Mali
Context
Mali and much of the rest of Africa are facing a perfect storm in terms of their ability to maintain the fertility of its soils, and therefore, its capacity to produce food. Four major and several minor factors are coming together, especially in the semi-arid and sub-humid lowlands of Africa, to create what could well become one of the worst famines in world history.
The first of these factors is the price of nitrogen-based chemical fertilizer – by far the most important chemical fertilizer in Africa because nitrogen is the most widely occurring limiting factor in the continent’s agriculture. Because of the end of cheap energy, the price has more than doubled in price in most of Africa in the last five years and therefore has become, and will continue to be, too expensive to produce any economic benefit for the vast majority of Africa’s subsistence farmers. The increase in the value of the harvest of maize, sorghum, millet and cassava that is produced by chemical fertilizer is less than the cost of the fertilizer. The exceptions to this rule are those cases where farmers are producing rice and, in some cases, peanuts. Thus the use of chemical fertilizer has become economically impossible for the vast majority of Africa’s subsistence farmers in a space of less than five years.
But the second factor, while it has taken much longer to reach a critical stage, is even more devastating. Because of Africa’s population explosion, agricultural land has become more and more scarce. Therefore farmers have gradually had to give up the age-old practice of letting part of their land sit idle (a practice called “fallowing” the land) in order to let it regain its fertility. Until the 1970’s, Africa’s farmers had enough land to fallow for periods of 12 to 15 years. By 1980’s, as land became more scarce, they reduced the fallow period to eight or 10 years, and then in the 1990’s to five years. Today, the fallow period in many areas is two years or less, and rapidly disappearing altogether. This is crucial because with no fallowing period there is no fertility-enhancing impact on the soil and it soon becomes impossible to farm. When one drops from fifteen to ten years, the fertility-enhancing impact on the soil is probably only reduced by 10 or 15%. When one goes from ten years to five years, one loses perhaps 30% of the impact on soil fertility. But when one goes from five years to no fallowing at all, one loses 100% of the impact previous impact. This is not a plane gradually descending to make a soft landing; it is a plane at five thousand feet in elevation that is heading into a nosedive.
The third factor hitting African soil fertility is the reduction in Africa’s famous cattle herds. The heightened pressure on the land has also reduced Africa’s herds, because traditional grazing lands have been turned into farmlands. People have also sold off their animals because farmers are no longer able to feed themselves from their cropland, so they are staving off famine by selling their animals. One result of the reduction in animals is that the available animal manure is no longer adequate to fertilize more than a very small fraction of the farmers’ cropland.
Fourth, whether or not climate change will cause an increase or decrease in overall rainfall in the various parts of Africa, it is quite clear it has already dramatically increased the irregularity and unpredictability of rains. This has already reduced yields dramatically in most of sub-humid and semi-arid Africa, and it is also damaging to soil fertility because irregular rains dramatically reduce the biomass (both as crop residues and as the growth of fallows and weeds) that is available to replenish the soil’s fertility.
Due to the combined effect of these factors, in the past several years Africa’s lowland farmers have started reporting a reduction of between 15% and 25% in their yields each year. They cannot survive for long at that rate and it is probable that a major famine will spread across the continent, affecting millions of African families. In Mali, the process seems to be more advanced (that is, the soils are already more degraded) than in most of the other African nations.
Groundswell’s Response
In response to this situation, in August 2010 Groundswell launched a three year program – Saving for Change Plus Agriculture (SfC Plus Ag) – in partnership with Oxfam America. It responds to requests for agriculture training by many of the 350,000 women in Oxfam’s Saving for Change community finance groups across Mali. They wanted to learn how to solve their other most pressing problems: low agricultural production (caused mostly by rapidly deteriorating soils) and water scarcity (both for domestic use and agriculture). Through SfC Plus Ag, 26,000 women living 200 rural villages in Mali are learning to sustainably improve their agricultural production by introducing simple technologies to improve soil fertility (using nitrogen fixing trees and cover crops), seed quality (short cycle seeds), and water management.