Poverty and hunger could worsen in Africa because its farmland and soils have been severely degraded and strategies must be adopted to revitalize agriculture in the continent, a report said Thursday.
According to a report by Julio Henao and Carlos Baanante of the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC), “evidence leaves no doubt that the very resources on which African farmers and their families depend for welfare and survival are being undermined by soil degradation”.
The report noted, that soil degradation in Africa is caused by “deforestation, use of .
Some 50.000 hectares of forest and 60.000 hectares of grasslands in Africa are lost to agriculture yearly. The highest rates of soil depletion are in Guinea, Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.
“African farmers often abandon infertile fields to clear forests or plow the savanna”, a statement on the major findings of the report said. It added that “approximately 70 percent of deforestation in Africa is a result of clearing land for cultivation” and that the soil crisis is a “major cause of poverty and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa” where one in three are already undernourished.
The report tracks soil health on the continent from 1980 to 2004. More than 60 percent of Africas population is directly engaged in agriculture. But crop productivity has remained stagnant, while cereal yields in Asia have risen three-fold over the past four decades.
“Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa have traditionally cleared land, grown a few crops, then moved on to clear more land, leaving the land to regain fertility”, the authors write in their report, adding: “But population pressure now forces farmers to grow crop after crop, mining or depleting the soil of nutrients while giving nothing back”.
During the 2002-2004 cropping season, about 85 percent of African farmland had nutrient depletion rates of more than 30 kilogram per hectare yearly. About 40 percent of farmland had nutrient depletion rates greater than 60 kilogram per hectare yearly.
In addition to removal by crop harvests, other factors contributing to nutrient depletion include loss of nitrogen and phosphorus through soil erosion by wind and water, and leaching of nitrogen and potassium.
Fertilizer use in Africa is the lowest in the world, at less than 10 percent of the world average. African farmers are put off by high costs, the report says.
The report calls for policy and investment strategies to reverse nutrient depletion and restore soil fertility. These include making the use of mineral and organic fertilizers more economically attractive to farmers.
The study further said that “African leaders face significant challenges in revamping development policies to make low-cost fertilizers available and improve farmers access to information and markets for their products. But the more difficult tasks identified by the study are boosting investments in roads and other infrastructure and combating rampant corruption – all of which are impeding economic growth and self-sufficiency efforts”.
African leaders have expressed hope that NEPADs Africa Fertilizer Summit in June in Abuja, Nigeria, would help develop methods to meet a goal of raising farm yield by 6 percent annually by 2015.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
