“No one is talking about food”: Making agriculture a “business” in Ghana

Abstract

At the turn of the 21st century, a collection of donors created the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to spark a “new” Green Revolution on the African continent. Since its inception, AGRA’s mission has revolved around a series of interventions designed around the idea of “making agriculture a business.” In this paper, I ask how AGRA puts such discourses into practice with a particular focus in Ghana. To do so, I draw on Kuapa, a two-season television show produced by AGRA, organizational literature, and to a lesser extent, interviews, to assess how AGRA materializes its goals in Ghana. Ultimately, I argue that a focus on discourse not only provides insight into how AGRA conceptualizes agricultural transformation, but also how AGRA pursues agronomic, political, and social changes in the countries in which it intervenes.