Towards a green modernization development discourse : the new green revolution in Africa

Since the Rio+20 conference, 'greening' economies and growth has been key in international politics. Leading policy actors and businesses frame the emerging green economy as an opportunity to realize a triple-bottom line – people, planet and profit – and support sustainable development. In practice, two key trends stand out: in the global North, the main component of the green shift seems to imply technological and market-based solutions in the renewable energy sector. While this is also important in the global South, here green economy implementation is often interpreted as environmental protection along with modernization of, and shifts in access to and control over, natural resources ('green sectors'). In the case of the latter, combined with persisting high rates of poverty, we claim that the post-Rio+20 context has revitalized a 'green' version of modernization to become the leading discourse and approach within international development; namely green modernization. A wide range of development initiatives across the global South – with significant support from international businesses amidst a general private turn of aid – are framed in this light. We use the new, green revolution in Africa to illustrate how modernization discourses are reasserted under the green economy. What is new at the current conjuncture is the way in which powerful actors adopt and promote green narratives around long-standing modernization ideas. They recast the modernization trope as 'green.' In particular, we focus our discussion on three linked components; technology and 'productivism', the role of capital and 'underutilized' resources, and, lastly, mobility of land and people.


Introduction
"We need a Green Revolution in a Green Economy, but one with a capital G" said Achim Steiner, former Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (Deen 2009).His remarks -presented at the Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Nairobi in 2009 during the launch of the report The environmental food crisis -represents an emerging trend combining the green economy, which became the main focus of the Rio+20 conference in 2012, with calls for a new, green revolution in Africa.This conceptual fusion -which resonated across the development industry as well as the private sector -proposes a 'greener' repetition of the original Green Revolution (the Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) 1996; Conway 1997) to feed a growing world population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050 sustainably (Gates 2009;Horlings and Marsden 2011;Patel 2012).
Steiner's remarks reflect a more general environmental concern in recent decades.Particularly since the Rio+20 conference, 'greening' economies and growth has been at the center of international politics and economies.Leading policy actors and businesses often frame the emerging green economy as an opportunity express worry about what they see as substantial blind spots when it comes to issues of power and distribution (Clapp, Newell and Brent 2018;Holt-Giménez and Altieri 2012;McKeon 2015;Moseley 2017;Patel 2012).Indeed, these are core concerns of political ecologists (Moseley 2017;Peet, Robbins and Watts 2011;Robbins 2012;Tilzey 2018).As Moseley (2017) argues, a political ecology approach is useful to unmask the power structures and key assumptions underpinning the new green revolution.In this article we seek to do this by situating and historizing the new green revolution for Africa within a wider green modernization development discourse.
This article is primarily based on a review of relevant academic and policy literature.In addition, research undertaken since 2015 at local and national level in Tanzania, as well as at the international level through key stakeholder interviews and conference ethnography, provide an overall contextual background to our discussion. 2 Following this introduction, the article proceeds with an outline of modernization thinking to illustrate its origins, persistence and contemporary 'green' turn in development discourses.After a brief discussion of this green turn in development policy, we demonstrate in the last part of the article how an emerging green modernization discourse manifests in the new green revolution for Africa.In particular, we focus our discussion on three interlinked components that we see as key to the discourse; technology and 'productivism', the role of capital and 'underutilized' resources, and mobility of land and people.Finally, we provide some concluding reflections.

From modernization to green modernization
Over time, the concepts of modernization and development have carried variegated meanings.Contemporary usage dates from the commencement of the post-war 'development project' (McMichael 2012).However, its historical roots go back to a patchwork of ideas rooted in 16 th and 17 th century European enlightenment philosophy.
During this time, what Patel and Moore (2017: 46) describes as an "intellectual revolution" took place, which set the stage for dualistic ways of understanding the world: seeing nature as an entity distinct from society.The Cartesian ontology that underwrites this divide distinguished between res cogitans (thinking things) and res extensa (extended things).The former refers to humans, while the latter describes all extended things; those that are not human and therefore not thinking things.In Descartes' view, res cogitans had to become the "lords and masters" (Descartes 1985: 142-143) of res extensa.This ontological construction underpins much of the enlightenment philosophy: "science should as it were torture nature's secrets out of her" (Bacon n.d. in Amrine 2010).This dichotomy has been considered foundational in shaping capitalist development -including the Green Revolution (Eddens 2017) -through its organization of the world in a way that mirrors the power and interests of some humans (the 'civilized' belonging to society) at the expense of others (the 'savages' belonging to nature) (Patel and Moore 2017;Peet and Hartwick 2015). 3 Cartesian dualism influenced early thinking around modernization and development.Ideas of progress combined environmental determinism with the rationalist aptitude of some humans to master 'nature's secrets' through science and technology (Parsons 1973;Peet and Hartwick 2015;Spencer 1898).Parsons (1973) later referred to this as society's 'adaptive upgrading'; a process by which the application of the rationalist mind to nature prompts a gradual differentiation of special industries from agriculture (Goldthorpe 1975).These ideas have ultimately spelled out an assumed geographic binary between 'modern' cores and peripheries of 'tradional backwardness'.By progressively controlling nature, the cores of modernity exemplified the 'progress' towards which peripheries locked in the pre-scientific chains of tradition should aim, and was also endowed with competitive advantages over them.
The rule of (some) humans over nature and the resulting 'separation' from it was evidence of progress and a manifestation of modernity.Embedded in a wider cycle of frontier expansion over capitalism's longuedurée, the 'core of modernity' saw as its moral imperative to proliferate the fruits of its scientific progress and liberate the inferior humans from their backwardness -first via colonialism.As French colonial politician and historian, Albert Sarraut, wrote in 1923: It should not be forgotten that we are centuries ahead of them, long centuries during whichslowly and painfully, through a lengthy effort of research, invention, meditation and intellectual progress aided by the very influence of our temperate climate -a magnificent heritage of sciences, experience and moral superiority has taken shape, which makes us eminently entitled to protect and lead the races lagging behind us.(in Rist 2008: 58) 4   Then secondly through 'development'.

