revolution

This year, AGRA, the donor-funded agricultural development initiative formerly known as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

AGRA’s slogan is “sustainably growing Africa’s food systems”, but for years, researchers and farmers have warned that the policies it promotes are having a negative impact on African agriculture.

Our new research provides more evidence to that effect. We have documented how AGRA’s Green Revolution, with its well-funded promotion of commercial seeds, fertilisers and other inputs, has failed to spur the “productivity revolution” promised by its founders.

Worse still, its promotion of monocultures, such as maize, has led to the massive expansion of land dedicated to them. At the same time, more resilient and nutritious local crops, such as millet, are losing ground.

Funding the loss of traditional crops

Hunger continues to increase in Africa, driven by climate change, desertification, conflict and disruptions to international supply lines from international conflicts like the Ukraine war. The Green Revolution promoted by AGRA does not seem to have made much of a difference.

In countries where AGRA has had significant presence, the number of undernourished people has increased by about 60 percent – roughly the same rate as the rest of the continent.

The United Nations is calling for greater attention to “affordable healthy diets”. For Africa’s small-scale farmers, who grow what their families and communities eat, that means more, not less, crop diversity, which is the opposite of what the Green Revolution has produced.

In countries that have participated in AGRA projects, crops such as maize are promoted and funded with billions of dollars in subsidies and investment. Despite that, yields for maize have grown only modestly, just 40 percent over 18 years, well below the 100 percent improvement promised by AGRA.

Some countries, like Malawi and Ethiopia, have seen stronger yield growth for maize, but some, such as Kenya – where AGRA’s headquarters are located – have seen yields decline.

Maize production has soared across participant countries, driven mainly by the massive expansion of plantings as subsidies drive farmers to plant maize on new land.

In contrast, our research shows that traditional African staples such as sorghum, cassava, and groundnuts have lost land and investment. Since AGRA was launched in 2006, 13 countries that have participated have seen a decline in productivity of 21 percent for cassava and 10 percent for groundnuts in total.

But millet – a climate-resilient, nutritious grain – is the crop that has suffered the most. Before 2006, millet was as prevalent as maize in these countries. Since 2006, millet production has fallen 27 percent, while maize production has more than doubled. Millet yields have fallen 17 percent with the lack of investment. And as land allocated to maize production increased 71 percent, land for millet fell 12 percent.

Millet is not some backward crop waiting to be replaced by maize. For generations, it has fed communities across some of Africa’s driest regions. It can withstand heat and drought, grow with relatively few external inputs, and provide nutritious food where other crops struggle.

In 2023, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) celebrated the “Year of Millets”, highlighting the multiple benefits of the crop to the environment and social welfare.

The same is true of many of Africa’s traditional crops – sorghum, fonio, cowpeas, cassava, indigenous vegetables and many others. They are part of the biological diversity of African farming, but also of our cuisines, knowledge and cultures.

At a time of climate change, pushing such crops aside makes particularly little sense. Farmers need more options in their fields, not fewer. A diverse farm spreads risk: when one crop suffers from drought, pests or disease, another may survive. Rotation and diversity of crops help keep soils more fertile.

Valuing diversity

Rhetorically, AGRA now professes to value the very crops that its Green Revolution helped push to the margins. It speaks of diverse, nutritious and climate-adapted crops, and its seed programmes include millet, sorghum, cowpea, groundnut and others.

We welcome serious investment in these crops. It is overdue. But there is no indication that AGRA and other Green Revolution proponents will abandon their chosen monocrops, such as maize. AGRA’s current seed strategy still emphasises improved varieties, certified seeds, faster variety turnover, commercialisation and market-oriented seed systems.

Investment needs to support farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange and develop their seeds, protect crop diversity and indigenous knowledge, and ensure that farmers and communities – not seed markets alone – determine which varieties survive and spread.

African farmers do not need saving, but their crops – millet, sorghum, cowpea, fonio, and other traditional crops need to be rescued from Green Revolution crop-breeders.

When a traditional crop disappears from farmers’ fields, we can lose locally adapted seed varieties, knowledge about how to grow and prepare them and foods that are central to local diets and identities.

This is why the decline of millet should concern us far beyond the millet field. Africa is already dangerously exposed to climate shocks and volatile international food and fertiliser markets. Diversity is one of our greatest protections against those risks. Yet we are subsidising its disappearance.

