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African farmers could double or even triple crop yields from their farms if they embrace integrated soil fertility management (ISFM), a new report shows.According to the report, depletion of essential soil nutrients threatens food security and nutrition in Africa, adding that the continent loses US$4 billion a year from poor crop yields resulting from soil health issues. The report, Seeking fertile ground for a green revolution in Africa, launched by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) last month (22 August) in Nairobi, Kenya, says ISFM promotes practices such as the use of fertilisers, crop rotation and planting leguminous crops to improve soil quality.
The report adds that ISFM is a five-year soil health programme by AGRA that began in 2009 in 13 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.Bashir Jama, the director of AGRA’s Soil Health Program, said during the report’s launch: “The first step towards food security is ensuring that small-scale farmers understand the importance of soil health when it comes to crop production”. AGRA trained 1,8 million smallholders on ISFM and promoted the concept to a further 3,5 million farmers in the countries, the report says. One of the major proposals of the ISFM programme is for small-scale farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa to increase their fertiliser use from an average of eight kilograms a hectare to 50 kilograms in accordance with the Abuja declaration of 2006, says Qureish Noordin, a programme officer at AGRA.
This article has been produced by SciDev.Net’s Sub-Saharan Africa desk.
Online Reporter