Africa’s fertiliser shortages require continental solutions
AFRICAN presidents met in Nairobi for the Summit on Fertilisers and Soil Health, a technical, but exceptionally important topic since many of the solutions, especially to double and triple fertiliser output, will require collaborative efforts.
Zimbabwe has been expanding agricultural production, and soil conservation, fairly rapidly under the Second Republic, largely by looking at new farming techniques based around conservation agriculture, with the Pfumvudza/Intwasa programme for small-scale farmers leading the way, and by ensuring that farmers get enough fertiliser in their inputs.
A major stress in the Zimbabwean programmes is to get maximum benefit from fertilisers, which conservation farming gives. The idea is to have far more intensive farming, with soils being built up at the same time, on the same area or even less that used to be planted under older and less-efficient systems.
But Zimbabwe is fairly typical of all African countries in that it has to import a lot of fertiliser. While the country has phosphate reserves, and is expanding the mining of these, there are zero potassium minerals that can be mined and ammonium nitrate fertilisers rely on importing 80 percent of requirements, with even the local production relying on imported raw materials.
Most of the world’s potassium fertilisers come from just four countries: Russia, Belarus, China and Canada that have the right geology, with potassium minerals laid down 50 to 100 million years ago in shallow seas on continental shelf.
Africa, generally as a continent, was pushed together as a set of cratons a very long time before that and so never really had much in the way of the suitable shallow seas. South America, the Indian subcontinent and Oceania are in the same position, having split off from Africa.
But there are some potash deposits in Africa. Republic of Congo, that is Congo Brazzaville, Morocco, Eritrea, bits of Ethiopia and bits of Egypt have such deposits, so there are African sources, although many of these still need to be mined.
Ammonium nitrates, these days, are largely made from ammonia generated from natural gas, and there are a number of African countries that have such gas deposits, with Zimbabwe latest on the list following the Muzarabani strike.
There is a second source, that Zimbabwe used when Kariba could generate more power out of peak periods than could be sold.
This involves the liquefaction of air to obtain nitrogen and the electrolysis of water for hydrogen. But that method uses a lot of electricity and, unless there is a huge surplus of very cheap renewable energy, the resulting fertiliser will be very expensive.
Norway, with its surplus of hydro, does make ammonia this way, but it is not at present a solution for Africa.
So while no African country actually has all the main ingredients of modern fertilisers, the continent as a whole has the lot, or at least the building blocks that make up the lot.
Of course there are the intermediate industrial stages to turn potassium ores into the potassium salts that farmers want in a bag, and the natural gas first into ammonia and then into the ammonium nitrate salt that again farmers need in a bag.
Even the fairly concentrated phosphate deposits found in Zimbabwe and a few other countries need to be processed between the mines and the bag.
Turning raw materials into bags of fertiliser will require very large investments across a number of countries.
This is one reason why a Presidential-level summit is required. The technical experts can give the total supplies required, and they can also tell the presidents where African raw materials exist and how they can be processed into simple and compound fertilisers.
But it will need the political directives to ensure that a continental business is built up, with the countries that have the natural resources feeding their inputs into a continental pool that all draw down on for their national needs.
It is possible, but will require a high level of coordination, excellent contacts between the fertiliser businesses across the continent, and fairly careful direction of investment.
While fertiliser raw materials can be imported from other continents, and at the moment are imported, Africa needs to work towards self-sufficiency. Conflict, the need for exporting countries to use more on their own territory and other potential squeezes in supply require Africa to be largely self-sufficient.
This is particularly so when we consider that the agricultural experts reckon that Africa only uses a modest percentage of the fertiliser that should be used.
A huge expansion in use could well strain present global supply lines, hence the need for Africa to create its own internal supply lines from its own resources.
Finding enough fertiliser for all African farmers could well place intolerable strains on global supplies unless Africa builds up its share of global production.
As a continent we also need to make sure that while there are adequate supplies of fertilisers for modern farming, we waste nothing so we do not contaminate land, do not spend more than we need to produce our food, and we do not lose our topsoil.
A lot of this is applying research to farming, testing out new techniques and then creating best practices.
The conservation systems used in Pfumvudza are considered a best practice, but research and innovation must continue to be stressed so that something better still can be developed, or at least the conservation farming systems can be improved and tweaked.
We cannot sit still. We have to move forward.