas. While civil society organizations and academics promoting grassroots participatory development, agroecological approaches, and food sovereignty have offered some resistance, these groups’ critiques of the dominant approach have neither gained substantial traction nor garnered significant resources. Indeed, part of the power of this new governance structure is reflected in its ability to marginalize and exclude those whose ideas do not accord with the assumptions of the new model.
Still, the success of this African agricultural transformation project is by no means assured; much will depend on what happens on the ground. To date, its promised impacts on the livelihoods and food security of smallholders and poor rural Africans have not been realized. Even as the model has shifted from a tight focus on smallholders to a broader inclusion of agribusiness, private investment has not been as forthcoming as was initially hoped. And where firms have invested, it is not clear that their businesses will be sustainable or will lead to greater food security for the rural poor. Indeed, recent studies of new, “pro-poor” value chains in Africa, including the research in this Forum, show that food security impacts ultimately depend on who controls the income earned from participation in the continent’s new agricultural value chains, gender relations in the household, and how people choose to spend their money.
Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (grant # 1539833) for funding this research. We also thank our project collaborators, Tom Bassett, Heidi Gengenbach, and Bill Moseley for sharing expertise and fieldwork that helped sharpen our account. We received excellent research assistance from Lilli Ambort, Emily Schirmacher, David Werner, and Tatum Zsorey. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for incisive comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Supplementary Materials
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2021.82.