Modernization theory for development
"… we must embark on a bold new program", President Truman (1949) said towards the end of his inauguration speech, …for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas […].Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace.And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.
Truman's speech signaled the launch of the development project (McMichael 2012) and eloquently reflects the global level schism between primitive and prosperous industrial-capitalist areas.The distinction in enlightenment philosophy between nature and society finds its contemporary discursive representations in the backward/advanced, traditional/modern and underdeveloped/developed binaries that permeate 'development.' Modernization theory sought to describe the key mechanisms that drive the emergence of modern institutions in countries.Development in this context, as today, was defined according to schisms, which, in the words of Bernstein (1971: 147), depicts "modernization as a process in which modern elements accumulate and traditional elements are displaced."Development was assumed to be synonymous with most of what was considered Western -mental models (rationalism), culture and economic and political institutions -and thus modern (Peet and Hartwick 2015).Economist and US government advisor Walt W. Rostow's influential book, Stages of economic growth -a non-communist manifesto, provided the blueprint (1960; Figure 1).Rostow's evolutionary theory of development accentuated economic growth both as a means and as an end, with the ultimate telos being signified by societies of 'high mass consumption.'The West, and US in particular, epitomized the consumerist economy towards which all other societies should aspire.Rostow (1960).Lewis (1954) claimed that the global traditional-modern duality was also a feature salient to economies within the global South.There was the modern (capitalist) sector coexisting alongside a traditional (subsistence) sector yet to be 'captured' by the progressive values of capitalism (Hydén 1980;Lewis 1954).According to Hydén (1980), the traditional sector was governed by a non-entrepeneurial mentality -an "economy of affection" -that impedes the expanded reproduction of capital necessary for industrial development. 5The key feature of the dual economy, as advanced by Lewis (1954), was the ostensibly low productivity of the traditional sector relative to the modern, denoting overall productivity losses in the economy.This suggested that living standards and the overall performance of the economy would be improved -if 'fructified' by capital to fill development 'financing gaps' (Easterly 1999;Lewis 1954: 147) -via a gradual labor migration towards the modern sector.The mission of development became to capture and modernize uncaptured economies (Hydén 1980).
To Lewis (1954), the uncaptured subsistence sector represented a cheap pool of "unlimited supplies of labor" and embodied an opportunity for capitalists in 'advanced' areas to alleviate falling rates of accumulation through capital exports. 6Capital inflow would in turn contribute to increased saving rates and generate cycles of re-investable capital and raising productivity and incomes (Galenson and Leibenstein 1955;Lewis 1954).Indeed, the idea of migrating out of the traditional sector finds its equivalent in contemporary calls for investments in the global South and represents -with other "cheap things" (Patel and Moore 2017)a key component in capitalism's continuously expanding frontiers.
In general, modernization theories explain the "accumulation of modern elements" in society (Bernstein 1971) as a relationship and process of diffusion across the binary divide (Mouzelis 1980). 7Lewis argued that 'underdeveloped' countries were characterized by …not one island of expanding capitalist employment, surrounded by a vast sea of subsistence workers, but rather a number of such tiny islands…We find a few industries highly capitalized […] side by side with the most primitive techniques [and] a few highly capitalized plantations, surrounded by a sea of peasants.But we find the same contrasts also outside their economic life.There are one or two modern towns […] and villages which might almost belong to another planet.There is the same contrast even between people; between the few highly westernized, trousered, natives, educated in western universities, speaking western languages, and glorying in Beethoven, Mill, Marx or Einstein, and the great mass of their countrymen who live in quite other worlds.Capital and new ideas are not thinly diffused throughout the economy; they are highly concentrated at a number of points, from which they spread outwards (1954: 147-148).
Similarly, Hoselitz (1953: 197) argued that cities modeled after urban centers of the West displayed a "spirit different from that of countryside."Urbanization and what he referred to as 'generative cities', was vital to overcome 'traditionalism' and spur innovation, technological advancement and growth (Hoselitz 1955).
In other words, originating from islands of progress within a sea of tradition, modern elements are projected to diffuse "across the map, cascading down urban hierarchies, and funnelling along transport routes" (Peet and Hartwick 2015: 147).8Political intervention by 'underdeveloped' countries adopting freer markets to allow capital inflows could further galvanize the process (Easterly 1999;Eggen and Roland 2013;Lewis 1954). 9he metaphor of the dual economy, and modernization theories more generally, systematically conceals how modern and traditional sectors/areas are entangled in symbiotic and asymmetric relationships (Bernstein 1971).

Spatial blind spots: the politics and violence of modernization
Modernization theory exhibits a notable 'spatial' blind spot.Its Eurocentrism deifies the global supremacy of Western mental models and institutions, but systematically turns a blind eye to how the 'rise of the West' has been shaped by global patterns of dispossession, resource transfers and unequal market relations.Rather than simply occurring through internal processes as implied by 'stages of growth' theories (Rostow 1960), 'Western modernization' took place progressively and violently, externalizing agricultural production to colonies.10This inherent blind spot -as noted in particular, by dependency and world-system analysts (e.g.Frank 1979;Wallerstein 2004) -typifies a certain form of power exertion in the development project via depolitication: that is, "by constructing a universe of meaning in which the specific deficiencies that are to be rectified by development are portrayed as purely technical problems and the interventions through which this is to be done as purely technical solutions" (Nilsen 2016: 272).Rather than understanding social impoverishment and/or environmental devastation as outcomes of specific power relations, such questions are 'rendered technical', and thus 'simultaneously rendered nonpolitical' (Li 2007: 7).
