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Commentary
Limits of the New Green Revolution for Africa:
reconceptualising gendered agricultural value
chains
HEIDI GENGENBACH*, RACHEL A. SCHURMAN†, THOMAS J. BASSETT‡,
WILLIAM A. MUNRO§ AND WILLIAM G. MOSELEY¶
*Department of History, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd, Boston, MA 02125,
USA
E-mail: heidi.gengenbach@umb.edu
†Department of Sociology and Institute for Global Studies, 267-19th Ave. South, 909 Social Sciences,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
E-mail: schurman@umn.edu
‡Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign, 1301 West Green Street, MC-150, Urbana, IL 61801
E-mail: bassett@illinois.edu
§Department of Political Science, Illinois Wesleyan University, 205 E. Beecher Street, Bloomington, IL
61701, USA
E-mail: wmunro@iwu.edu
¶Department of Geography, Macalester College, 104d Carnegie Hall, St Paul, MN 55105, USA
E-mail: moseley@macalester.edu
This paper was accepted for publication in July 2017
In order to address food insecurity, the New Green Revolution for Africa (GR4A) promotes tighter
integration of African smallholder farmers, especially women, into formal markets via value chains
to improve farmers’input access and to encourage the sale of crop surpluses. This commentary
offers a theoretical and practical critique of the GR4A model, drawing on early findings from a
five-year study of value chain initiatives in Burkina Faso, C^
ote d’Ivoire, and Mozambique. It
highlights the limitations of a model that views heightened market interactions as uniformly
beneficial for smallholder farmers. We challenge the notion that there is a broadly similar and
replicable process for the construction of markets and the development of gender-sensitive value
chains in all recipient countries. Instead we build upon the feminist network political ecology and
coproduction literatures to conceptualise value chains as complex assemblages co-produced by a
broad set of actors, including socially differentiated farmers.
KEY WORDS: value chains, green revolution, gender
Introduction
With some 2018 million undernourished
people, sub-Saharan Africa remains the
most chronically food insecure region of
the world (FAO 2015). To address this problem, a
coalition of African and donor governments, the G8,
philanthropic foundations and others have come
together in an unprecedented effort to improve food
security in Africa. Through a broadly coordinated
development strategy, which we call the ‘New Green
Revolution for Africa’(GR4A), these actors seek to
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not
necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
The Geographical Journal, 2017, doi: 10.1111/geoj.12233
integrate African smallholder farmers more tightly into
formal markets through value chain development,
both to improve their access to yield-boosting inputs
and to increase crop sales. Their approach assumes
that increasing yields is the key to hunger reduction
and economic growth (Toenniessen et al. 2008). In
the expectation of dramatically transforming African
farming systems, rural livelihoods, and household
diets, they have committed billions of dollars to raise
productivity among African smallholder farmers.
Recognizing that women are the majority of Africa’s
smallholder farmers, GR4A proponents have
foregrounded women as key players in this agrarian
transformation. Research stressing that high rates of
maternal and child malnutrition jeopardise poor
countries’capacity for economic growth has further
pushed some GR4A advocates to scrutinise links
between agriculture and nutritional well-being (G
omez
et al. 2013). Accordingly, ‘closing the gender gap’and
‘unleashing women’s potential’in agriculture are now
understood as critical elements in solving Africa’s
‘hunger problem’(USAID 2010; BMGF 2012).
This concerted effort to construct a high-external-
input, market-based and gender-sensitive model for
agricultural development represents a major shift in
international development actors’response to African
hunger. Nevertheless, the model rests on linear and
functionalist assumptions in which farmers are
recipients of, rather than active participants in, value
chain construction. It assumes that simply incor-
porating women farmers into agricultural value chains
will boost rural incomes and food security, ignoring
varied axes of differentiation among rural women that
influence resource access, farm performance, and
dietary change. This top-down, monolithic framing of
value chain construction leaves little room for the
actual conditions and relationships that shape farmers’
decision-making, and renders GR4A initiatives
vulnerable to unexpected and unintended outcomes.
