Fertilizers and Soil Health in West Africa: The Views of Key Stakeholders Collected during Virtual Consultations

The virtual consultations organised by ECOWASs from 25th to 27th April 2023, respectively with the private sector, civil society, and public sector actors on improving soil fertility and agricultural productivity in West Africa ended on a positive note.

The quality of the discussions of the consultations held with the technical and financial support of the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC, through the Feed the Future Enhancing Growth through Regional Agricultural Input Systems Project funded by USAID) and the World Bank, has mobilised stakeholders, inter-governmental organisations (ECOWAS, UEMOA, CILSS) and their Member countries to contribute to the development and adoption of a specific regional agenda that includes performance indicators on soil fertility and health for the benefit of all countries of the region.

For all three consultations (private sector, civil society, and the public sector), the convergence of views made it possible to identify priorities for 12 actions to be carried out: 6 in favour of policies, 3 in favour of access to fertilisers, 2 in favour of agronomy and 1 in favour of knowledge.

This includes enhancing and promoting local agricultural production, increasing, and promoting local production of fertilisers, coordinating, and strengthening the monitoring of soil conditions and providing appropriate recommendations, sensitising decision-makers, and stakeholders on the need to restore soils, and coordinating the monitoring of fertiliser use.

It will also be necessary to ensure the supply of fertilisers to ECOWAS countries, strengthen the financial and operational capacities of agro-dealers, improve availability and accessibility of inputs, and improve the effectiveness of fertiliser subsidy programmes.

Last but not least, it is also important to strengthen the regional regulatory framework on fertilizer control and quality, update and strengthen the Community tariff regime on fertilizer trade and promote complementary inputs through extension services.

The recommendations of the consultations will be recorded in a Roadmap that will be discussed at the high-level ministerial meeting that the ECOWAS Commission will organise on 30th and 31st May 2023 in Lomé (Togo), with the support of the World Bank.

To recall, despite the efforts undertaken and the progress recorded since the African Fertilizer Summit held in Abuja, Nigeria in June 2006, agricultural productivity, and production are still insufficient on the African Continent. Fertilizer use is still at low levels, far away from the adopted targets of 50 kg of nutrients per hectare. The corollary is the heavy reliance on food imports, the continuous increase since 2010 of the number of food insecure and hungry people, all this in a context of growing insecurity, climate change and declining soil fertility.