These underlying spatial and political dimensions of capitalist modernization were central themes in the work of Karl Polanyi.In his critique of liberal capitalism, Polanyi (1944) describes modernizationunderstood as the move in Europe from preindustrial to industrial societies -as a process of gradual 'disembedding' and commodification.Drawing centrally on Marx's (1887) theorization of capitalism (Prudham 2013), Polanyi argued that this process relied on the decoupling of labor and land (nature) from the socio-ecological systems in which they are embedded.11This included steps to mobilize land (e.g. via enclosure laws) alongside technological intensification of agriculture and in the process forming the 'surplus labor' force that Lewis (1954) referred to: "farming was business, and …those who were poor must clear out" (Polanyi 1944: 192;Stroshane 1997).Referring to Jeremy Bentham who stated that the condition most favorable to (capitalist) modernization exists "when there are no entails, no unalienable endowments, no common lands, no right redemptions, no tithes", Polanyi stated that 'disembedding' processes were purposeful and strategic.
The enclosure laws and land consolidation measures in England in the 18 th and 19 th centuries were regarded by Polanyi as a "revolution of the rich against the poor" (1944: 37).To Marx (1887) this marked the original moment of 'primitive accumulation' -expropriation of producers from their means of production (labor formation) and the emergence of a capitalist class -in the history of capitalism. 12The system gradually expanded via resource appropriation in subtropical regions signifying the application of an industrial/agricultural division of labor on a world scale (Frank 1979;Friedman and McMichael 1989;Marx 1887;Polanyi 1944). 13This underscores the blind spots intrinsic to mainstream accounts of modernization: rather than being an internal, national and 'natural' process, it rests upon a global socio-ecological relationality with winners and losers.Harvey (2003) later introduced the concept of 'accumulation by dispossession' to describe accumulation as an ongoing process in the reproduction of capitalism.
Polanyi emphasized that complete 'disembeddedness' was a utopian mission.No society could absorb the complete socio-ecological destruction associated with the 'satanic mill' of unregulated capital.Hence, the perpetual pursuit of exchange-value would inevitably incite counter-forces -formal and informal social organizations and movements -pushing to re-embed the market in a system of social and environmental regulations.14This 'double-movement', as Polanyi calls it, is in continuous tension and lies at the crux of capitalist development.To Harvey (2014) this dynamic symbolizes capitalism's elasticity and potential for expanded reproduction in the face of social and environmental pressures.

Ecological blind spots and modernization today: from brown to green
Ecological issues have been neglected in most conceptions of development and modernization.Arguably a hangover stemming from the Cartesian worldview, the ecological side-effects of capitalist modernization have been reduced to 'externalities' and thus shifted across the dualistic divide.However, these 'externalities' periodically strike back; as Patel and Moore (2017: 21) write: "…the modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at the frontier, crises that resulted from human and extrahuman life inserting itself" into the calculus of production.Said differently, capitalist modernization evolves through frontiers, expanding into new spheres and spaces in response to externalities and in the process creating new sites and relations of power.To Harvey, frontiers appear as short-term 'fixes' to capital's internal contradictions (1981,2001,2014).Externalities that strike back mobilize capital to develop new strategies for accumulation via technological or spatial fixes.This logic, in our view, is the raison d'être behind the green economy and is reflected in leading institutions' policy documents on green growth (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 2009; UNEP 2011a). 15y the 1970s (with 'limits to growth') and 1980s (with 'sustainable development'), the ecological question was on the global agenda.The environmental costs associated with development prompted calls for the incorporation of environmental issues in economic and development planning (Pearce, Markandya and Barbier, 1989).Yet, the ecological question garnered limited attention until the late 2000s (Tienhaara 2013).Intersecting crises in climatic and environmental systems along with food price increases and the global financial downturn, provoked increased comprehension among governments and civil society about the urgency to stake out a 'new path' that aligns the global economy with environmental issues.The emerging green economy framework (and the related concept of green growth) as conceptualized in a variety of policy documents by actors such as UNEP (2011b), World Bank (2012) and OECD (2009,2011,2012) -is understood as a new frontier; that is, environmental and climatic change is conceived as an opportunityrather than crisis -to create new zones of interaction between capital and various forms of nature.At this frontier, (green) economic activities promise triple-bottom lines -people, planet and profits -in a new 'enlightened capitalism' (White 2013).
In the context of the 'environmental turn' during the 1980s, new approaches emerged within environmental sociology around the concept of eco-modernization (see review by Mol and Spaargaren 2000).This reformist perspective generally views the ecological scarcity induced by modernization as a "design fault" (Spaargaren and Mol 1992: 329) and opportunity to innovate and devise new technologies in a 'greener' direction.Gleeson and Low (1998) summarize the three main tenets of eco-modernization as 1) the ecologization of production, 2) market and regulatory reforms that reflects ecological priorities, and 3) the 'greening' of social and corporate values and practices.
Eco-modernization assumes that ecological sustainability is well attuned with growth (by decoupling) and 'modernization' (York and Rosa 2003), and supporters believe firmly in "the self-corrective potential of capitalist modernization" (Gleeson and Low 1998: 165).Going further into capitalist modernization and industrialization is, in other words, not a problem, but a solution that "offers the best option for escaping from the global ecological challenge" (Spaargaren and Mol 1992;York and Rosa 2003: 273).From this view, ecomodernization emerges as the ultimate evolutionary stage of development in accordance with the environmental Kuznetz curve (Stern 2004).The implicit implication is that eco-modernization is something countries 'do' once reaching a certain threshold of affluence.
Hence, the eco-modernization discourse focuses on the global North and how to devise and deploy technological improvements to an already existing industrial sector.Consequently, its application beyond the global North has been negligible (Adams 2008).The Rio+20 green economy conception reflects to a great extent the same discursive trends as in eco-modernization.However, the green economy discourse is more global and explicitly incorporates (green) development in the global South.

Green economy, development and green modernization
According to UNEP (2011a: 16), the main rationale of the green economy is "to enable economic growth and investment, while increasing environmental quality and social inclusiveness."While these ideas cover many areas, the practical focus remains on technological and market-based solutions.Leading development institutions consider the green economy to embody the promise of a "new development paradigm" that paves the way for a "great, green technological transformation" (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) 2011: v).This new agenda appears to reassert development as modernization with a green profile: it is in this context we identify an emerging green modernization development discourse.