This commentary examines the GR4A model
critically, drawing on early findings from a five-year
study of the nutritional consequences of agricultural
value chain initiatives in Burkina Faso, C^
ote d’Ivoire
and Mozambique.
1
We stress the need to re-
conceptualise agricultural value chains as co-produced
assemblages of diverse actors, processes and practices
that draw on relationships across time and space to
reconfigure agency and power within development
initiatives. We deploy insights from network political
ecology, feminist political ecology, and co-production
theory to suggest that gender operates at multiple levels,
simultaneously and interactively, to shape the process
of value chain development and its dietary results. The
food security impact of value chain initiatives, we
argue, will be profoundly shaped by the site-specific
ways in which GR4A-driven efforts to commercialise
smallholder agriculture interact with pre-existing
markets, social networks, and cultural practices through
which women farmers have historically managed
household food supply. The constellation of value
chain actors and their deployment of gendered GR4A
discourses in particular settings thus may affect food
security in ways neither policy-makers nor researchers
predict. Our early findings indicate the need for a
relational analytical approach to GR4A development
initiatives, one that integrates gender, and the gendered
calculus of active social agents, at all nodes of the value
chain.
Features of the model
The GR4A model frames agricultural value chains as
linear sequences of market-strengthening activities,
focused on transforming African farm-centred liv-
elihoods from local to national levels (and beyond, via
regional or global value chains) (Figure 1). A strategic
ambition to ‘scale up’smallholders’participation in
commodity, input, credit, labour, and (where feasible)
land markets requires policy attention not only to farm
production but to the entire chain of transformations –
including processing and retailing –along which
commodities travel.
At the local level, the model aims to integrate
farmers into new input and output markets in order
Figure 1 Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa’s (AGRA) value chain approach for agricultural products
Source: Toenniessen et al. (2008) redrawn by Macalester College, Geography Department
The Geographical Journal 2017 doi: 10.1111/geoj.12233
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
2Commentary
to increase productivity, sales and income, thereby
improving household food security. At the national
level, it seeks to transform the policy environment to
promote private sector investment in agro-industry,
with the goal of adding value to agricultural
products and creating employment. Integration into
the value chain will occur at various entry points,
depending on the organisational requirements of the
particular chain. In theory, these transformations will
be uniformly beneficial for smallholder farmers and
their families.
Private sector actors and highly transferable
agricultural technologies –above all, productivity-
enhancing technologies such as ‘improved’seeds –are
at the centre of the GR4A model. Organisationally, it
promotes value chain development through public–
private partnerships, with the government providing
‘catalytic investment’and an ‘enabling environment’
for markets to thrive. At the same time, like much
development planning, GR4A proponents view the
model as broadly replicable across countries, and
dependent on similar enabling institutional envir-
onments.
Finally, the GR4A model includes a multi-faceted
push to ‘mainstream gender’in value chain
initiatives. Broadly accepted by the international
agricultural development community, this gender
focus is unprecedented in ambition and scope and is
justified in terms of women’s pivotal role in food
provisioning, unequal access to land and credit, and
the alleged need for ‘behaviour change’to bring
them into formal markets (cf. Sebstad and Manfre
2011). In theory, gender objectives should infuse the
strategies, actions, and decisions of all participants in
value chain initiatives.
In the next section, we suggest a cautionary
approach to all aspects of this model, especially its
gender dimensions. We consider first the national
level of policy framing and then move to the
household level. Along the way, we illustrate our
points with snapshots from our research sites.
Critique of the model
African states clearly play a pivotal role in
transforming GR4A objectives into formal policy
plans backed by administrative authority and
political will. Yet states are likely to adopt ‘bits and
pieces’of the GR4A model, modifying and (re)
assembling them in the context of existing policies
and institutions (Peck 2011). For example, all of the
countries in our study had adopted national
agricultural development plans in the early 2000s in
order to qualify for debt relief. These plans, which
privileged export agriculture, shaped the institutional
landscapes onto which the GR4A is inscribed. In
addition, policy frameworks are filtered through the
concerns of powerful in-country political interests. In
Burkina Faso, for instance, rural elites comprising
male traditional leaders linked to both the cotton
industry and the ruling party exercise substantial
policy framing influence (Loada 2014). Such
political dynamics may inhibit the development of a
systematic focus on gender or women.
