Millet, sorghum, fonio, Bambara groundnut, cowpea, amaranth, pigeon pea, taro. For decades these crops were treated as the food of the past. Research money, extension, subsidies, and markets went to maize, wheat, and rice. Yet African farmers, most of them women, kept planting them, saving the seed, sharing it with neighbors, and cooking with them. They did it with very little help.

Now, suddenly, the same crops are fashionable. Climate change, poor diets, and tired soils have pushed them into conference halls and donor strategies. I welcome that. But I keep coming back to one question: Who gets to decide what happens to them next?

The question hit me again at a side event on African adapted crops during the Africa Food Systems Forum, hosted by the Africa Adaptation Crops Initiative, the Food Action Alliance, AGRA, TechnoServe, and Bain & Company. I went in encouraged. Before long, the discussion had slipped into a familiar script: raise productivity, formalize seed, mechanize, attract private investment, link farmers to big buyers. I am not against research, processing, or markets. My worry is what happens when crops that African communities developed and protected over generations are treated first as business opportunities. We could change the crop and leave the system exactly as it was.

Let the women who kept these crops alive sit where decisions are taken. And judge success by diets, biodiversity, soil health, incomes, and farmers’ control over seed, not only by tons and dollars.

The same worry applies to the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, known as VACS. It was launched by the US State Department with the African Union and Food and Agriculture Organization to promote diverse, nutritious, climate-adapted crops grown in healthy soils. On paper, it takes neglected crops seriously and brings soil back into the conversation. Both are long overdue. So the issue is not whether to invest, but what kind of investment, and controlled by whom.

Look at who was in the room when VACS was designed. Early research profiling possible “opportunity crops” was backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, and in December 2023 Washington announced $150 million in support for that year. African farmer organizations were not consulted while the program was being planned. Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, whose members have campaigned for years to promote nutritious local crops, was never approached. When the journalist Alexander Zaitchik asked me about it, I had to tell him that nobody from VACS’ leadership or affiliate groups had ever reached out to us or our networks.

Who was at the table instead? Zaitchik’s reporting for Truthdig, from the World Food Prize’s Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, is revealing. Cargill, Bayer, Syngenta, and John Deere are listed as “VACS champions,” alongside the Rockefeller and Gates foundations. The World Food Prize Foundation, where VACS was showcased, is chaired by a former president of Corteva, the seed giant formed from the Dow and DuPont merger. Cary Fowler, the US special envoy who championed VACS, has told audiences that “the answers to the world’s food insecurity issues may lie in for-profit companies.” When the world’s biggest grain, seed, and agrochemical companies are champions of a program on Africa’s seeds, and African farmers are not even asked, we are entitled to ask whose programme it really is.

Zaitchik’s larger point is that VACS, for all its new language, carries the assumptions of the Green Revolution. The crops are different, but outside expertise is still placed above farmers’ knowledge, and yields above food sovereignty. It was telling that at a 2023........

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