Fertilizer International 498 Sept-Oct 2020
30 September 2020
Nutrients for livelihoods
“By transforming its fertilizer supply and distribution in just a few short years, Nigeria has blazed a trail for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa to follow”
“There can be no life without soil, and no soil without life.” An insightful quote from Charles Kellogg, the renowned former chief of USDA’s soils bureau.
Yet around one-third of the world’s soils are currently degraded, a figure that could rise to more than 90 percent by 2050, according to a particularly apocalyptic UN estimate. Soil erosion on that scale would threaten global food security, given that it can reduce crop yields by as much as 50 percent.
It’s unsurprising, therefore, that reversing soil degradation has become a farming priority.
There have been success stories. The widespread uptake of conservation agriculture across North and South America has helped improve soil health in those two regions. American farmers, by practicing reduced or conservation tillage and no-till systems, have done much to reduce soil erosion, conserve soil moisture and sequester carbon.
Conservation agriculture – often termed agro-ecology – is based on three clear and simple agronomic rules: firstly, minimise soil disturbance; secondly, permanently cover the soil with mulched crop residues; thirdly, practice either crop rotation or intercropping.
Conservation agriculture’s initial success in tackling soil erosion in the Americas fuelled hopes that it offered a panacea for African agriculture. But a recently-published paper in the journal Nature Food rejects many of the claims made by agro-ecology’s most ardent advocates.
The authors, led by Marc Corbeels – an expert in sustainable intensification at CIMMYT in Nairobi, Kenya – compared conservation agriculture with conventional cropping by analysing the results of 79 studies across 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
They discovered that conservation agriculture did little to improve the yields of cotton, cowpea, rice, sorghum or soybean. Maize yields did show a four percent increase – but only if the herbicide glyphosate was applied pre-emergence.
Commenting on the paper, Katrien Descheemaeker, an assistant professor at Wageningen University, said: “The findings of Corbeels and colleagues refute the claims that conservation agriculture would substantially improve the food security of smallholders.”
She added, “small yield increases [in Africa] are meaningless at the farm level in terms of improvements in food self-sufficiency and income, mostly because of small farm sizes”, before concluding that conservation agriculture “should not be promoted on the grounds of its potential to improve crop yields and food security”.
Katrien called for a shift away from conservation agriculture and a renewed focus on other options for improving the livelihoods of Africa’s smallholder farmers.
Many believe the key to successful agriculture in Africa is improving fertilizer supply and distribution. They include Marie Claire Kalihangabo of the African Development Bank (AfDB). She’s helping finance fertilizer projects across the continent through her role as coordinator of the African Fertilizer Financing Mechanism (AFFM).
This mechanism is currently financing a $2.2 million project aimed at improving fertilizer supply for 200,000 Nigerian smallholder farmers.
“We are confident that the project will increase access to quality and affordable fertilizer by smallholder farmers and hence contribute to the transformation of the agriculture sector in Nigeria,” Marie Claire said.
By transforming its fertilizer supply and distribution in just a few short years, Nigeria has blazed a trail for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa to follow (see our report on page 15). The West African country has been at the epicentre of a remarkable expansion in African blending plant capacity.
Impressively, the number of blending plants in Nigeria increased from just eight at the start of 2017 to 34 by the beginning of this year, a total that is expected to rise to 51 by the start of 2021. This has helped Nigeria cut its NPK imports from half a million tonnes in 2017 to less than 2,000 tonnes last year.
Meanwhile, massive investment in domestic urea production capacity – much of it co-financed by the AfDB – has seen Nigeria’s urea production rocket from around 280,000 tonnes in 2015 to 1.5 million tonnes last year. About half of this volume is consumed domestically by farmers.
Shuaibu Yusuf, a farmer in Nigeria’s Kaduna region, spoke movingly recently about how access to locally-produced, affordable fertilizers had transformed his family’s livelihood: “Low productivity brings despair. The benefits that I get from higher-yield farming are increased food, education for my children and the ability to pay our medical bills.”
Shuaibu’s farming experience brings us back to Charles Kellogg’s original quote. In rural Africa, without soil – nutrient-rich soil – there can be no lives or livelihoods.
