Alternative approaches for promoting fertiliser use in Africa, with particular reference to the role of fertiliser subsidies

Promoting sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will require massive increases in the amounts of fertilisers used in agriculture. Beyond Africa, history has shown that increases in fertiliser adoption are the starting blocks to long-term structural transformation and growth of the economy, and there is a widely held view that farmers’ failure to intensify agricultural production in a manner that maintains soil productivity is a key feature of SSA’s land degradation problems. This commissioned paper reviews the substantial body of fertiliser literature and attempts to provide a balanced view to the policy options available regarding fertiliser subsidies for smallholder agriculture in SSA.Although there are some differences, the paper reports that most of the literature agrees that enabling conditions for rapid fertiliser adoption include:increased investment in transportation and marketingbetter extension services and extension messagescost-effective means to reduce the risks of using fertilizer and producing for the marketfacilitation of rural financial markets for the financing of fertiliser purchasesResearchers and practitioners increasingly appreciate that complementary interventions must accompany fertiliser promotion programmes, and that these must explicitly regard improvements in land husbandry practices, the type of fertiliser recommended, and methods of application. SSA boasts an extremely wide variety of specific circumstances, and the paper emphasises disaggregated research, extension, and market development, and to take into consideration issues of institutional capacity, agro-ecology, and population densities. General lessons for better programme design should only be drawn where the scale of the synthesis and generalisation is at the national level or below.Fertiliser subsidies remain an attractive option; they are politically appealing and seem easy to implement, despite past negative externalities. The current debate on subsidies focuses on ways to improve targeting, and that fertiliser promotion programmes are considered explicitly in relation to a range of alternative investments and policy tools. Soil fertility decline can only be combated with increased donor resources, which will lead to local benefits as well as supra-national benefits, such as increased carbon sequestration.Despite the substantial literature available, significant gaps remain in our knowledge of soil fertility, fertiliser response and profitability, and social costs and benefits, among others. This appears partly attributable to a lack of consensus due to the variety of studies undertaken in different location-specific contexts, so the authors recommend more adaptive research to test the relevance of initial findings under a variety of circumstances.