Moreover, states do not act as unitary entities: every
state agency has its own priorities, objectives, and
institutional culture; is subject to different internal and
external pressures; and works differently with non-state
actors to set policy and implement value chain
projects. Some state institutions are stronger and bear
more political weight than others. In Mozambique, for
instance, agricultural development strategies are
framed by both the Strategic Plan for Agricultural
Sector Development and the National Agricultural
Investment Plan, as well as by other sectoral strategies,
which are unevenly implemented and sometimes run
at cross purposes. This undermines policy consensus,
especially around gender mainstreaming.
The role of local and international firms, civil
society groups, and donors is equally important to
the policy process, though the power dynamics
shaping state–non-state relationships vary by context.
In C^
ote d’Ivoire, the disjuncture between the
national agricultural investment plan, which
prioritises poverty reduction and food security, and
the projects funded by aid donors and the private
sector, illustrates how the internal logics of these
initiatives result in some value chains receiving a
disproportionate amount of funding (Varlet 2015).
Between 2007 and 2014, rice-related development
projects in C^
ote d’Ivoire received more than twice
the funding of other food crops, although rice
accounts for just one-fifth of national food
consumption.
In practice, market innovations and opportunities,
rather than farmer innovations and knowledge,
provide the fulcrum for value chain construction. In
an AGRA-funded
2
rice commercialisation project in
Burkina Faso, project organisers conducted market
surveys to determine rice qualities and varieties
preferred by urban consumers before moving to build
a value chain that connected farmers, intermediaries,
and millers to produce rice with the desired
characteristics. Because the project bends farmer
agency towards the needs of the value chain, rather
than building on their agroecological expertise, it
exposes growers to the risk of producing rice they do
not eat and might not be able to sell if the market fails.
Moreover, as GR4A initiatives develop markets,
they introduce new economic agents (agro-dealers,
merchants, development agencies, private-sector
extension workers) who participate in the gendered –
and gendering –discourses of value chain
construction. Each set of actors brings distinct interests
and imperatives to bear. Buyers may be concerned
about quality standards set by agroprocessors, retailer
pricing practices, and/or consumer preferences. Local
The Geographical Journal 2017 doi: 10.1111/geoj.12233
©2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Commentary 3
government officials may respond to the national
ministry imperatives. Extension workers and scientists
may prioritise the deployment of particular seed
varieties. In all cases, gender assumptions structure
the knowledge on which these priorities rest and
direct decision-making in ways that may alter gender
dynamics on the ground. For example, the World
Bank prioritises land privatisation in its Agricultural
Sector Support Project for C^
ote d’Ivoire. A poster
funded by this project suggests that when women
obtain secure rights to land, the welfare of the entire
household will improve (see Supplementary
Information, Figure S1). This blending of land reform,
gender equity, and rural livelihoods assumes that
women are a homogenous group and that income
sharing is the norm in rural households. Our research
shows that these assumptions do not hold.
While the diverse interests of these actors shape
their impact on female (and male) smallholders, local
farming histories and personal experience influence
farmer decision-making on the ground. This crucial
element of any agricultural value chain includes
culturally sedimented gender relations, embedded
ecological knowledge of local landscapes, and
existing networks of collaboration, seed exchange,
and market involvement. These realities complicate
value chain implementation in ways that the tidy
linear GR4A model does not address.
The advent of new and potentially fluid power
relations around the construction of agricultural
markets is likely to generate differentiated patterns of
political agency –not least among women –with
unintended consequences. Some women may gain,
others may lose. Our preliminary research indicates
that socio-economic differentiation can strongly
influence women’s participation in GR4A projects.