Influenced by the same Cartesian ontology, the green modernization development discourse advances green incarnations of dominant modernization narratives.Its focus is, in particular, on commodification and modernization of 'green' sectors, with resulting shifts in access to, and control over, natural resources in the global South (Bergius et al. 2018;Buseth 2017; UNEP 2011a).The conception of green modernizationrelative to eco-modernization -attempts to capture these dynamics, prompted in large part by a new institutional context of the green economy that insists on a combination of tha application of technology, continued productivity growth and private capital to set green development trajectories in motion (Bailey and Wilson 2009;OECD 2009OECD , 2011; UNEP 2011a; World Economic Forum (WEF) 2010).
As Green (2015: 632) notes, the "current incarnation" of the growth and modernization agenda valorize, in particular, "private business as development catalyst."After the converging crises of the late 2000s, Green (2015: 630) writes, international development funding was reprioritized towards the private sector in support of "for profit-driven economic growth within a context of globalization."As Bergius et al. (2018) argue, this turn of aid and development towards the private sector can be seen as a key vehicle by which capital's spatial-fix to new resource frontiers is enabled in response to an accumulation crisis.In this context, 'green sectors' -for example agriculture, forestry or carbon/biodiversity offsets -have over the last decade become important outlets for (often aid-supported) private capital as part of a general cycle of 'material expansion' in contemporary capitalism (McKeon 2014;Kröger 2013Kröger , 2015;;World Bank 2013).The growing capacity of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) since the financial crisis, whose primary aims are to incentivize and support private sector investments, is an important signifier of this private turn (Currey 2014;Kwakkenbos 2012). 16rom the perspective of green modernization, the 'underdevelopment', 'traditionality' or 'backwardness' of countries in the global South tend to be implicitly expressed as an advantage in the form of 'untapped markets' or 'underutilized' land and natural resources that can be linked with the stock of capital, knowledge and technology accumulated in the global North.This would, in theory, allow developing countries the possibility of "tunneling through" the detour suggested by the environmental Kuznets curve in their quest for development and modernization (Adams 2008: 120).Renowned professor and development economist, Carlos Lopes, aptly sums up this perspective in a recent op-ed where he explains how Africa "can avoid the polluting stage of industrialization" by making an "impala-like leap into a green, industrial economy" (Lopes 2017).However, absent from the green modernization discourse are questions of power, rights and distribution, hence rendering technical (Li 2007) challenges and processes which are inherently political.
These trends are visible, in particular, in discussions around contemporary food and agricultural development.Within the wider green economy context of the last decade a number of interconnected largescale agricultural initiatives have brought together a diverse set of actors -philanthrocapitalists, donors, governments, corporations and agricultural research centers -that promise poverty and food insecurity reduction alongside environmental protection and to achieve a new green revolution in Africa.Both in their framing and proposed solutions, these initiatives amalgamates under repacked and green versions of modernization.

The new green revolution in Africa as green modernization
It is "Africa's turn", a 2006 text from the Rockefeller Foundation narrates, to reap the benefits of the advanced agricultural science associated with the original Green Revolution.However, the foundation continues, more than a "triumph of unfettered science", the original Green Revolution was, at its origins, a strategic act of philanthropy, enlisting experts, government, and ultimately local scholars and farmers in a carefully wrought partnership that grew geometrically-and deliberately-over many years.Science, donations, and market forces all played an indispensable part; but all were guided, in the first instance, by a philanthropic plan (Rockefeller Foundation 2006: 4).
That plan, which materialized first in Mexico, and then further into Latin-America and Asia, involved funding research for industrial agriculture and the introduction of high-yielding variteties of staple grains, agro-chemical inputs and irrigation that resulted in significant aggregate yield increases.These transformations have been widely celebrated as the triumph of science over the Malthusian trap (Malthus 1998(Malthus [1798]]) and culminated in the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 to the Revolution's most prominent scientist, Norman Borlaug.
However, while yields increased, the wider social and environmental implications of the Green Revolution are much more intricate than the win-world narrative presented by the Rockefeller Foundation (Eddens 2017;Freebairn 1995;Holt-Giménez and Altieri 2012;Patel 2012;Pimentel and Pimentel 1990).17Nonetheless, after lauding the philanthropic powers that wheeled the original Green Revolution in motion, the Foundation continues in its 2006 text by declaring that "a similarly decisive initiative from philanthropy […] could well spark a new Green Revolution, this time for Africa" (2006: 4). 18In partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation went on to launch the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) -registered as an NGO and a key actor in the institutional framework that makes up the new green revolution (Daño 2007). 19 Contemporary political economies of food and agriculture differ from those in 1960s and 1970s.Whereas the original Green Revolution arose on the premise of strong state support, the milieu in which the new green revolution for Africa expands is characterized by the spread since the 1980s of neoliberal political agendas and market-based approaches that have put smallholders under severe constraints (Dawson et al. 2016).The role of the state in the new green revolution has, in other words, shifted towards becoming primarily a facilitator of conducive business environments to allow the private sector and large agribusinesses to take on a leading role through investments (Moseley 2017).Indeed, this asserts the prevailing private turn of aid in which businesses and markets are considered the principal 'development catalysts' in the spaces opened up by neoliberal structural adjustment policies.In this context, the leading view among proponents of a new green revolution is that rural transformation and poverty alleviation will be private sector led and achieved indirectly "through trickle-down effects from an agricultural boom" (Dawson et al. 2016: 205).As such, the new green revolution extends a productivist notion that sees hunger predominantly as a supply-side issue, rather than a problem of access to resources (Moseley 2017;Lappé 2012).