It is not enough for the UN to call for greater access for all to nutritious diets. For the majority of Africa’s rural populations, who are also among its least food-secure, crop diversity is key to diet diversity. It is time for AGRA, the African Development Bank, foreign donors and African governments to stop subsidising and promoting the crops that are driving the loss of such diversity.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Filmmaker Paul Greengrass is often associated with a cinematic aesthetic colloquially known as “shaky cam” — handheld cinematography enabled by lightweight digital cameras that function a lot like another character in the room, on foot, at eye-level, responding and reacting to action and dialogue the way a person would.

It’s a style that has served him well in modern action thrillers like his installments of the “Bourne” franchise, and films depicting recent real-world events like “Captain Phillips” and “The Lost Bus.” Now, Greengrass applies his signature style to the Middle Ages — can shaky cam work in a medieval movie?

It may seem odd, but it’s a brilliant creative choice when considering that while “The Uprising” is technically about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England, that’s not really what it’s about. It’s about right now.

The shaky cam is intended to jolt us into that awareness. When we pick up with our protagonist, a pathetic ploughman (Andrew Garfield) living a grief-filled and wretched existence, a plague has wiped out half the population. A small group of men hoards wealth and resources, while the peasant class is heavily taxed, laws brutally enforced. As Greengrass lays out the bare facts of this situation with a cinematic style that’s more news documentary than stuffy period piece, the parallels to our own current situation are laid bare.

“The Uprising,” which Greengrass wrote and directed, is told in a fairly simple fashion, with an emphasis on visual storytelling and visceral sensation (the disparate English accents are also lost in the melee of the mob). All we need to know is that the council advising the 14-year-old King Richard II (Woody Norman) conspires while the young royal prays and his mother (Katherine Waterston) glowers. Outside, a bloodthirsty mob armed with farm tools marches on London, led in part by Garfield’s ploughman, who started his own local uprising when he fought back against the taxman. He joins forces with Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), a former soldier, and John Ball (Jamie Bell), a priest deemed heretic, as the crowd demands an audience with the king.

As the chaos unfolds, Greengrass doesn’t pontificate on the morality of these events and, in fact, maintains a rather neutral stance on them for most of the film, withholding judgment. A revolution is not right or wrong for most of “The Uprising.” It is simply inevitable under the conditions the film presents.

The ploughman wants to play by the rules, but it’s how the revolt plays out that radicalizes him. While Greengrass shows us the uprising in all its messy confusion as the logical outcome of oppression, by following our protagonist as he witnesses treachery and deceit, Greengrass ultimately arrives at the belief that revolution is necessary, even in failure, and that freedom is worth more than anything.

The opening and closing of “The Uprising” are bracing and stark in their storytelling — the middle is a bit mushy and confusing. But it’s the performances that carry us through. Garfield, sensitive and earthy, is our bellwether as the events descend into bloody carnage dictated by muddled agendas. When he turns, we turn, and the anguish that Garfield wordlessly conveys is our compass.

Greengrass surrounds Garfield with actors who deliver bigger performances, like Jarvis as the brutish but shrewd Tyler, and Bell as the fervent Ball. Thomasin McKenzie plays a young woman, Alyce, steeped in her own trauma and loss, who attaches herself to the ploughman, and her ability to express wide-eyed, barely contained hysteria and fear is unmatched. Young Norman is riveting as the increasingly dastardly king.

The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 is a fascinating moment because it’s a time when the notion of democracy wasn’t even a twinkle in a feudal servant’s eye. The mob’s actions are frustrating because they’re religiously bound to the king, who they believe is an emissary of God, and desperate to change their day-to-day existence. When those two instincts collide, it’s bound to be complex and conflicting, and Greengrass delivers that with a boots-on-the-ground style.

The murkiness of it all clarifies by the end of the film, not just in terms of its heroes, villains and message, but Greengrass also situates this story within a recognizable cinematic and storytelling history. There’s a thrill as it all comes together. Greengrass might be taking a big swing (of the scythe), but his blade finds its target nevertheless.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Even had you never read Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” or even known of its existence, the odds are good that you have somewhere encountered its much quoted opening and closing lines: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and (spoiler) “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known,” respectively, the latter possibly in the course of a Ronald Colman imitation. (Please do not ask who Ronald Colman is.)