In OLAM’s Sustainable Cashew Growers Programme
in Cote d’Ivoire
3
, senior, unmarried women living in
upper- and middle-income households are better
positioned to benefit from the programme than
younger women and women in low-income
households. Moreover, whether women (and men)
actually benefit from the programme depends on the
crop prices they receive from OLAM. Despite selling
directly to the factory and producing high-quality
nuts, OLAM’s producer prices are not much higher
than those of local bush traders, defying GR4A
assumptions of value chain-related income gains.
GR4A proponents have also assumed that if
projects aimed at boosting smallholder yields and
incomes are gender sensitive, they will accomplish
food security and nutrition goals regardless of targeted
communities’socio-cultural characteristics. But the
model under-theorises inter- and intra-household
socio-economic and cultural differentiation and its
implications for food and nutrition security. It also
inadequately addresses women’s uneven access to
resources and markets. An extensive literature shows
that gendered power dynamics within and among
rural households profoundly shape farmers’access to
land, inputs, credit, water and markets (e.g. Vellenga
1977; Peters 2010). These variables influence the
nutritional outcomes of agricultural change in ways
neither scholars nor policy-makers adequately
understand. Consequently, value chain projects
cannot reasonably predict the implications of
agricultural commercialisation for the nutritional
health of farming households (G
omez and Ricketts
2013).
For example, many ‘improved’rice production
schemes in southwestern Burkina Faso effectively take
land away from women, the region’s traditional
growers of rainfed rice, and open it up to men and
other women in the community. While these projects
have an explicit gender component, they diminish
women’s relative power in the rice economy. In
southern Mozambique, few women farmers
independently decide how to use income from the sale
of cassava to the Dutch Agricultural Development &
Trading Company (DADTCO), a social enterprise that
processes fresh roots for the national brewery’s
cassava-based Impala beer. Spending decisions emerge
from consultation and debate within a range of power-
infused relationships, including husbands, co-wives,
adult children, friends and community leaders. Rather
than nutritional concerns, aspirational asset-building
and dietary preferences in the context of investor-
driven development guide women’s spending toward
home improvement, school expenses, and processed
foods such as sugar and pasta.
These trends challenge the GR4A assumption that
participation in value chain projects will change
women’s farming behaviour in ways that will improve
household food security and reduce rural hunger.
Farmers’decisions are certainly informed by gendered
responsibilities for family food provisioning along
with women’s experiential understanding of
challenges to alimentary well-being. But evidence
for a positive causal relationship between market-
based agricultural interventions and rural food
security is conspicuously scarce (IFPRI 2011; Ruel and
Alderman 2013). Researchers and practitioners
increasingly agree that given the long history of efforts
to increase African farmers’market involve-
ment, we know surprisingly little about how, and in
what particular circumstances, commercial produc-
tion –especially of staple food crops –translates into
enhanced food access, equitable intra-household food
distribution, improved dietary diversity, or better
nutritional health for farming families (cf. Webb &
Kennedy 2014). Indeed, a robust historical and
political ecology literature provides dramatic exam-
ples of the opposite: the destruction of once self-
sufficient agrifood systems as a consequence of
farmers’market integration (e.g. Wright 2010).
In sum, the policy terrain of the GR4A is complex,
and the variety of actors and interests involved is
wide. Under these circumstances, the propensity of
The Geographical Journal 2017 doi: 10.1111/geoj.12233
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
4Commentary
GR4A proponents to view value chain construction
as a broadly replicable process, dependent on
similar market-based environments and with
uniformly positive impacts on food security and
nutrition, is overly optimistic. Such an approach
cannot account adequately for crucial patterns of
national and local variability, contingency and site
specificity that shape the co-production of value
chains on the ground (Dawson et al 2015). It is
inevitable that the meanings of ‘women’s
empowerment’and ‘women’s participation’–as well
as other elements of the GR4A model –will be re-
interpreted, re-negotiated and re-worked at various
points in the value chain.