The term 'Green Revolution' was first coined by USAID administrator William Gaud in 1968 (Gaud 1968).As Spitz ([1987] 2011: 42) writes: "'Green', of course, was implicitly opposed to 'red' and was signaling, like a flag, that social reform was not necessary, since technical means in agriculture (evoked by 'green') alone were supposed to solve the problem of hunger."The 'green' flag in the new green revolution has an expanded meaning and also incorporates ecological concerns.Already in 1997, Gordon Conway, then newly elected president of the Rockefeller Foundation, called for a "doubly green revolution" (Conway 1997), essentially making the case for an "ecologically-sound replay" of the first (Patel 2012: 37).Ismail Seregeldin, then head of CGIAR, went even further, calling for a "thrice green revolution: green for productivity, green for environmental sustainability, and green for increased income" (Holt-Giménez 2006: 156).This expanded 'greeness' in the new green revolution answers to the triple bottom line advanced under the green economy and arguably opens up new 'green' spaces for accumulation (for example via climate-smart agriculture (Newell and Taylor 2018) as part of what Friedman (2005) has conceptualized as the corporate-environmental food regime. 20hether portrayed as 'doubly green' or 'thrice green', the new green revolution represents an eloquent example of 'green modernization'.Informed and justified by neo-Malthusian thinking, its stated objective is development through poverty reduction and food security, it has a strong green rhetoric and it is private sector led and capital/techno-centered constituting a wide array of public-private investment platforms.In the light of contemporary environmental and climatic challenges, the new green revolution has an expanded purpose, but the core remains unchanged.Within the context of the emerging green modernization discourse, the new green revolution, we argue, evolves at the interface of three interlinked narratives around technology and productivism, 'surplus nature' and capital deficits, and population trends.To these we now turn to illustrate how 'modernization' is reinforced in international aid and development under the banner of the 'green economy'.

Technology, 'productivism' and 'sustainable intensification': Feeding the world while saving nature
The new green revolution is infused by a steadfast belief in the power of science and technology to 'feed the world' in an era of climate change (Collier 2008;Rockefeller Foundation 2006;WEF 2018). 21There is a sense of optimistic evolutionism to this belief; target countries are destined to climb the development ladder by adopting technocratic solutions to their 'under-development' -a condition which is considered to contribute to unsustainable practices.Only by getting the 'right policies' in place to support the diffusion of the 'right technologies' to the 'right farmers' can African countries generate momentum for development and break the fetters of the past (see Figure 2 below) (Bushell 2014).This is underpinned by assertion using a particular blend of Malthusian and Ricardian inspired narratives of absolute and relative scarcity in the tripartite relationship between food production, population growth and the environment (Dawson et al. 2016;Scoones et al. 2014). 22n particular, normative interpretations of the '9 billion people by 2050' challenge -the assumed need to double food production -have been widely and strategically adopted as a discursive device by institutions and businesses promoting a new green revolution (Bushell 2014;Rockefeller Foundation 2006;Tomlinson 2013).The imperative to double food production to avoid a potential Malthusian downfall has given renewed impetus to a politics of productivism among governments, development institutions and corporations in the approach to food security (Horlings and Marsden 2011;McKeon 2015;Tilzey 2018).Through the 'productivist' lens, smallholders are found lacking in terms of scientific knowledge and 'yield gaps' which can be resolved via gradual adoption of the right technologies -developed and devised by large-scale agribusiness corporations -in the progress towards becoming 'advanced' farmers motorizing development (see Figure 2).Bill Gates sums up this approach thus: The metrics here are pretty simple.About three-quarters of the poor who live on these farms need greater productivity, and if they get that productivity we'll see the benefits in income, we'll see it in health, we'll see it in the percentage of their kids who are going off to school.These are incredibly measurable things.The great thing about agriculture is that once you get a bootstrap -once you get the right seeds and information -a lot of it can be left to the marketplace.(Gates 2013  While 'productivism' has been the dominating approach to global food security in the post-war context of the original Green Revolution (Horlings and Marsden 2011), the new green revolution is strongly influenced by environmental and climatic stresses.Thus, contemporary notions of productivism develop within the wider frame of the green economy via vaguely defined, overlapping and interchangeably used concepts such as 'climate-smart agriculture' and/ or 'sustainable intensification' (McKeon 2015;Newell and Taylor 2018;Perfecto, Vandermeer and Wright 2009;The Royal Society 2009;Tilzey 2018;Tittonell 2014;Westengen et al., 2017;WEF 2010).
Advocates of the new green revolution in Africa particularly emphasize the Malthusian dilemma -that agricultural growth to date has come at the expense of forested land -and that more intensive (usually branded 'climate-smart') farming practices can address productivity (food security), climate and biodiversity challenges (Dawson et al. 2016;Taylor 2018;Yara 2015).In short, according to dominant framings, this entails producing more food from less land and not necessarily less inputs (Westengen et al. 2017). 23Hence, 'smart' and 'intensified' farming should make use of all available modern technology -including chemical fertilizers and latest advancements in genetic modification -to control and 'outsmart' nature (Borras Jr and Franco 2018;ETC Group 2015;McKeon 2015;Tittonell 2014).The fertilizer industry in particular has been at the forefront of the multiple and interlinked agricultural initiatives currently being rolled out under the new green revolution as climate-smart.Spearheaded by the Norwegian, partly government owned, fertilizer giant Yara, 24 the industry upholds fertilizers as the 'smart' link between intensification and sustainability.Consequently, the industry is "pleased with the new and aptly coined term 'sustainable intensification'" (International Fertilizer Association (IFA) 2012: 5) and "fully supports and implements the concept" (Yara n.d.-c).This agro-industrial view of intensification stands in contrast to the classic Boserupian model -also referred to as autonomous intensification -which predicates agricultural intensification occurring via population growth and subsequently more labor intensive, rather than capital intensive, production techniques (Boserup 1965;Tiffen, Mortimore and Gichuki 1994).
To Yara (2015: 4), intensified and "modernized, high-yielding farming" is smart in the sense that it is the only way to enhance productivity to feed 9 billion and simultaneously prevent "an area the size of most of Western Europe […] [to] be converted to farmland -releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gases" (2015: 12) and leading to "loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services" (2015: 4). 25 Indeed, these rhetorics -the so called Borlaug hypothesis (Angelsen and Kaimowitz 2001a) -epitomize the mainstream discourse around climate-smart and intensified agriculture and similar initiatives under the new green revolution.
