Posted on 03/31/2006 7:16:50 PM PST by blam
Soil health crisis threatens Africa's food supply
12:16 31 March 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi
Population pressures combined with limited access to fertilisers threaten the future of farming in Africa, a new study warns. The report highlights the continent’s “soil health crisis”, revealing that three-quarters of its farmlands are severely degraded.
The politicians and researchers behind the report stress that urgent changes are necessary to improve food security in the continent, particularly in sub-Saharan countries. Agriculture is the main source of income for two-thirds of Africa’s population, according to the document from the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC), a nonprofit organisation based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, US.
Farmers in sub-Saharan countries traditionally grew crops on cleared land for only a brief period before moving on to new areas, allowing the land to regain fertility. But population pressure now forces the farmers to grow crop after crop in the same area.
Exhausted land Without enough fertiliser to sustain the land, levels of nutrients in the soil rapidly decline. Growers must then clear and cultivate new land at the expense of wildlife and forests.
“Africa loses an estimated $4 billion of soil nutrients yearly, severely eroding its ability to feed itself,” said Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo at the launch of the report in New York city, US, on Thursday.
Many African farmers have only limited access to fertilisers due to their cost and poor infrastructure. Amit Roy, president of the IFDC, says that levels of fertiliser use in Africa are less than 10% of the world average.
Three-quarters of African farmland is severely degraded to the point where it cannot even produce one tonne of grain per hectare, only 30% of productivity in Latin America and Asia, Roy adds.
Soil health
IFCD researchers collected data on farming practices such as fertiliser use and modelled future land use. They also examined more than two decades of information on the continent’s soil health.
Their report reveals that between 2002 and 2004 about 85% of African farmland lost nutrients at an annual rate of 30 kilograms per hectare. Some 40% of the land had annual nutrient losses higher than 60 kilograms per hectare.
The authors point out that Africa’s population is expected to grow. They predict that as a result the amount of grain it imports will rise by about 50%, from 43 million tonnes in 2003 to 60 million tonnes by 2020.
The study found some of the greatest levels of soil depletion in densely populated areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania, Burundi, Namibia and Angola. The report also notes that agriculture, along with other factors such as deforestation, contributes to soil erosion, and predicts that if erosion continues unabated yields of some crops could plummet by 17-30% by 2020.
Immediate steps
African farmers should take immediate steps to reduce land degradation due to agriculture, urges Firmino Mucavele, chief executive of the New Partnership for Africa's Development secretariat.
“In Africa the environment is being damaged because we are not using the appropriate level and quality of fertilisers, and we are extracting more from our soil than what we’re putting back,” says Mucavele.
Further details relating to the report are due to be released at the Africa Fertilizer Summit in Abuja, Nigeria, in June 2006, where leaders will discuss how to make fertiliser more accessible to farmers.
Journal reference: Agricultural Production and Soil Nutrient Mining in Africa (March 2006)
Let me guess...if we send them money everything will be just peachy.
White farmers seemed to do OK farming in one spot for years. I wonder what has changed over there?
Hmmmmmmm. Let me think on that a bit.
Guess Africa is at least 300 years behind.
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