CAPE TOWN, Jun 20 (IPS) - The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) claims that its "stress breeding", high-yield seed program and its emphasis on grassroots farmer input will boost agricultural production among poor, small scale farmers. But NGOs and environmentalists say AGRA's Programme for Africa's Seed System (PASS) is essentially a top-down, corporate driven approach that further threatens food security on the continent.

Like its predecessor, AGRA's `new' Green Revolution views food shortages as a crisis of demand-and-supply and has initiated what Joe de Vries, director of PASS, describes as a "farmer participatory" program that aims to develop strains of crops specifically suited to African conditions.

"It is our belief that Africa's farmers need to move beyond subsistence farming and that by doing so they will benefit, and so will African consumers through greater abundance of food in local markets," says de Vries.

For many NGOs working with subsistence farmers, AGRA's model has more to do with increasing Africa's production of commercial crops for export and opening up markets for agribusiness than it does with contributing to food security.

"The need to increase yield is a neat argument that is easily swallowed by governments and citizens.It does not necessarily lead to ending hunger, especially when that yield is headed for a global market and remains inaccessible to the majority", says Haidee Swanby, researcher at the African Centre for Biosafety (ACB).

One of the main criticisms levelled at AGRA is that it has not taken cognizance of the 2008 report by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) which suggested that food sovereignty is inextricably tied to traditional and ecological agricultural models.