Reckoned to be Dickens’ most popular novel, it has been several times filmed for the big and small screens, going back to 1911 — the big-budget Colman version came in 1935 — but has not been mounted in this century, until now, with a four-part adaptation premiering Sunday on MGM+ in a co-production with BBC One. It stars Kit Harington, whom “Game of Thrones” people know as Jon Snow, as Sydney Carton, a disheveled, cynical, self-loathing, alcoholic, yet clever London lawyer. London is one of the two cities whose tale this is. Paris, before and during the Revolution, is the other.

Daniel West’s adaptation hits the major plot points and select lines of dialogue, but has typically, unavoidably, been streamlined and compressed. Characters disappear, or have their attributes and actions assigned to different characters. But much has been added as well. Most of these alterations are trivial, although one major change, coming near the end, is a very bad idea. I can’t tell you what it is, though.

Francois Civil, left, and Kit Harington in “A Tale of Two Cities.”

(Marcell Piti / MGM+)

Other than that, the most substantial changes are to Lucie Manette (Mirren Mack), the female lead, in order to give her a more active, heroic role in the story, this being 2026. (Not that Dickens didn’t write a heroine or two.) So we meet her, a Frenchwoman raised in England, sneaking out at night to dissect corpses in a sort of one-woman underground medical school — knowledge that will come in handy when Charles Darnay (François Civil), a Frenchman living in London, shows up at the place where she lives, dying from a knife wound acquired in the process of chaperoning into England a young woman in danger from the French ancien régime (the king is still in his counting house); laying him out on the dining room table, she cauterizes the wound.

Darnay has also been tasked with delivering the message “Recalled to life,” which refers to the fact that the father Lucie believed dead has merely been languishing in the Bastille for 18 years and is now out. In the novel, he is simply released, but here he has escaped — or rather, has been escaped, since he is something of a wreck, as you might imagine — and is being hidden at the wine shop of the pre-revolutionary Defarges, Ernest and Thérèse. Like the novel’s first and last lines, Madame Defarge (Roxane Duran), with her knitting needles, has transcended the text into folklore.

“A Tale of Two Cities”

(Marcell Piti / MGM+)

But before a recovering Darnay can clear any of this up, he’s dragged away by English police, accused of spying for the French for the benefit of the Americans — our own revolution is in progress at this point — and put on trial. Lucie, having exhausted all other possibilities, and needing Darnay in order to find her father, hires a very reluctant Carton, who in a trick worthy of Perry Mason, gets him off when a witness cannot tell him and Darnay apart. (Make a note of their resemblance; it will be important later.) By this time, both men are in love with Lucie, which, historical action scenes and social commentary aside, is the real point of the story, which might as easily be titled “A Tale of Three Citizens.”

All this gets the miniseries off to an energetic start. After this, there will be a lot of going back and forth across the Channel; crimes of the aristocracy; Darnay’s own Big Secret revealed; more trials, more imprisonments. Still, though it wakes up when we get to the storming of the Bastille, economically but effectively rendered, and, later the Reign of Terror, in between it can turn into a murky, mopey slog. It is often dark, visually and temperamentally; the music tends to moodiness. The actors speak quietly, as if fearful of being overheard, whether or not there is anyone around to hear, and often regard one another with pained or stunned expressions. It’s not necessarily inappropriate — there’s a lot of death in the book, and in a love triangle, someone is bound to lose, at least in the pre-polyamorous 19th century. But this “Two Cities” does lean into the worst of times.

Nevertheless, as Lucie, Mack makes a consistently vital impression — one can see why everyone’s in love with her. (Harington, the big name here, is less vivid; he’s more interesting before Carton falls for Lucie, when he’s still a bit of jerk and not simply sad most of the time.) And as Madame Defarge , who will become the symbol of the revolution’s bloodthirsty overreach, Duran is splendid; she’s a monster, finally, but layered and human. She has her reasons.

Ten years ago, I went with my older daughter and a group of her classmates to see Gloria Steinem speak. Though they were part of a feminist group recently formed at their all-girls Catholic high school, some were not quite sure who Gloria was, exactly. My daughter knew her mostly as my former “boss”; my first job out of college had been as an editorial assistant at Ms. magazine. That was back in the ‘80s — ancient history.

