During the 20th century, country after country adopted methods of industrial agriculture — use of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and high-productivity grain hybrids — that caused yields of corn, wheat, rice and other staples to soar. This “green revolution,” as it became known, brought food self-sufficiency to nations like China and India, laying the groundwork for their emergence as economic powerhouses.

Yet these revolutionary farming methods largely bypassed sub-Saharan Africa. In west Kenya, for instance, fertilizer use remains so low — just 7 kilograms per hectare, or 6 pounds per acre, compared with about 100 kilograms per hectare for the average farm in U.S. Midwest — that each harvest depletes the soil of important nutrients, leading to progressively lower yields, according to a recent study in the journal Science.

As a result, while much of the world enjoys plentiful harvests, malnutrition remains epidemic in the region. Nearly one-third of sub-Saharan Africa’s population, about 265 million people, suffers from chronic hunger, according to a recent estimate by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In 2006, international donors, led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, founded the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, with the goal of finally introducing modern farming methods to Africa. Almost immediately, however, the multibillion-dollar effort came under attack from groups that assailed its vision of bringing technological agriculture to Africa’s smallhold farmers.