Reconceptualising value chains: a co-production
approach
As indicated above, one challenge in analysing the
dynamics of GR4A value chain construction is to
understand how diverse actors operating in a multi-
level field of interactions understand women’s
integration into agricultural value chains. How are
policies crafted at the transnational level to promote
women’s participation translated at the national and
project levels? At the household level, how do
GR4A projects that seek to expand women’s access
to resources –cash, labour, inputs –intersect with
pre-existing gender relations shaping smallholder
production and consumption? What other axes of
social differentiation interact with or inflect gender
relations within and across households? To answer
these questions, we advance an analytical approach
that integrates concepts from three literatures:
network political ecology, feminist political ecology
and co-production.
The network political ecology literature allows us
to reconceptualise value chains as constellations or
assemblages of nodes and interactions among
diverse actors operating in distinct locations. From
this perspective, we understand agricultural value
chains as relational webs in which power determines
the type, terms, and strength of connections among
diverse actors (Birkenholtz 2012; Rocheleau and
Roth 2007). As such, value chains are multi-agentic
and power-infused co-productions open to a
diversity of outcomes. Figure 2 sketches the multi-
level field of interactions, relationships and networks
theorised to shape the operation of agricultural value
chains.
A network political ecology approach contrasts
with the technocratic and apolitical conceptuali-
sation of socio-natural relations in the GR4A model.
The emphasis on power relations affecting women’s
participation in emergent agricultural networks
also contrasts with the ahistorical and radical egali-
tarian focus of actor network theory which
‘diminishes the importance of subjectivity, intention-
ality, consciousness, [and] reason’(Chagani 2014,
429). Most importantly, our reconceptualisation of
value chains as webs of power relations enables us to
explain ‘who loses and who wins from the
constitution of networks’(Jasanoff 2004, 23).
The network political ecology approach we
propose builds upon a robust base of feminist
political ecology insights. Early feminist political
ecology illuminated the dynamics between outside
development interventions and internal household
political struggles (Rocheleau et al. 1996, Carney
2004). While post-structuralist feminist ecology has
demonstrated the agency of African women, much
of that literature focuses on agency within and
between households. Our analytical approach, with
its emphasis on co-production and its attention to
women’s agency across (and beyond) an entire value
chain, better illuminates women’sinfluence on
broader economic relations and policy networks. It
also enables us to break with the problematic
assumption, still pervasive in development discourse
on Africa, that women’s farming decisions, labour
and income are fully determined within a
presumptive ‘household’unit (Guyer 1981).
Recent feminist political ecology scholarship
decentres gender as a major analytical category.
Emphasising ‘intersectional’analyses and ‘gender
subjectivities’(Carr and Thompson 2014; Jackson
1998), this literature shifts attention to identities
and ‘different lived experiences’of women and men
(Mollett and Faria 2013). Intersectional analysis
investigates the construction of identities in which
‘gender intersects with other social categories’such
as class, caste, age and ethnicity (Carr and Thomp-
son 2014; Elmhirst 2011). Gender identities are
formed at the intersection of these different axes. In
contrast to the functionalist view of women as a
unified social category that can be enrolled in more
equitably designed value chain projects (FAO 2011;
Mayoux and Mackie 2009), feminist political
ecology emphasises gender subjectivities in a
‘constant state of negotiation and articulation’
(Mollett and Faria 2013, 118). Gender may or may
Figure 2 Value chain actor networks. Note: IARCs =
International Agriculture Research Centers
The Geographical Journal 2017 doi: 10.1111/geoj.12233
©2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Commentary 5
not emerge as an important social category to
explain the dynamics of agrarian change (Bezner-
Kerr 2014). We find the concepts of ‘gender
subjectivities’and ‘different lived experiences’to be
more useful than the notion of ‘closing the gender
gap’for analysing women’s participation in GR4A
projects.
Co-production theory allows us to integrate the
constitution of the GR4A model with our network
and feminist political ecological approaches.
