Debate rages over push for new green revolution in Africa's agriculture

September 24 - After decades of mono-cropping and overgrazing, around 65% of Africa’s farmland, opens new tab is now considered unproductive or degraded, leaving more than 270 million people facing chronic hunger, opens new tab. But while there is general agreement that food security is a priority for Africa, how to achieve it is a far more polarised debate.

In February, the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit concluded in Kenya with the signing of the Nairobi Declaration, opens new tab by African heads of state. It included a fertiliser plan that, over the next 10 years, will triple the use of both organic and inorganic fertilisers across Africa, with the stated aim of boosting food production and restoring health to 30% of the continent’s degraded soil.

The summit heard that, historically, African countries have failed to apply enough fertiliser to replace vital nutrients. The African Union pointed out that more than 40 countries are below a target of 50kg of fertiliser per hectare a year, with most averaging just 18kg. As a result, Africa’s soils have become barren.

But for Charles Tumuhe, healthy soil project officer at the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), chemical fertilisers are the reason “the soil got sick in the first place”.

Since the start of Africa’s Green Revolution, opens new tab in the middle of the last century, he argues, vast quantities of artificial fertilisers have been added to the soil, often indiscriminately. The idea was to boost yields and feed a growing population but instead, he says, it has made African agriculture reliant on inputs, at the expense of indigenous knowledge.

For AFSA, which is a coalition of civil society groups and farmers, the answer to food security in Africa lies with the concept of agroecology, and combining traditional, local knowledge with science to restore biodiversity and build more resilient food systems. “Agroecology is modern science that uses indigenous ways,” he says. “It’s about working with nature, not against it.”

Agroecology focuses on soil health, he explains, and looks at all the components, from its chemistry and pH, to elements such as water and nutrients, and the micro-organisms that live in it. And the best way to boost all these aspects is by using bio-fertilisers, not artificial ones. This, he says, will “create an environment in the soil for even more life to flourish”.

Take bokashi, he explains, a compost made from easily available materials such as charcoal dust, rotten fruit and cow dung, which as it ferments, attracts micro-organisms. As well as nutrients, and micro-elements such as zinc and iron, he says “when you add it to the soil, you are also adding beneficial bacteria… that you will not find in a commercial fertiliser. … Soil likes diversity,” he says.

The idea of bringing together the latest science to improve soil health, but without the chemical inputs, is also taxing scientists at agricultural technology giant Syngenta.

“Africa suffers from a yield gap,” says chief sustainability officer Petra Laux, with farmland that never reaches its true potential. “Technology can solve this,” she explains.

The company is working on a new generation of technologies that are focused on soil health and enabling plants to make better use of existing resources. These include adding bio-stimulants (micronutrients), to help plants resist abiotic stress, such as heat and drought.

Syngenta has shown that by delivering natural micronutrients to a plant, farmers can achieve the same yields, with 30% less fertiliser. “If a plant is in good shape, it can make better use of existing nutrients,” she explains.

The Swiss agrichemical company is also looking at ways of using bacteria to help plants extract nitrogen from the air, again reducing reliance on chemicals inputs, as well as next-generation technologies such as Tymirium, a compound that targets the nematodes that eat plants’ roots, but without affecting other micro-organisms in the soil.

“Africa will not get to food security without using technology,” says Laux.

As well as better managing the soil, African agriculture must also get to grips with a changing climate. Creating more resilient farming communities is central to the Mount Kenya Sustainable Landscape and Livelihoods programme, opens new tab (MSuLLi).

Established by the Rainforest Alliance, with support from the IKEA Foundation, it covers one of the most important agricultural zones for both food and cash crops in Africa, with the mosaic of plantations, forest and smallholdings on the slopes of Mount Kenya, also one of the largest tea-producing regions in the world. The programme focuses on regenerative farming techniques and reducing farmers’ reliance on synthetic fertilisers and pesticides while at the same time creating more diverse farms.

MSuLLi is built around the idea of integrated landscape management, explains Marion Nduta, the Rainforest Alliance’s country director in Kenya, and brings together all the actors from across a landscape, from farmers to buyers, local government to international companies, around a shared vision of restoration and conservation.

The Mount Kenya programme also aims to support women farmers, strengthen farmer associations and build commitments from companies buying tea and coffee to reward farmers that are working regeneratively.

But Kenya’s hundreds of thousands of smallholders live with the daily threat of climate change, from higher temperature and land degradation to events such as the unpredictable rainfall and floods earlier this year, which killed hundreds of people and destroyed thousands of hectares of crops.

The conditions caused by these extreme weather events have seen pests and pathogens such as tea mites and coffee berry disease flourish, which along with other challenges such as ageing coffee and tea bushes, have left many farmers struggling.

Two years ago, Enos Muriuki and his wife Tabitha took the brave decision to act on Rainforest Alliance’s advice and grub up their 50-year-old tea bushes, replacing them with more climate-resilient, higher yielding varieties on his farm in Kirinyaga County.

At the same time they began to diversify what they grew on the smallholding, too. Yam, cassava, spinach and arrowroot now flourish in a small kitchen garden, while sweet potatoes grow up the side of the house and huge cabbages provide ground cover between the tea bushes; what they don’t eat, they sell.

