Devex Dish: AGRA enters a new era with Alice Ruhweza at the helm

Few entities hold as much sway over the future of agriculture on the African continent as AGRA.

The African-led, Nairobi-based organization works with national governments and institutions to scale innovations and craft policies that will help smallholder farmers increase their incomes and improve food security. Formerly known as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, it now goes by just its acronym and has been led by Agnes Kalibata for the past decade.

Now, as the ground shifts beneath traditional development aid, Alice Ruhweza has taken the reins. As she stepped into the role of AGRA president on March 1, major long-time donors, namely the United States, were stepping back from the alliance. But the organization was buoyed by fresh grants: $350 million from the Mastercard Foundation to create youth jobs, and $105 million from the Green Climate Fund to reduce post-harvest losses in farming.

Still, Ruhweza faces a tough task: About 70% of sub-Saharan Africans depend on agriculture for their livelihoods — while the continent’s crop yields remain low, food import bills are high, and the impacts of climate change threaten to exacerbate both, my colleague Ayenat Mersie writes.

A Ugandan national who joined AGRA from the World Wide Fund for Nature, Ruhweza brings a focus on biodiversity and conservation to the role.

“I’m an economist by profession, but I spent years at WWF, which recognizes that wildlife lives in production landscapes — often shared with agriculture or mining,” she tells Ayenat. Ruhweza is a systems thinker — not just on food systems, but ecosystems: “I’ve been telling my team that we need to start partnering with conservation institutions, because we know that the work that we do is a solution to their dilemma.”

As for fertilizers, Ruhweza’s position may be music to the ears of those who have criticized AGRA for promoting chemicals and other potentially harmful methods of industrial farming. “The future of fertilizer is organic,” she says. “We can do this and move from dependence on synthetic to organic fertilizer in Africa.” On genetically modified organisms, which have seen backlashes from many African countries, she says: “For me, we do not have a specific position on this other than we provide the information that’s available, and then the governments make decisions. It is a complete sovereign decision of the government on whether or not to use GMOs.”

And as public finance dwindles, Ruhweza offers a clear vision for how AGRA can still scale its work: de-risking private capital to mobilize financing; investing in big new trade corridors such as Lobito and Abidjan, and really working across the full food system in order to transform.

Read: Alice Ruhweza’s vision for AGRA and African agriculture

ICYMI: Beyond the Green Revolution — how AGRA evolved under Agnes Kalibata

Related: Aid cuts spark a rethink of African agriculture rooted in agroecology 

Crop failure

That’s how much farmland in the Gaza Strip is both undamaged and still accessible to Palestinians living under the threat of Israeli attacks, according to an assessment by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The conflict has led to more than 86% of the territory's cropland being damaged.

In the past two years, Gaza has been completely dependent on humanitarian aid. But lesser known is how Gaza was almost self-sufficient in terms of its food production prior to the conflict. 

“They had a very large organic agriculture system at one point in around 2010, the largest organic farm in the world. And they were growing a lot of their own food, a lot of their own poultry, a lot of their own vegetables. So the first thing that Israel did wasn’t to cut off humanitarian aid — it was to destroy the agricultural lands with which Palestinians have been sustaining themselves,” Dr. Tarek Loubani, Medical Director of Glia, said at a media briefing late last month on Gaza’s growing starvation crisis. Israel’s refusal to allow most aid into Gaza is in fact coupled with attacks on farmland and fisheries that portend long-term issues in production that could force Palestinians into aid dependency for years.

The FAO study comes as the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned on July 29 that a “worst-case famine scenario” is rapidly unfolding in the Gaza Strip. While IPC stopped short of a formal famine declaration, it concluded that “mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths” and that “famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.”

Despite daily “humanitarian pauses” by Israel for nearly two weeks now, aid groups and the U.N. say that humanitarian access is still severely restricted. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, says there is “no starvation in Gaza.”

