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SOIL depletion in Africa is a crisis that needs to be addressed with urgency, the Director of the Alliance for Africa Partnership, Africa Secretariat, Prof. Richard Nkandawire, has said.
He said as a result of the continuous loss of soil nutrients on the continent, African soils had become one of the poorest globally.
According to him, soils in Africa “are the most depleted and our vegetation cover is destroyed as tonnes of soil nutrients are washed into the sea.
We need to pay attention to that.
It is an emergency; it is a crisis that we need to attend to".
Currently, he said, about 40 per cent of the soil in Africa was degraded, thereby diminishing food production.
As a result, he added, emergency food production in Africa would have to be increased by almost 100 per cent by 2050 to keep up with population demands on a continent where 83 per cent of the people depended on the land for livelihood.
Prof. Nkandawire was speaking at a three-day African Fertiliser and Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) Regional West Africa Public-Private Dialogue (PPD) as part of activities towards an African Union (AU) Soil Health Summit to be convened in July 2023.
It is being organised by the AFAP, in collaboration with the USAID-supported Feed the Future Policy LINK Activity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the West African
Fertiliser Association (WAFA) and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA).
It is on the theme: “The future of fertiliser and agro-inputs in Africa” and has brought together stakeholders in the fertiliser value chain from both the private and the public sectors, including farmer associations, agro dealers, financial institutions and policy makers from Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mali.
Discussions are focused on how to address the challenges impacting the regional fertiliser supply chain and their negative consequences on West Africa’s fertiliser and agro-inputs sectors.
Prof. Nkandawire appealed to African governments and international aid organisations to make funds available to facilitate the implementation of the outcomes of the summit.
Africa's poor soil health is mainly caused by soil erosion that happens when the wind or the rain carries the top soil away.
The quantity of soil that is carried away depends on how strong the rain or wind is, as well as the soil quality, topography-slope or terrace land and the amount of ground vegetation.
The Chief Executive Officer of AFAP, Michael Sudarkasa, said the conference would help amplify challenges in the fertiliser value chain and bring them to the attention of governments and policy makers to create the necessary environment to improve food security on the continent.
The Country Lead of Feed the Future Policy LINK, Yunus Abdulai, expressed appreciation for the active participation of stakeholders and said the discussions would inform the development of evidence-based policy recommendations to support the fertiliser and agro-inputs sectors in Ghana.
The Deputy Minister in charge of Crops at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Yaw Frimpong Addo, lauded the implementation of the fertiliser and other crop input subsidy programmes and initiatives which he said would increase productivity.
He added that agribusiness and the private sector played critical roles in supporting smallholder farmers through the supply of fertiliser and other inputs.
