80% Of Soils In Sub-Saharan Africa Severely Degraded - BBC

[hatrack]

Africa's farmland is rapidly becoming barren and incapable of sustaining the continent's already hungry population, according to a report. The report shows that more than 80% of the farmland in Sub-Saharan Africa is plagued by severe degradation.

This is a major cause of poverty and hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in three people is undernourished. Population growth is leading to the overexploitation of farmland, depleting soil of nutrients, the report says. Farmers' inability to afford fertiliser is a major contributing factor, it adds. Deforestation, use of marginal lands, and poor agricultural practices also play a role. The International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC) report tracks soil health on the continent from 1980 to 2004.

More than 60% of Africa's population is directly engaged in agriculture; but crop productivity has remained stagnant, while cereal yields in Asia have risen three-fold over the past four decades.

"Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa have traditionally cleared land, grown a few crops, then moved on to clear more land, leaving the land to regain fertility," the authors write in their report. "But population pressure now forces farmers to grow crop after crop, mining or depleting the soil of nutrients while giving nothing back."

EDIT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4860694.stm

[jwirr]

1. When I read something like this I always wonder how much the

population has dropped from deaths related to the various crises in Africa: crop failures, Aides, genocide, wars, etc. The articles seem to be saying that the population is still growing. Anyone know of information that would answer my questions?

[XemaSab]

2. This site has a lot of info

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/

The CIA world factbook can also give you a lot of data on individual countries at www.cia.gov

It's my theory that the wealth of nations is a direct result first and foremost of the ability to grow enough food to feed the people, and everything else is secondary.

Tropical soils are typically very nutrient-poor due to the high rainfall. Desert soils often have chemical problems that most North American soils don't have such as high pH and high salt content adding to the anthropogenic causes of desertification.

We are very blessed with arable soils in this country in a way that most nations are not.

[jwirr]

3. Thank you. As a farmers daughter I have always felt that we

were going about helping those countries in the wrong way. Our own country developed from the bottom up. We used small intensive labor farms to first feed the farmer and his family, the neighboring towns and then further. From that there is a natural move to educate any surplus laborers to provide services and supplies to those farmers. We did not start out as big business. It also seems to me that there is a big need for many of the organic methods of building up soil so that it can sustain growth of usable plants.