Emerging from the field of science and technology
studies, the notion of co-production is useful for
asking ‘what sorts of scientific entities or tech-
nological arrangements can usefully be regarded as
being co-produced with which elements of social
order?’(Jasanoff 2004, 18). Following Jasanoff, we
view the GR4A as a ‘socio-technical dispensation’
that can be fruitfully studied as a co-production of
many actors operating at multiple scales. One can
see this in the reworking of Mozambique’s cassava
value chain. There women expanded their
production in response to the Impala initiative.
However, DADTCO’s low prices and unreliable
buying practices led growers to sell much of their
cassava supply to itinerant female traders,who
incentivised sales by paying slightly more. Women
farmers are reshaping the cassava market to fit their
own commercial calculus, thereby actively co-
producing the value chain.
A co-production analysis reveals the processes
through which ‘the products of technoscience are
made intelligible and portable across boundaries’
(Jasanoff 2004, 38). In particular, it exposes the
extraordinary simplifications embedded in GR4A
value chains that make such ‘high modernist’
schemes more legible so they can move across
transnational policy networks to farmers’fields (Scott
1998). The homogenous representation of women
and men stands out as one such simplification. The
depiction of African food systems as uniformly
low yielding and inefficient is another. A third
is the linear representation of value chains. Such
simplifications are necessary for the framing and
stabilisation of the GR4A model. But as our
preliminary research indicates, a co-production lens
makes visible the roles of power, culture, history and
place in the (re)making of the GR4A.
Conclusion
Belief in a market-based value chain approach to
hunger alleviation has enjoyed a quarter-century long
build up and, as the GR4A attests, is now hegemonic.
Yet, as we have argued, this development model rests
on deeply problematic assumptions and an
oversimplified understanding of African rural worlds.
Stripped to its essence, it assumes a positive, linear
relationship between agricultural productivity and
farmer income, and between farmer income and food
and nutrition security. It assumes sameness and
replicability where there is in fact variation and
difference. It assumes that value chains are
constructed by groups of agents –principally firms,
but also state policy-makers, traders and input dealers
–that exclude farmers. And although it pays attention
to gender, it does so through a utilitarian development
lens, seeking to intervene in gender dynamics from on
high, as an antidote to food insecurity. In our
assessment, these assumptions rest on a shaky
evidence base, and in some cases are downright
faulty. At the very least, it is an empirical question
whether, how frequently, and in what circumstances
they hold.
Rather than starting with a model in which farmers
are considered ‘value chain takers’rather than ‘value
chain makers’, we advocate a different approach
to analysing the potentialities of value chains and
their relationship to food security. This approach
conceptualises value chains as complex assemblages
co-produced by a broad set of actors, including socially
differentiated farmers. Gender is a key axis of social
differentiation, yet it always operates intersectionally
with other sources of differentiation. While all value
chain actors have their own motivations and interests,
they always operate in relation to one another.
Farmers are never passive, and should be a greater
focus of our attention, since their agency has a
direct and immediate influence on the food security
and nutrition of diverse household members. Our
preliminary fieldwork indicates that African
smallholders behave in all sorts of ways that would not
(and could not) have been predicted by the model on
which today’s value chain interventions are based.
Recognising, embracing and theorising this complexity
is the only way to advance an understanding of the
GR4A.
Notes
1 National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project
(grant # 1539833).
2 AGRA, or the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, is a
Nairobi-based grant-making organisation co-founded by the
Gates and Rockefeller Foundations in 2006. Its goal is to
catalyse a new green revolution in Africa.
3 OLAM International is a global agribusiness that specialises
in growing and trading nuts, cocoa, spices, coffee, cotton
and more.
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Supporting Information
Additional Supporting Information may be found in
the online version of this article:
Figure S1. A poster funded by the World Bank’s
Agricultural Sector Support Project for Cote d’Ivoire
suggests that when women obtain secure rights to
land, the welfare of the entire household will
improve. Source: T. Bassett.
The Geographical Journal 2017 doi: 10.1111/geoj.12233
©2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Commentary 7