I was a tiny bit nervous about how the evening would go. Gloria herself was in her 80’s by then; how would she connect with a group of teenagers who had come of age post-post-everything in a social media world of makeup tutorials, fit checks, and so much rage bait?

By being precisely herself, as it turned out. Calm and witty, impassioned and informed, clear-eyed yet hopeful, Gloria enthralled them — and the entire audience — for almost two hours. By the time we left, the girls were ready to follow her anywhere.

“She’s a rock star,” my daughter breathed.

That she was. Gloria Steinem did not invent feminism, not even its second wave, but for many years she was its most recognizable frontwoman. Tall, slender, with (for many years) aviator glasses framed by her signature long, straight hair, she was the Jackie Kennedy of the women’s movement: a physical dismissal of all those childish critics who deride feminists as an army of unlovely and unloved women, devoid of humor and, most likely, surrounded by far too many cats.

Even so, how she looked was beside the point. No feminist I know ever wanted to look like Gloria; we all wanted to be like her. Smart, funny, incisive, generous and, perhaps above all, unflappable.

For an activist organizer, she had a low center of gravity. Her speech was measured, her tone was mellow — even when calling out the most outrageous hypocrisies, the most sinister forms of oppression, she rarely if ever raised it. Though by her own admission she was often furious about many things, her sharpest weapon was always a deadly talent for stating the obvious. “If women could sleep their way to the top, there‘d be a lot more women at the top.” “I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career. ” “A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.” “This is what 40 [or 50] looks like.”

She believed in shaping the future by being fearlessly frank about the present and the past. For more than seven decades, she helped millions strip away the veils of hierarchy, patriarchy and all the stories spun about gendered expectations to confront the actual experience of women’s lives. “If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?”

She never incited anger; she simply pointed out the facts as she saw them and let human nature take its course. “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

Gloria listened as much as she spoke, and with great attention and democracy. When I worked at Ms., she was always running late, invariably having been pulled into some conversation or other. Her assistant groaned over her calendar; Gloria would say “yes” when asked for help, even if it meant being two places at once.

She often came in for staff meetings to which everyone was invited and, when discussing ideas for future issues, would ask for, and attentively listen to, the opinions of even a lowly editorial assistant like myself. Her interest was sincere, astonishing and made for very long meetings. Wherever she went, it was the same. She needed to know what all manner of women thought about a wide variety of topics. More important, she wanted them to learn the habit of speaking up. In a private meeting or a public forum, to colleagues, politicians, friends, the boss or even a feminist icon, she wanted women to be unafraid of saying what they thought.

When I worked at Ms., and for many years after, people would invariably ask me: “What’s Gloria Steinem like?” and it was, and remains, impossible to describe. She was kind when she didn’t need to be, generous with her attention when no one expected it. She didn’t want laws and social constructs to be fairer, less dangerous, more fulfilling for women as a concept; she wanted it for you, for me, for the lady in the back row.

She gave aura but also advice about where to find discount shoes. She instantly claimed any room she entered and then made sure there were snacks. She believed that the world could change, that with work, we could change it. But she also believed in having fun; otherwise why bother?

On the day Gloria Steinem died at 92, I awoke to a text from one of the friends I made all those years ago at Ms.; soon there were four of us on the thread. I had just arrived in New York to take my youngest daughter back to college, and we had planned to meet one of those friends in Union Square at noon. Instead, we met at Gloria’s brownstone and laid flowers along the fence outside her door. It seemed the least we could do.

My youngest never got to hear Gloria speak and, at 19, she is too young to know who Gloria was, exactly. Which was always the point of all that Gloria did. She didn’t want the future to feel beholden to the past; she just wanted it to be better. And despite the recent setbacks, particularly in reproductive rights, and all the work that still has to be done, it is.

There stood my daughter. Like her sister, she never doubts for one minute that she is a first-class citizen, entitled to equal rights, bodily autonomy, basic respect and a life of her choosing. God help the poor souls who try to tell them different.

“She’s a big part of why you are here,” I tell her. “Of why your life at 19 is so better than mine was, and why mine, at 19, was so much better than hers.”

That’s not just a rock star; that’s a revolutionary.