What is resilient in Africa’s green revolution? Agricultural intensification, climate change, and agrobiodiversity in Rwanda

Under the umbrella of a ‘new’ Green Revolution for Africa, policies such as Rwanda’s Crop Intensification Program (CIP) aim to transform agriculture from subsistence to commercial. As with green revolutions in Asia and Mexico, agricultural innovations (hybrid seeds, ‘modern’ cultivation techniques, infrastructure, and increased inputs) are promoted as essential catalysts of pro-poor economic growth. With a multi-season study of four Rwandan communities, this article asks what and who is resilient in Africa’s green revolution. Rwanda’s CIP focuses on households as the locus of transforming agriculture to meet regional and national crop productivity targets. We advance the argument that there are fundamental limits to the forms of climate resilience afforded by green revolution land use policies. Our findings illustrate that the CIP has led to decreased social resilience that negatively affects those most vulnerable to climatic shocks. We put forth that intensification policies could promote more climate-resilient livelihoods if they: 1) empower collective and democratic agro-ecological decisions, 2) support smallholder food producers’ locally-rooted strategies of intensification, and 3) recognize the importance of agrobiodiversity to mitigating the negative effects of climatic shocks.