African agriculture holds the key in curbing carbon emissions

AFRICAN agriculture has the potential of capturing 20 times more carbon than the world’s oil and gas emissions with the continent potentially able to absorb 132 billion tonnes of the carbon gases blamed for causing climate change.
In an analysis by FarmBizAfrica unveiled this week, the African farming service reported that simple shifts in farming practices and a new governmental and international focus on agricultural carbon capturing could nearly triple food production in Africa and slow climate change globally.
The report noted that instead, the world’s top priority remains energy investments, which are drawing almost $2 trillion a year in a so-far failed effort to offset oil and gas carbon emissions of just five billion tonnes while African agriculture’s far greater potential remains substantially ignored.
“We often see debates where leaders’ thinking just cannot catch up with the facts, like ‘let’s stop oil’, which is so obviously making no progress at all, but is also largely an irrelevancy next to our global land crisis,” said FarmBizAfrica’s chief executive officer, Mr Jethro Tieman.
He said some world leaders are fiddling while Rome burns, yet the consequences are unimaginably huge with imminent danger of destroying the whole planet, adding that it is not about trading chips on industrial emissions as time has come to address soil carbon head-on and invest more in African carbon capture than in the entire energy transition.
Globally, said FarmBizAfrica, the top one metre of soil holds more carbon than the atmosphere and all plant and animal life combined, dwarfing all human emissions. It noted that Agricultural practices, mostly in Africa, have been pouring out extra soil carbon, reducing the percentages held in soils and in turn, reducing food production, with soil carbon critical to plant life, fertility, and moisture retention in soils.
“Without it, soils progressively turn to sand, moving towards eventual desertification. In Africa, that land degradation is now affecting 35 million hectares of land a year, reducing the continent’s rainfall as plant cover diminishes, triggering deepening droughts. It has also moved the continent to the lowest soil carbon count in the world, between one and two percent, compared to five and eight percent that is carbon replete,” wrote FarmBizAfrica.
It said recapturing carbon was an easy process, which requires a farmer to dig a hole, put farm waste into it, light it from the top and it will burn smokelessly to create biochar.
According to the report, across Sub-Saharan Africa, which has 10.5 million square km of agricultural land, each percentile point rise in soil carbon will capture 22.1 billion tonnes of carbon and restoring African soils to full carbon levels at five to eight percent would capture 132 billion tonnes of the greenhouse gasses now disrupting the planet.
“By contrast, the oil and gas industry has never secured a reduction in its emissions despite more than a decade of funding and policies to drive it downwards.
“In 2023, energy transition drew investment of US$1.8 trillion dollars,” said FarmBizAfrica.