General
Maintaining and improving soil fertility is crucial for Africa to attain the Millennium Development Goals (www.unmillenniumproject.org), specially contributing to ‘Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger (MDG 1)’ and ‘Ensuring environmental sustainability (MDG 7)’. Fertile soil and balanced fertility management are major foundations for sustainable food production and contribute to sound management of natural resources and to controlling environmental degradation such as erosion, loss of biodiversity, pollution of water sources and acidification. It has been recognized that activities aimed at improving soil fertility management need to be implemented within an overall strategy to reduce poverty that includes restoring budgetary priority to agriculture as an engine of economic growth, empowering women, and promoting community-based actions that will boost agricultural production, improve nutrition, develop rural markets and infrastructure, and promote environmental sustainability. ‘Africa has not yet had its green revolution,’ stated Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Millennium Project. ‘We have the technology today to bring about this revolution in a totally environmentally sound manner’.
While formal agricultural research indeed has generated a vast amount of knowledge and fundamental insights in soil fertility and ways to enhance it, their adoption by smallholder farmers, especially in Africa, has remained below expectations. The research and development community has concluded that traditional transfer of technology, once successful in specific farming systems in Europe and Asia, is not the appropriate approach in the diverse smallholder farming systems in Africa. New approaches are needed in which smallholders are actively involved in the process, that focus on technology development and innovations geared to the specific physical, climatic, economic and social circumstances of smallholders and integrate this technology development...
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