Fertiliser access grows smallholder farmers, food and finance
LOUIS TRICHARDT, South Africa: Brightly coloured cans, bags of fertiliser and packets containing all types of seeds catch the eye upon entering Nancy Khorommbi’s agro dealer shop tucked at the corner of a roadside service station.
But her seeds and fertilisers have not exactly been flying off the shelves since Khorommbi opened the fledging shop six years ago. Her customers: smallholder farmers in the laid back town of Sibasa, 72 kilometres northeast of Louis Trichardt in Limpopo, one of South Africa’s provinces hard hit by drought this year. The reason for the slow business is that smallholder farmers cannot access, let alone effectively use plant-nourishing fertilisers to improve their low productivity.
“Some of the farmers who walk into my shop have never heard about fertilisers and those who have, do not know how to use them effectively,” Khorommbi told IPS said on the sidelines of a training workshop organised by the International Fertiliser Association ( IFA)- supported African Fertiliser Volunteers Program (AFVP) to teach smallholders farmers and agro dealers like her about fertilisers in Limpopo.
Khorommbi, describing information as power, says fledging agro- dealer businesses are a critical link in the food production chain. Agro- dealers, who work at the village level, better understand and are more accessible to smallholder farmers, who in many cases rely on the often poorly resourced government extension service for information on improving productivity.
“Smallholder farmers can make the change in food security through better production, one of whose key elements is fertilizer,” said Khrorommbi, one of more than 100 agro- dealers in the Vhembe District of Limpopo.
Noting the knowledge gap on fertilisers, the African Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP), supported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation ( FAO) and private sector partners, launched Agribusiness Support to the Limpopo Province (ASLP) in 2015 which has trained over 100 agro- dealers in the Province.
The project promotes the development of the agro dealer hub model, where established commercial agro dealers service smaller agro dealers and agents in the rural areas, who in turn better serve smallholder farmers by putting agr icultural inputs within easy reach and at reasonable cost. The AFVP aims to attract the private sector in South Africa – a net fertiliser importer – to developing the SMEs sector in the fertiliser value chain focusing on smallholder farmers and agro dealers. Smallholder farmers hold the key to feeding Africa, including South Africa, but their productivity is stymied by poor access to inputs and even effective markets for their produce, an issue the FAO believes private and public sector pa r tner sh ips can solve.
AFAP and a private company, Kynoch Fertiliser, have embarked on an entrepreneurship development programme for smallholder farmers and agro dealers in the Limpopo province, one of the country’s bread baskets, in an effort to help close the ‘yield gap’ among smallholder farmers. Smallholder farmers and agro dealers have been trained on fertilisers, soils, plant nutrients, safe storage of fertilisers, environmental safety and business management skills.
“By using more fertilisers correctly, South Africa’s smallholder farmers can grow more and nutritious food, achieve household food security, create jobs, increase incomes and boost rural development,” AFAP’s Vice-President, Prof Richard Mkandawire, told IPS. “To grow and support SMEs in Africa is the pathway if we are to reduce hunger and poverty.
The future of South Africa is about growing those rural enterprises that will support smallholder farmers and employment creation.’
In 2006, African Heads of State and Government signed the Abuja Declaration at a Fertiliser Summit in Nigeria committing to increase the use of fertiliser in Africa from the then-average 8kg per hectare to 50kg per hectare by 2015 to boost productivity. Ten years later, only a few countries have attained this goal.
Research has shown that smallholder farmers in South Africa in general do not apply optimum levels of fertilisers owing to high cost, poor access and low awareness about the benefits of providing nutrition for the soil. Fertiliser Registrar and Director in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forests ( DAFF) in Limpopo Province Jonathan Mudzunga says smallholder farmers have structural difficulties in getting much needed fertilisers, a critical input in raising crop yields and providing business and employment creation opportunities for agro dealers.