One of the ‘quick wins’ identified by the Millennium Project’s assessment of how to halve hunger by 2015 was for a massive effort to replenish nutrient depleted soils in Africa through a combination of chemical fertilizers and agroforestry. Nigeria is hosting a ‘Fertilizer Summit’ organised by IFDC for Africa in 2006, with President Obasanjo taking the lead to follow up on these recommendations.
But what should be the key elements of the debate at the summit? With less than 10kg/ha of fertilizer being applied on average to African farm lands, access to soil nutrients is of course a key issue if African agriculture is to grow sustainably in the future. But how can soil fertility be improved? This is of course a long-running debate, and Africa has seen many fertilizer and soil management projects falter in the past. Central is how to encourage a balanced approach, recognising the diversity of soil fertility constraints across farm landscapes.
The simplistic, blanket solutions often suggested in grand plans for ‘soil replenishment’ often miss this. A key question is: are decentralized participatory approaches which are responsive to local diversity and complexity influencing current thinking around soils and fertilizer policies – if not, why not, and how can they be supported? Such issues are highlighted in some of the papers in a recent issue of Land Use Policy, focusing on soil degradation in Africa. A recent e-forum discussion highlighted the challenges faced by input markets, and the critical need to address institutional and policy issues, not just technical ones. Past reforms to the fertilizer sector have assumed the blossoming of a private sector-led supply system, but this has often not arisen.
A number of institutional challenges are highlighted in the e-forum summary, including the need to ‘kick-start’ markets, perhaps through voucher schemes, and develop fertilizer recommendations that are locally specific and attuned to rainfall variations. Institutional perspectives highlight legal and technical aspects market development – such as contract enforcement and information – but we also need to better understand how local input markets are structured by social, economic and political power relations. Market concentration and standardization in agri-food commodity chains has received increasing attention, but we still know little about such dynamics in fertilizer markets. To avoid the failings of a one-size-fits-all approach therefore, policies that are attuned to local soils, markets and farming conditions – and that take a decentralised, participatory approach – are needed, requiring much more than a simple focus on inputs.
Sources
Africa Fertilizer Summit – 9-13 June 2006, Abuja, Nigeria
UN Millennium Project website – Task Force on Hunger
International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development website
Soil Degradation in Sub-Saharan Africa, A. Hartemink and H. van Keulen (eds), Land Use Policy, 2005, Vol 22(1) – see articles by Mortimore and Harris and Fairhead and Scoones
Increasing Fertizer Use in Africa: What have we learned? E-forum commissioned by the World Bank and hosted by NRI International in collaboration with Imperial College London. Also see the summary paper… Policies for Soil Fertility Management in Africa. A Report Prepared for the Department for International Development, 1999, Toulmin and Scoones
‘A Realistic View on Increasing Fertiliser use in Sub-Saharan Africa’, (see under Debates) Bert Meertens, Rural Development Expert