Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) President Dr Agnes Kalibata in her office on October 24, 2024.
When Dr Agnes Kalibata, the President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), walks into the board room where the interview with the Nation is to take place she is taken aback by the sight of a video camera.
“I thought you said it would be a print interview,” she says.
She comes off as the kind that says what she means and means what she says. It takes considerable efforts from our photojournalist and her communication team to convince her that journalism has evolved into multimedia.
Dr Kalibata, a towering figure on food security in Africa, is set to leave office after a 10-year stint as the President of AGRA. If farming is both a science and an art, then it has found a perfect crusader in Dr Kalibata, a 59-year-old Rwandan scientist and policymaker.
She has won many awards, including recently being named the 2024 Winner of Justus Von Liebig World Nutrition Award.
It is her work and journey as a policymaker, scientist, and global thought leader for advocating for inclusive, resilient and sustainable food systems in Africa that won her the prestigious award.
Broken food system
Given biennially by the Foundation fiat panis to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to improving world Nutrition, the award is seen as the Nobel Prize of Food & Nutrition.
In this hour-long interview, Dr Kalibata clinically diagnoses what ails Africa’s agriculture and how to fix the continent’s broken food system. She also touches on the intimate relationship she has with her children despite her busy schedule and seeks to put the record straight on questions about alleged discrimination against some AGRA staff.
Although agriculture is the mainstay of Kenya’s economy it has traditionally been left to older people in rural areas. Its low returns, compared to the effort needed, have scared off younger people, most of whom have moved into cities and towns to try their luck in employment and business.
Dr Kalibata is afraid that as long as agriculture remains unattractive to young people, the continent will continue spending billions on imported food. She estimates that Africa spends $34 billion to import such crops as rice, wheat, maize and oil seeds which it could easily produce.
Dr Kalibata, who has a PhD in Entomology, says that Agriculture on the African continent fails in three places--at the productivity level due to poor technology; expensive loans which inhibit investment in quality seeds, extension services, irrigation and mechanisation and poor infrastructure that makes it difficult for smallholder farmers to get their produce to the market.
“Most countries that do a lot of first-class agriculture put huge subsidies on the agricultural sector in a way that makes it possible for people to do farming,” she says.
She doesn’t believe in the cliche of making agriculture sexy to attract young people. Just make agriculture profitable and young people will flock into farming.
She says that at AGRA they have started a programme of initiating young people into agriculture by introducing paid extension services to bridge the knowledge gap.
“The reason young people don’t want to get (into agriculture) is because it is not paying. They will not go into anything that doesn’t pay,” she says.
“With the extension, we can help them access drones to deal with pests, irrigation,” she says.
Redeem smallholder farmers
In the 10 years that she has been at the helm, Dr Kalibata might as well have reshaped AGRA in her own image.
AGRA, a Pan-African organisation that seeks to redeem smallholder farmers on the continent from the back-breaking drudgery of subsistence farming by transforming agriculture into a profitable business, has been synonymous with Dr Kalibata. It has a vision that Africa should be able to feed itself and the world.
Growing up as one of the Rwandan refugees in Uganda, watching her parents break their backs to produce what was only enough for subsistence, the young Kalibata met her first love: the smallholder farmer.
But it was not until later in life after she had achieved much with her first love—returned to Rwanda after the genocide to become its Agriculture and Animal Resources and later President of AGRA—that she found her second love: her children.
Although she finds herself working from 7am to 7pm, she insists that weekends are strictly for family. She takes her children out over the weekend and when it is time for their school exams, she takes a week off to revise with them.
“Actually, if I had time, I would teach them myself. Lucky for them I don’t have the time,” she says. “Because if your mother is teaching you to pass an exam, it is not very easy.”
But it is her love for smallholder farmers, who are the majority in Kenya and Africa, that is infectious, especially for those who didn’t grow up on farms.