“Instead of wasting space you can plant cabbages and get money,” says Enos. “It’s better to plant different things… we want to plant for food security, for when the drought comes.”

There are chickens too, and a small fishpond, while the milk from four cows brings in important extra money, and a previously unusable slope of land at the end of the farm is now alive to the sound of beehives.

The bees are important pollinators for another crop, Hass avocados, which are only irrigated by rainwater and fruit throughout the year. The farm is also chemical-free, says Enos.

Encouraging farmers to diversify also helps them maintain an income as they transition away from using artificial fertilisers on key crops such as tea and coffee, explains Karugu Macharia, a member of MSuLLi’s landscape management board, because becoming organic often sees a short-term dip in production.

Macharia is no fan of artificial inputs. “We used to use worms for fishing but they are no longer there… the fertiliser has killed the soil,” he explains, adding that: “Food co-operatives are stopping stocking the chemicals because they have seen the damage they cause.”

However, the plan is to help farmers phase out the use of pesticides and fertilisers rather than abandon them overnight, which would risk significant crop loss and economic.

Enos’s smallholding is one of more than 800,000 tea farms that have achieved Rainforest Alliance certification, along with more than 85,000 coffee farmers. Certification is an important part of the MSuLLi programme because farms selling certified produce can charge a premium price.

“The buyers are able to invest and give back to the producers as a way of encouraging best practices,” says Rainforest Alliance’s Nduta, while it allows them to record the exact provenance of the raw materials they are buying. This helps to meet the growing number of regulations, such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, as well as consumer demands for more sustainable products.

But while there has been interest from companies to support the transition to more sustainable landscapes, funding remains scarce. Last year a report from investor network FAIRR revealed that of the 50 agrifood companies that had committed to regenerative agriculture, only four were offering financial support to help farmers make the transition.

Without this support there is a high risk that companies won’t be able to source the quantity or quality of crops they need, says Nduta. “The business case is there for companies to de-risk their supply chain but they can only do this by investing in farmers,” she says.

An important part of Rainforest Alliance’s work is encouraging farm-level investment, and in June it announced a collaboration with Clarmondial, opens new tab, a Swiss investment company with a focus on mobilising capital for the sustainable management of natural resources.

A pilot investment is supporting the Biosphere Integrity Fund in the Mount Kenya landscape, which Clarmondial will use to help local businesses and farmers working on sustainable ideas to show they are investment-ready, and catalyse interest from companies already sourcing in the region.

MSuLLi is just one of dozens of initiatives across Africa designed to kickstart a more sustainable agricultural sector. Others include AFR100, an ambitious project to empower Africa’s millions of smallholders to bring 100 million hectares of degraded land back into use by 2030.

Alongside knowledge, training and tools, AFR100 is also looking to fill the huge funding gap that is stalling the restoration movement, with support from the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) TerraFund, opens new tab. Earlier this year, the fund announced investment of nearly $18 million that will help 92 organisations restore land, support farms and plant nearly 13 million trees across Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, the Lake Kivu, the Ghana cocoa belt and the Rusizi River Basin of Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

Analysis from the ClimateShot Investor Coalition (CLIC), made up of fund managers and financial institutions, suggests that just 4% of global climate finance is currently directed to agriculture, with just 1% going to smallholders, despite their vulnerability.

CLIC works to scale finance for climate resilient and nature-positive agriculture and among the businesses it has recently supported is MazaoHub, a Tanzanian startup that is developing climate-smart farm management software that integrates soil sensors with AI-powered agronomy.

Another recent fundee is CoAmana, a tech company that digitalises market hubs and food systems in Kenya and Nigeria by linking small rural agribusinesses to trade services, financing and “fulfilment solutions”. The funding will allow the company to scale its buy-now-pay-later capacities and help more farmers access credit.

Kiasili Farm is an initiative co-founded by 28-year-old entrepreneur Fiona Macharia, with backing from Mercedes-Benz’s beVisioneers programme for young eco-innovators. Macharia is promoting indigenous and traditional food crops, which include highly nutritious vegetables such as managu, a leafy plant traditionally used to treat high blood pressure, and the vitamin-rich terere, as well as fruits such as guava.

By creating an online marketplace, she is providing farmers with access to hotels, schools and nutritional clinics, where they can sell their produce. At the same time, she adds, the project is improving access to quality, sustainably produced crops that can boosts Africa’s food security and help to address emerging health risks in Kenya caused by poor diets.

Back on the slopes of Mount Kenya, Christine Karimi has been farming her small plot of coffee bushes since her husband died in 2019. She was quick to embrace new ways, she explains, doing away with expensive chemicals, mulching so the soil retained its moisture and moving away from a coffee monoculture, with macadamia and banana trees now providing the shading the coffee needs, as well as important extra income. “I was always crying that coffee gave me no money,” she says, but now trees that once produced around 1kg of beans a year, are producing closer to 6kg, three times the national average. She now works for Rainforest Alliance to train her male neighbours, teaching them about agro-ecology, and how to prune trees and draft new disease-resistant strains.

In many ways, though, agro-ecology represents a return to old, indigenous ways of working with nature, instead of against it. And that is what needs to be done to meet the challenge of climate change, says MSuLLi’s Macharia. Farmers need “to think what their ancestors used to do”.