The narrative around 'sustainable intensification' -referred to as an oxymoron by Marsden ( 2010)has been strongly challenged and critiqued by both environmental organizations and academics (e.g.Collins and Kirtana 2012;Kremen 2015;Perfecto and Vandermeer 2010;Struik et al. 2014;Tittonell 2014).Three key interlinked facets of this debate are important to our purpose.First, by rendering questions around sustainable agriculture and global food security as predominantly technical, it disguises underlying political economic relations of power -who wins and loses and how (Bernstein 2010) -associated with input market and technology upscaling (Clapp et al. 2018).Yet, occasional references to 'land mobility' (Gates Foundation 2008in Patel 2012) and 'migration out of agriculture' (Zhou 2010) implicitly indicate a future trajectory of dispossession of those unable to transition to the higher stages of the modernization ladder (see below).Inherent to this political economy of sustainable intensification/climate smart agriculture, is the tendency to contrast extensive 'low input-low productivity' agriculture in the global South ('underdeveloped') with intensive 'high input-high productivity' in the global North ('developed'), while disregarding how production and consumption patterns in the latter lay claim on increasing areas of land in the former.
Second, the "article of faith" in development and environmental circles that automatically link agricultural intensification with land sparing, is not given (Angelsen and Kaimowitz 2001b: 89).Although resulting from a complex set of factors, there is a risk that intensification via capital-intensive technological change promotes deforestation as more well-off farmers are incentivized to expand production, while 23 Given that chemical input use in Africa remains at very low level, Tittonell (2014) points out, there is no clear connection between goals to increase the use of fertilizers under the green revolution and aims of producing more with less. 24According to Yara (n.d.-b), the company initiated the African Green Revolution Conference (AGRC) -the predecessor of the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) -in 2006.Yara (n.d.-a) states that "several partnerships have been initiated after the conferences", of which "Yara's projects include two agricultural growth corridors in Tanzania and Mozambique" described as 'green corridors' to exemplify how green growth principles can be introduced" in agriculture. 25Elsewhere, Yara contrasts its own approach, referred to as 'productive farming', with organic farming which they claim would lead to lower productivity and therefore increased deforestation.However, recent research on diversified and agroecological farming systems indicate negligible differences in productivity per land unit (Ponisio et al. 2015).
accumulation by dispossession pushes less resourced farmers to expand farmland into forests (Angelsen and  Kaimowitz 2001a; Angelsen and Kaimowitz 2001b; Perfecto et al. 2009). 26 Lastly, the intensification agenda reinforce the ontological dualism inherent to modernization discourses in the way the world is sub-divided into distinct landscapes for 'nature' (biodiversity and carbon sequestration) and landscapes for production to 'feed the world.'This dualism reveals underlying power structures in the workings of a contemporary corporate-environmental food regime that suggests a trade-off between technology-driven productivity, biodiversity and climate change mitigation.Indeed, this dualist worldview enables strategic partnerships around shared concerns between agribusiness corporations and mainstream conservation oriented NGOs (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011; Newell and Taylor 2018),27 while disregarding alternative conceptions that see agroecological matrixes as key repositories for both production and biodiversity (Perfecto and Vandermeer 2010).
Under the green economy an opportune moment has arised for agribusiness corporations to rebrand their product lines under epithets like 'climate-smart' and 'feed the world' to capitalize on new market opportunities.As Clapp et al. (2018: 5) have recently pointed out, "many of these strategies, packaged as solutions to climate change, are being skillfully used to open up new commodity frontiers", while obscuring how they are girded by history, politics and power.What is new at the current conjuncture is not the link between technology and intensified agricultural production, but rather the adoption and promotion of green narratives around already existing technologies to recast the modernization trope as 'green.'Similar processes have been discussed as 'greenwashing' or 'grabbing green' (Buseth, 2017;Corson et al. 2013).In the language of Lewis' (1954) dual economy, the key feature here is the ostensible low productivity and environmentally unsustainable nature of 'traditional' farming relative to 'modern' or 'advanced' practices, which signify overall social, economic and ecological losses.Eliminating these losses and thus achieving progress -"feed the world and protect the planet" (Yara n.d.-a) -is possible if foreign public and private capital is mobilized to 'fructify' Africa's 'underutilized' resources (UNEP 2011a).
'Surplus nature' and capital deficits: the role of capital in the green modernization discourse "Sub-Saharan African agriculture is underdeveloped.Its transformation from subsistence farming to modern, commercial agribusiness represents a massive long-term opportunity, especially considering Africa's wealth of natural resources" (AgDevCo 2017: 4). 28This quote summarizes a common perspective on the current state of rural Africa: It holds an abundance of underused nature (including labor), which, if coupled with accumulated global capital and technology, represents an opportunity for both business and sustainable development.
The World Bank epitomizes this view aptly in its Growing Africa -unlocking the potential of agribusiness' report (2013).Pointing towards a peak in global yields of major staple crops due to "the exhaustion of Green Revolution technology, a slowdown in research and development (R&D) spending in many countries, and increasing land degradation and water scarcity", combined with future uncertainties around climate change, it predicts that "prices will be higher and more volatile relative to the past decade" (World Bank 2013: 15).In this context the World Bank (2013: 17) sees great potential for agribusiness expansion in Africa relative to Asia, which "faces an acute scarcity of land and water."Africa, however, "has an abundance of both" (2013: 17) for the production of food and agricultural exports -including sugar, palm oil and biofuels.Export commodity production, it notes, "gives a clear advantage to African producers with plentiful low-cost labor and/or land" (2013: 15-16).Hence, from the perspective of global capital, the "time has come for African agriculture.Southeast Asia has become crowded, competitive, and expensive for doing agribusiness, chipping away at profit margins.We see higher profit potential in Africa for exports -and for domestic sales" (2013: 16).
