The Green Revolution: A double-edged sword

In the third episode of Under the Spell season 2, host Michael Avery and Doctor Tinashe Kapuya peel back the scientific veneer of the Green Revolution to reveal the winners and losers in Africa's food systems.

For decades, the story of modern agriculture has been told as a triumph of science over hunger. We are promised that improved seeds, synthetic fertilisers and global integration are the only path to abundance. But as we look at the reality on the ground, we must ask if this progress is designed for the resilience of the farmer or for the profit of the provider.

In this episode, we explore:

The Myth of Neutral Abundance: Why the promise of higher yields often comes with a hidden cost of dependency and debt for the small scale farmer.

Scale vs Virtue: How the drive for industrial efficiency often ignores the local knowledge and social stability provided by traditional farming systems.

The Shadow of Science: Examining why a model that worked for Asia in the 1960s has produced such uneven and contested outcomes across the African continent.

Who Feeds Africa: A critical look at the tension between big commercial agriculture and the smallholder resilience that actually underpins local food sovereignty.

The Ownership of Systems: Understanding how the tools of "progress" can become instruments of control in the hands of global input providers.

This isn’t a podcast about crop yields. It is a deep dive into the political and human structures that dictate who gets to eat and who holds the power over our most basic necessity.

Join us every week as we go UNDER THE SPELL.