Sustainable agricultural practices focused on smallholder farmers can help produce more food while caring for the land, Kashim Shettima, the vice president of Nigeria has said.
Precision and regenerative agricultural practices from local communities, such as soil mapping and improved seeds, could help to bring about an increase in yield, he said during a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel in Davos on soil.
“The small-scale farmer is the key to economic emancipation and development of the African continent,” he said.
The Great Green Wall project cutting cross Sub Saharan Africa could bring about the kind of “major change in the landscape” needed to tackle the environmental crisis, he said. This initiative, adopted by the African Union in 2007, initially aimed to increase the amount of arable land over a vast area while combating desertification.
“In Sub Saharan Africa behind the mayhem of Boko Haram, behind the insanity of ISIS and all those terrorist organisations, lies the real cause, which is extreme poverty and … you locate it in the quality of soil, the degradation of our soil resources, because the soil is not only responsible for our food, it’s also has some mitigating effects … on our economic viability.”
Nigeria’s agricultural sector faces numerous challenges including a poor land tenure system, a low level of irrigation farming, climate change, and land degradation, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. However, it has implemented several initiatives that aim to promote the sustainable management of natural resources.
Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, also emphasised the need to understand communities to tackle soil challenges in Africa.
“We need communities to work together, that should translate into credits for these communities. If a farmer is investing in improving biodiversity on their land, they should get biodiversity credits,” Kalibata told the panel.
Artificial intelligence could be used to pull together different sustainable incentives for farmers, like biodiversity and carbon credits, to improve their access, she said.
Farmers need policies that allow them to own land so they have the right incentives to engage in sustainable practices, she said. “For me, it’s about incentives. What is the need for the farmer?”
Cindy McCain, executive director of the UN World Food Programme, said small and large farms need to be better educated in using science and technology to analyse soil.
“What does that mean? It means in the long run, global security is better. We are seeing right now a huge exodus, coming up to the dry quarter up in New Mexico all the way up to the southern border of Arizona. People are hungry, they’re scared,” McCain said.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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