The many interlinked initiatives currently proliferating across Africa under the umbrella of the new green revolution ought to be understood, at least partially, from this perspective: as a spatial-fix for global agribusiness capital to falling profit margins (Harvey 2014).Indeed, as noted by the World Bank ( 2013), Africa has become the 'final frontier' for agribusiness corporations, which see great potential in the ostensible cheap nature/cheap labor nexus the continent (Patel and Moore 2017).
The wide array of public-private investment platforms under the new green revolution are essentially framed through the vision of these agribusiness actors wishing to create markets and demand for their products.As Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO of Yara, states: "Yara realized early on in our operations in Africa that the international private sector cannot simply serve the agribusiness market in Africa; it must be part of creating that market" (WEF 2016: 12).That is why Yara took on a leading role in, for example, establishing the African Agricultural Growth Corridor initiatives to exemplify, in their own words, "how green growth principles can be introduced" in agriculture (Bergius 2014;Yara n.d.-a).In this context of expanding agribusiness frontiers, private capital is held forward by donors, governments and corporations as the main limiting factor to green development and modernization.There seems hardly to be any limit to the number of billions of dollars that have been pledged in investments under the various new green revolution initiatives for the development, deployment and distribution of (green) agricultural technologies.To ensure the smooth movement of this capital and linking it up with the ostensible dormant potential contained in Africa's lands, governments' roles are to create business-enabling environments.
'Enabling' environments are thought to create the conditions necessary to allow space for the private sector to drive development efforts.The World Bank promotes and incentivizes this through its annual Enabling the business of agriculture (EBA) reports, which ranks countries according to their attractiveness for agribusiness investments.The higher the EBA score a country receives, the more competitive and enabling it is for capital investments to address problems of hunger and poverty.Framed in the language of 'modernization', global South countries at the lower end are found to be "lagging behind" their better performing counterparts -mostly countries from the global North -having "less than half of the regulatory good practices promoted by EBA" (World Bank 2017: 7).As a consequence, donor support under G8's New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a key initiative of the new green revolution, is tied to EBA linked conditionalities.Hence, countries that participates in the New Alliance scheme committed in their framework agreements to undertake a number of policy changes to liberalize regulations concerning land, seeds and other agro-inputs to incentivize agribusiness investments.
Integral to the private and 'green' turn in agricultural development financing is the proposed introduction of agricultural carbon markets via 'climate-smart' production practices.Smallholder farmers tend to be presented within a narrative that makes them beneficiaries of such markets (Newell and Taylor 2018).As Syngenta, for example, states: "The carbon market offers potential opportunities for farmers to benefit from payments for ecosystems services and agricultural and land use practices that sequester or use carbon efficiently" (Zhou 2010: 2).While denounced by many civil society organizations -including La Via Campesina -for lacking precision and 'greenwashing' industrial agriculture (The Ecologist 2015), Newell and Taylor argue that "dominant agribusiness actors […] use CSA [climate smart agriculture] to advance their preferred technologies and strategies as well as seek to re-package them in ways which access new financial and revenue streams associated with carbon markets and the 'bio' or 'green economy '" (2018: 12).
The relocation of agribusiness capital to the 'final frontier' (World Bank 2013) under the new green revolution is arguably part and parcel of a contemporary epoch of material expansion in capitalism.In the context of the green economy this happens by ascription to an emerging green modernization discourse that seeks to 'climate smartify' what are essentially long-standing approaches to food and agricultural production by 'grabbing green' (Buseth 2017).A central aspect of this discourse is the construction and promotion of a narrative of imbalance between 'surplus nature' and capital/technology that needs to be rectified to ensure a 'green' development trajectory.However, this narrative often appears alongside contradicting neo-Malthusian perspectives on population growth and environmental degradation (Benjaminsen and Svarstad 2017).

Mobility of land, people and 'stages of progression'
Population trends are inextricably linked to the emerging green modernization discourse.Such trends are important both as drivers (population growth) behind green transitions and as integrated solutions to social and environmental challenges (agricultural outmigration and urbanization).The gradual disappearance of peasantries in the West -a trajectory of urban-based modernization to which a recent Ecomodernist manifesto explicitly subscribes (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015) -allowed modernization theorists to define the absence of peasants as a key signifier for development.As McMichael (2012: 8) notes, "a logical extrapolation (if not historical analysis) would therefore be to define peasant cultures elsewhere as remnants of 'Traditional Society'" and thus "destined to disappear, whether because of urban gravitational pull, green revolution technologies, eviction by land grabs, or unequal competition from First World agribusiness." In other words, as modernization cascades, an implicit long-term notion involves the substitution of (some) rural peoples living from the land with capital and technology to facilitate outmigration from agriculture.In the neoliberal vocabulary of the new green revolution -where land is to be treated as a fungible economic asset -this process tends to be depoliticized as 'land mobility.'A 2008 unpublished summary of the Gates Foundation's agricultural development strategy elucidates this vision of rural transformation: it necessitates "market-oriented farmers operating profitable farms that generate enough income to sustain their rise out of poverty.Over time, this will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production" (Gates Foundation 2008in AgraWatch 2011).Of course, the mobile component here is not the land itself, but rather labor: the people working it.
Similar visions of development are shared by many African elites and policymakers.The Tanzanian Minister of Agriculture, for example, was recently quoted stating that "A farmer who sees that they wouldn't follow modern farming procedures shown by extension officers should quit and pave way for other farmers who are ready to do so" (The Guardian 2017).