Aid groups are also starting to engage with a new — and often deadly — model of privatized, militarized aid distribution: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which many view as contradicting humanitarian principles of neutrality. Indeed, despite intense criticisms of GHF, groups including the World Food Programme and UNICEF met with GHF last week to see whether and how they might collaborate.

Read: After weeks of tension, UN leaders talk to controversial Gaza aid group

See also: MSF demands Gaza Humanitarian Foundation close for ‘orchestrated killing’ 

From our archive: ‘Nothing is left’ — the collapse of Gaza’s agricultural sector

Firing up production lines

The U.S. State Department has issued a tender for Edesia, a Rhode Island-based producer of ready-to-use therapeutic food, or RUTF, on Aug. 5 — purchasing enough food for about 818,000 malnourished children in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan, and nine other African countries.

It seems to be a part of the department’s broader push to resume purchasing and distributing such products as it absorbs what remains of USAID, with an agency spokesperson stating last Thursday that the U.S. government was providing $93 million in RUTFs to reach nearly 1 million children. That purchase will draw down the “entire prepositioned stock” of RUTFs, the spokesperson added, and support continued production “to meet ongoing needs.”

As we’ve previously reported, Edesia — along with another U.S.-based RUTF producer, Mana Nutrition, in Georgia — has been hit with cancellations, rescissions of those cancellations, and chaos over the last several months. Earlier this year, several of Edesia’s USAID contracts were extended for a limited period of time — but this tender is the first to be issued directly by the State Department, which has taken over the little left of USAID.

The order includes 11,285 metric tonnes of RUTF, a highly fortified peanut paste that can treat severe malnutrition. It will also bring more than 185,535 boxes of RUTF to Nigeria and the Central African Republic, following months of idling in Edesia’s warehouse. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Rhode Island Rep. Gabe Amo that there “were no State Department delays” in getting RUTFs out of his state — even though at that time, another 123,000 boxes of the product were blocked from getting to Sudan.

Those boxes eventually made it to the conflict-torn country in June, where over 1 in 3 children are facing acute malnutrition, according to the World Food Programme.

“Let me be clear, the supply chain disruptions have a human cost. Hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been impacted and it will take us time to catch up,” Edesia’s CEO Navyn Salem wrote in an Aug. 6 newsletter, adding in a separate email that the team has learned “it is critical to have our own supply chains as well as the partnership with the U.S. government.”

Edesia will also be bringing back team members who were laid off earlier this year, and Salem said they were ramping up production schedules to try to produce the RUTFs as quickly as possible.

Background reading: Why are 400,000 boxes of food for malnourished kids stuck in the US?

And don’t miss the deep dive: Food aid cuts leave behind a trail of hunger and uncertainty

Release the flood-Gates

In a recent Devex Pro Briefing, Suzman expanded on how the foundation — which is best known for its global health work — is investing in agricultural research and innovation. “It’s not just agriculture as a sector,” he added. “It’s ensuring that exactly the smallholder farmers, the poorest members of that sector, are benefiting.”

The foundation recently announced it will double its giving in the next 20 years by $200 billion before shutting its doors in 2045. In an era of dwindling traditional sources of aid, that’s left many groups wondering how they can partner with the organization.

Watch: Inside philanthropy’s biggest bet — Gates Foundation CEO on the 2045 exit (Pro)

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Chew on this

Can rice production in Africa keep up with demand? The Africa Rice Initiative is helping farmers reduce flooding and increase yields. [The Guardian]

Thousands of villagers in Vietnam are being offered just a few thousand dollars each to leave land that has provided their livelihood for generations to make way for a Trump family-backed golf course. [Reuters]

A year ago, the United Nations was taking on big ideas such as ending hunger and confronting climate change at its Summit for the Future. Now, it’s contending with big cuts. [Devex]

Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine State are being starved by the Arakan Army, an ethnic armed group. [The New Humanitarian]