Recent achievement of sustainable soil management in Sub-Saharan Africa

To many, the African continent is on the cusp of a rise in poverty and food insecurity. The often quoted widespread, inherently low fertility of soils in Africa is topped by a more widespread nutrient mining. The fundamental biophysical root cause for declining per capita food production in Sub-Saharan Africa is soil fertility depletion in smallholder farms. Although significant progress has been made in research in developing principles, methodologies and technologies for combating soil fertility depletion, soil infertility still remains the fundamental biophysical cause for the declining per capita food production in SubSaharan Africa. The inherent constraints in some soils have been exacerbated by their over-exploitation for agricultural production. Large areas of soils of high production potential in Sub-Saharan Africa have been degraded due to continuous cropping without replacement of nutrients exported by harvests. Increasing population pressure of up to 1200 persons per square kilometer have necessitated the cultivation of marginal lands that are prone to erosion and other environmental degradation. In many cases, it is no longer feasible to use extended fallow periods to restore soil fertility. The shortened fallow periods are in many situations not able to regenerate soil productivity leading to non-sustainability of the production systems. For decades, the annual food production increase of 2 % does not match the yearly population growth rates of 3 %, rendering food insecurity more common and more regular. Furthermore, from the sixty-six nations worldwide that are currently unable to meet their population’s food demands, the majority lies in Sub-Saharan Africa requiring greater food production in this region. Therefore, the African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government coined 2014 to be the ‘‘Year of Agriculture and Food Security in Africa’’. This was driven ‘‘to consolidate active commitments toward new priorities, strategies and targets for achieving results and impacts, with special focus on sustained, all Africa agriculture-led growth, propelled by stronger, private sector investment and public–private partnerships’’. ‘‘Sustainable intensification’’ is recurrently proposed to meet this challenging pressure as it deals with increasing yields while concurrently decreasing the negative impacts on the environment. There is consent that closing the yield gap in SubSaharan Africa is difficult to meet since there is no silver bullet solution, but rather a large portfolio of options is to be considered. To improve food and nutrition security, in a global crop modeling study, A. Bationo (&) Accra, Ghana e-mail: abationo@outlook.com