Agricultural policies aimed at alleviating poverty in Africa could be making things worse, according to new research findings.

University of East Anglia (UEA) researchers this week published a report on so-called 'green revolution' policies in Rwanda. Governments, international donors and organisations such as the International Monetary Fund claim these strategies are successfully growing the economy and alleviating poverty, but researchers revealed that they may in fact be having very negative impacts on the poorest people in the country.

One of the major strategies to reduce poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is through policies aiming to increase and ‘modernise’ agricultural production. Up to 90 per cent of people in some African countries are smallholder farmers reliant on agriculture, for whom agricultural innovation, such as using new seed varieties and cultivation techniques, holds potential benefit but also great risk.

In the 1960s and 70s policies supporting new seeds for marketable crops, sold at guaranteed prices, helped many farmers and transformed economies in Asian countries. These became known as "green revolutions". The new wave of green revolution policies in sub-Saharan Africa is supported by multinational companies and western donors, and is impacting the lives of tens, even hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, according to Dr Neil Dawson, who led the UEA study.

The UEA research reveals that only a relatively wealthy minority have been able to keep to enforced modernisation because the poorest farmers cannot afford the risk of taking out credit for the approved inputs, such as seeds and fertilisers. Their fears of harvesting nothing from new crops and the potential for the government to seize and reallocate their land means many choose to sell up instead.

Debates over development industry on the increase

The report follows another by social justice organisation Global Justice Now, which suggested the world’s largest private donors, who wield huge amounts of influence and financial power have “Dangerously and unaccountably [distorted] the direction of international development” in a way that could entrench corporate power and poverty. This has been done by, amongst other things, championing highly industrialised agriculture, which is undermining smaller-scale, biologically diverse systems.

Dr Dawson’s findings tie in with recent debates about strategies to feed the world in the face of growing populations, for example the influence of wealthy donors such as the Gates Foundation, initiative's such as the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, and multinational companies such as Monsanto in pushing for their vision of agriculture in Africa.

There have also been debates about small versus large farms being best to combat hunger in Africa, while struggles to maintain local control over land and food production, for example among the Oromo people in Ethiopia, have been highlighted. In a recent policy document advocating on behalf of small-scale farmers, FAO warned that “The over-arching paradigm of economic growth, considered the highway to secure development, has left the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development behind.”

Dr Dawson, a senior research associate in UEA's School of International Development, commented, "Similar results are emerging from other experiments in Africa. Agricultural development certainly has the potential to help people, but instead these policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants.

"Many of these policies have been hailed as transformative development successes, yet that success is often claimed on the basis of weak evidence through inadequate impact assessments. And conditions facing African countries today are very different from those past successes in Asia some 40 years ago.”

Outlining one of the main criticisms with this vision of agriculture and its place in development policies, Dr Dawson added, ”Such policies may increase aggregate production of exportable crops, yet for many of the poorest smallholders they strip them of their main productive resource, land. [My research] details how these imposed changes disrupt subsistence practices, exacerbate poverty, impair local systems of trade and knowledge, and threaten land ownership. It is startling that the impacts of policies with such far-reaching impacts for such poor people are, in general, so inadequately assessed."

The research looked in-depth at Rwanda's agricultural policies and the changes impacting the wellbeing of rural inhabitants in eight villages in the country's mountainous west. Here chronic poverty is common and people depend on the food they are able to grow on their small plots.

Farmers traditionally cultivated up to 60 different types of crops, planting and harvesting in overlapping cycles to prevent shortages and hunger. However, due to high population density in Rwanda's hills, agricultural policies have been imposed which force farmers to modernise with new seed varieties and chemical fertilisers, to specialise in single crops and part with "archaic" agricultural practices.

Dr Dawson and his UEA co-authors Dr Adrian Martin and Prof Thomas Sikor recommend that not only should green revolution policies be subject to much broader and more rigorous impact assessments, but that mitigation for poverty-exacerbating impacts should be specifically incorporated into such policies. In Rwanda, in their view, that would mean encouraging land access for the poorest and supporting traditional practices during a gradual and voluntary shift.