She says her appreciation of farming came from realising the disparity between what happens in the real world of farming and what happened on their small farm in the village in Uganda.
AGRA has been trying to fill that gap through what is technically known as crop intensification.
“Recognising that there is so much we could have done with the land we had; there is so much we could have produced; there is so much we could have been part of. But we didn’t because those things were not coming to us,” she says of the parents’ farming.
Then President Paul Kagame, her role model, made her minister for Agriculture, offering her an opportunity to put her plan into practice. She launched an agricultural transformation journey in Rwanda that endeared her to the rest of the world and earned her current job.
As the agriculture minister she wanted to get every farmer to access what it takes for them to be part of the agricultural revolution.
She also pushed for land consolidation. For every 500 hectares, every farmer on that land would receive what they required in terms of seeds, fertilisers and organised markets around them.
She introduced crop intensification by offering them the right type of fertilizer, seeds and even technology.
“We had a major revolution. Our food production went from a deficit to 11 percent growth in nearly two years.”
Even though success stories dominate her decade at AGRA, she has also had to deal with controversies. A recent one has been claims on social media of discrimination against Kenyans.
There were accusations that AGRA, whose headquarters are in Kenya, does not employ enough Kenyans and that expatriates tend to be paid better than locals.
“AGRA employs a lot of Kenyans,” she says, adding that of the 300 professional workforce, 50 per cent are Kenyans.
Of the 11 senior officials that report to her, five are Kenyans, including Dr Hamadi Iddi Boga, a former Principal Secretary in President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration, who is currently AGRA’s Vice President for Programme Delivery.
On payment, she says AGRA’s pay scale recognises expertise when recruiting.
“There is no way a Kenyan will be put outside a pay band just because she is a Kenyan,” she says. The difference comes with some benefits, with the organisation offering higher housing and education benefits for the expatriates. Dr Kalibata explains that on the flip side Kenya has the highest number of workers deployed outside their country of origin among the 12 countries where AGRA has a presence.
AGRA has also been accused of dealing in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
She insists AGRA does not deal with GMOs but does conventional breeding using hybrid seeds which she believes still have huge potential in increasing yields as they are resistant to diseases and have better uptake of nutrients. Only 30 per cent of farmers have optimally adopted conventional breeding, she estimates.
“If we were doing that (conventional breeding) very well on this continent, we would be a rich continent. We are doing it, but we are not doing it at a sufficient scale,” she says.
But there is a place for GMOs nonetheless, she reckons.
The accusation that AGRA is doing GMO might be due to their strategic partnership with the Gates Foundation, which is one of the strategic partners under the Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA).
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have invested in some companies rethinking food production and have endorsed the use of genetically modified seeds as one way to increase farming productivity and feed more people globally.
In 2010 the Gates Foundation Trust invested about $23 million in Monsanto, the genetically modified seed and chemical company, though it sold its shares the next year following outcry from environmental groups.
But while The Gates Foundation, led by billionaire Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has supported initiatives related to GMOs, he has also invested in a variety of other agricultural projects and technologies.
However, the world, and Africans specifically, might soon need to have a change of heart on the controversial topic of GMO.
“When I look at drought, the challenges we are trying to deal with drought, the way we are going, you might find that those commodities are the only commodity that might offer the ability for us to survive some of these challenges.”
“So, are you going to allow people to starve or are you going to adopt technology that can save people?”
Towards the end of 2022, President William Ruto overturned a 10-year ban on the importation or cultivation of genetically modified crops (GMO) in the country.
Dr Kalibata believes in strong institutions as a bulwark against corruption and does not hide her admiration for her President Paul Kagame.
“I have appreciated his leadership on the role of institutions. He really puts a lot of emphasis on the role of institutions. I have come to appreciate that leaders come and go but institutions stay — they must be strong.”
With strong systems, she says they have not had to worry about corruption at AGRA.
“I just think that corruption happens because of a lack of systems. But when you have systems in place, people respect it,” she says.
