African leaders vow to tackle soil health ills to bolster food production

African Union leaders spoke as one voice at a recent fertiliser and soil health summit, pledging to take measures to improve Africa's soil quality

- Jeff Kapembwa

The Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, which was attended by several heads of state and governments, discussed food security and the strategies being applied with a single voice.

They alluded to the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme Malabo Declaration, which was adopted during the 23rd Ordinary Session of the African Union (AU) Assembly in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, in June 2014 to end hunger and poverty in Africa. However, few remedies were initiated there.

The AU committed itself to inclusive agricultural transformation and to demand measures to improve food security.

One of the reasons the discussion was held was because the continent is grappling with ‘withered soil’ that lacks nitrogen and there is a need to improve crop production. This is due to many factors including soil erosion and cheap fertiliser, which has pushed the continent to import fertiliser to improve food production.

The summit was officially opened by AU chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat under the theme ‘We must listen to the land’.

He challenged African leaders to marshal resources and set up a stateof-the-art fertiliser plant to meet the inputs needed by smallholder farmers, many of them grappling with soils that are lacking nutrients.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Africa has a low intake of fertiliser at 18kg/ha recorded in 2022, far below even half of the target of 50kg/ha as set out in the declaration.