Soil
Fertility/Management
 One
of the most pressing problems of African agriculture is the
widespread decline in soil fertility. About a half billion
hectares of the continent's agricultural land are already
moderately or severely degraded, greatly undermining the efforts
of African farmers to improve their livelihoods through more
intensive production. CIAT has done much to help reverse the
soil fertility decline and has recently embarked on new initiatives
with international and national partners that promise to deliver
much more.
New
Practices and Tools
Since the early 1990s, CIAT scientists have been identifying
and testing new soil management practices, using participatory
approaches, with farmers in several eastern African countries.
This work has demonstrated the value of various legumes-canavalia,
mucuna, lablab, crotalaria, tephrosia, and vetch-for improving
soil fertility, among other uses.
In order for farmers to make sound decisions about when and
where to employ new soil management technologies, they need
a reliable way to monitor soil quality. To help them do that,
CIAT and various national partners have developed a new decision-support
tool in the form of a training
guide. The guide explains how to elicit, organise, and
rank farmers' perspectives on soil quality and integrate them
with those of soil scientists.
Developed originally in Latin America, this and other decision-support
tools have been adapted to conditions in eastern Africa through
training events held in Uganda and Tanzania. These events
were conducted jointly by CIAT; the African Highlands Initiative
(AHI),
coordinated by the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry
(ICRAF);
the CGIAR Systemwide Soil, Water, and Nutrient Management
(SWNM)
Program; and the Kenya-based Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility
Programme (TSBF).
An
Open Alliance
On the foundation of that and other collaborative efforts,
CIAT, the TSBF Programme, and ICRAF recently established the
Alliance for Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) in
Africa. In a prior step toward forming the alliance, the TSBF
Institute of CIAT was created under an agreement signed
in December 2001. Subsequently, CIAT and ICRAF agreed on terms
for a wider arrangement that will fully integrate the soils
research of the three organisations.
Scientists from the alliance's three founding partners met
in early March 2002 with technical advisers from interested
donor agencies for a 3-day strategy-development workshop.
The event was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation at its
Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy. Afterwards,
a working group produced a synthesis of the workshop presentations,
entitled "Soil Fertility Degradation in Sub-Saharan Africa:
Leveraging Lasting Solutions to a Long-Term Problem."
Workshop participants identified a series of actions that
need to be taken, organised under five headings:
1. Empowering farmers to apply ISFM practices on a larger
scale-from individual farm plots and households to entire
landscapes and communities.
2. Finding ways to translate new knowledge from strategic
research on soil carbon and nutrient cycles into practical
soil management measures that boost and sustain agricultural
productivity.
3. Devising new management practices that enhance the soil's
ecosystem functions, such as carbon storage, which reduces
emissions of greenhouse gases.
4. Managing soil organisms and monitoring their valuable contributions
to human welfare and agroecosystem health.
5. Strengthening networks of scientists, development professionals,
and farmers through training, partnerships, and information
sharing.
To achieve rapid advances on all of these fronts, the three
founding members of the alliance will combine their R&D
experience, networks, and partnerships for joint implementation
of ISFM approaches. The alliance will also serve as a hub
for effective collaboration with regional networks and major
development programmes in Africa.
Contact
Robert Delve
E-mail: r.delve@cgiar.org
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With
a more intensive, market-oriented agriculture comes the risk
of more intensive pest and disease pressures. If Africa's
small farmers are to be competitive over the long term, they
must acquire new knowledge, skills, and tools that help meet
these threats without relying excessively on agrochemicals,
monocropping, or single crop varieties, which only increase
the vulnerability of agriculture in the face of evolving pests
and diseases and global climate change.
Like
its research on soils, CIAT's work on integrated pest and
disease management increasingly depends on multi-institutional
alliances for combating major threats to agriculture in Africa
and beyond. One particularly alarming problem is the whitefly
and the many viruses it transmits, affecting numerous crop
species across the tropics. Researchers are presenting a united
front against this threat through the CIAT-coordinated