The theory of change invoked by this conception of 'land mobility' is akin to Syngenta's vision of 'good growth' (see Figure 2 above).Bearing striking resemblances to Rostow's stages of growth theory, Syngenta's 'good growth plan' -alternatively "stages of agricultural intensification" (Zhou 2010: 4) -explicitly posits agrarian change as traversing through a series of stages where the final step insinuates highly capital and technology-intensive agriculture dominated by an emerging base of what Syngenta conceptualize as 'advanced farmers.' The modern, business-oriented and advanced farmer represents the antithesis of the unsustainable and 'backward' condition of African agriculture at present (Scoones et al. 2014).As the Syngenta model and similar calls for land mobility predict, this 'good growth' towards modernization is not for everyone and those farmers unable to take the next step -from agriculture to agribusiness (AGRA 2017b) -are projected to 'migrate out of agriculture', although it is not clear to what and where (Li 2011).To Akinwumi Adesina, former associate director of food security at the Rockefeller Foundation, winner of the 2017 World Food Prize and current president of the African Development Bank, this could in theory realize his prediction, that "Africa's agricultural take-off will make billionaires from poor men's fields"(AGRA 2017a). 29Perhaps these prospective billionaires are the supreme signifiers of the white-collar agribusiness managers Swedish company Agro EcoEnergy imagined would emerge as a result of their large-scale investment in Tanzania (Figure 3).Nevertheless, the notion of 'land mobility' -allowing land to 'move' to supposedly more efficient, sustainable and business-oriented producers, while reducing the overall number of people involved in agriculture -"lies at the heart of the modernization narrative" (Bergius et al. 2018: 4) and is supported by influential actors, including the World Bank, as a decisive factor to "move upwards" in the "value-chain of countries" (Akram-Lodhi 2008;McMichael 2009;World Bank 2007). 30owever, following Polanyi's (1944) reminder that a 'disembedded economy' was not the result of some natural force, land mobility does require land to be mobilized.Several land use planning and property formalization schemes with this intention are currently underway in Africa as part of the wider institutional infrastructure of the new green revolution. 31Land use planning enables land mobility and consolidation (Walwa 2017) and is a precondition for commercial estates -Lewis's islands of progress (1954) -to be established, "since only once tenure rights are fully clarified shall the investor be assured that its title is secure" (De Schutter 2015: 24; Greco 2016). 32Reporting from an agricultural frontier area in Tanzania, Greco (2016) argues that the region's status as a high-potential zone for agribusiness investments has incited donors to fund a land planning and formalization program, with a core aim is to publish a database with land available for investments.Further, she writes, "the speedy implementation of [land-use plans] in Kilombero District seems to indicate that they are more likely to be sponsored when strong corporate interests are at play", such as the G8's New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, "which require rapid and effective formalization of land property" (Greco 2016: 35). 33  Figure 3: The future farmers of Africa?Swedish company Agro EcoEnergy's illustration of how large-scale investments will catalyze economic growth and turn small-scale farmers into agribusiness managers (Agro Eco Energy n.d.).
The condition obstinately regarded as most favorable to agricultural modernization, as Jeremy Bentham once proposed (in Polanyi 1944), exists when land is alienable and 'mobile.'Although leading proponents of agricultural modernization appear to put more emphasis on the importance of smallholders than they have over the last few decades, mainstream policy discourse remains infused by the idea that the long term vision of a 'thrice green revolution' are better addressed by a gradual move towards capital and technological intensification and larger scales in production.This view is manifested, in particular, by the substantial increase in farmland investments spurred by the converging crises of the mid 2000s (Borras Jr. et al. 2011;Hall, Scoones and Tsikata 2017).The displacement and injustice occurring in the wake of many of these investments, whether for or food, fuel or carbon-sinking, represent the politicized side of the 'land mobility ' coin, and, as Harvey (2014: 55) posits, a global "politics of accumulation by dispossession run riot in ways that even Polanyi could not have imagined." Flagged by a depoliticized green language of climate smartness, sustainable intensification and land mobility, public and corporate interests subscribe to a resilient and linear historical narrative of modernization that risks reinforcing a pattern of rural depopulation (Borras and Franco 2018;Davis 2006;Engström and Hajdu 2018;Li 2010). 34Registered in the long-standing dualist ontology undergirding this narrative, the emerging green modernization discourse would perceive such trends as progressive change.Indeed, modernization is simply "not possible in a subsistence agrarian economy" (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015: 13).The ultimate stage of agricultural intensification is presumed to allow for less people being directly involved in agricultural production, and thereby unleashing the 'unlimited supplies of labor' from the countryside (Lewis 1954).This is a path to green modernization that will ultimately, it is assumed, reduce pressures on 'nature.'

Concluding remarks
Upon receiving the World Food Prize in 2017, Akinwumi Adesina proclaimed his pride of being a "disciple of Norman Borlaug to preach the new "agriculture gospel" across Africa."In Adesina's words, the …new agriculture gospel is simple: to lift millions of people out of poverty, agriculture must become a business.For in agriculture as a business lies the hope of economic prosperity for Africa […].Every time I pass through rural parts of African countries -where the agriculture engine is or should be unlocked -I see nothing but wasting potential.They sit on 65% of the uncultivated arable land left to feed the world, but can barely feed themselves.They hear of rich farmers in Europe and America and wonder why they themselves languish in poverty.Certainly life must be better than this.Why have we forgotten them?(Adesina 2017) Adesina's analysis is indicative of the modernization discourse that epitomizes the new green revolution for Africa.Against a background of a present state of misery relative to the richness of industrial agriculturalists in the global North, a new green revolution premised on a combination of agribusiness capital and technology promises to unleash the dormant development potential currently 'wasted' in Africa's lands.While this trope of modernization is long-standing, we have argued in this article that the new green revolution and its emergence within a contemporary green economy feeds into an emerging green modernization development discourse.
'Greening' development and growth under presumptions of realizing a triple bottom line have been at the core of international politics since the Rio+20 conference in 2012.While in the global North this mainly entails ecologization of an already existing industrial sector (eco-modernization), the trend in the global South is making investments in and modernization of 'green sectors' to make the development path 'green' from the onset.We have argued in the case of the latter that the post-Rio+20 green economy context has revitalized green versions of classic modernization thinking in development.This trend is visible, in particular, in the agricultural sector where proponents of a new green revolution in Africa increasingly avow green narratives