There's been a flurry of news articles about African agriculture lately - everything from the horrors of Chinese designed irrigation systems and dams to increasingly impoverished soil.

Although drought may be the best known barrier to successful crops in Africa, the poor soils are a huge part of the equation. Farmland in Africa has been robbed of chemicals such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which are vital for plant growth. And these have not been replaced with organic and chemical fertilizers, as they are in most other countries, because of the expense.

The nutrient-starved soils have become one of the major factors preventing the 200 million malnourished people in the continent from growing enough food to eat and sell. "Poor soil fertility is the fundamental cause for low agricultural production in hunger-endemic areas," notes Alfred Hartemink of World Soil Information (ISRIC) in Wageningen, The Netherlands. . .

In their analysis, the researchers totted up the nutrients that feed the soil, and subtracted losses from leaching, volatilization, erosion and crop uptake. They plugged these numbers, which differ from region to region, into a computer model to come up with a picture for the entire continent over time.

The study showed that around three-quarters of the continent's land is severely degraded of nutrients, with many regions losing as much as 60 kilograms per hectare each year. As a result, the production of cereals in sub-Saharan Africa has stagnated at one tonne per hectare compared with around three tonnes in the rest of the world, the report says.

It's worth noting that this isn't an unusual situation. It is the invariant consequence of organic agriculture that has played out in every place and every time period through history. It's the old story told by the ancient Greeks about their ancient ancestors that denuded the land before civilization rose to the point of being able to write about the problem. The response has always been abandonment, moving on to some other place and wrecking it while the old land recovered over centuries of fallowing, or conquest of those few special places such as the Nile delta that were born again each year due to seasonal flooding and the sediment loads dumped on the flooded fields. Rome favored this approach.

Africa is not uniquely bad in some way. Like other places it is experiencing population growth and running out of new lands to exploit. The old way of fallowing is no longer possible since there isn't enough land. They need to keep each parcel in production to grow needed food, but this results in decreasing yields. They can't win, they can't break even and they can't get out of the game. 2nd law.

There's no quick fix.

"Dumping fertilizers alone will not help," warns agricultural scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State University, Columbus, because most of them will wash away or evaporate from cement-hard, hot ground.

He says that fertilizers can work only in combination with other methods to restore soils, such as planting cover crops that anchor the nutrient-rich topsoil and supply organic matter between crop cycles. "Those are the things that build up the soil's life-support system," Lal says.

Judicious use of chemical fertilizers could also be tremendously useful, the meeting participants said. Any environmental damage from the chemicals must be balanced against the far greater damage being wreaked today by farmers who raze forests in order to find fertile land.

Lal made previous appearances here advocating no-till cultivation to reduce loss of soil carbon on cropped lands. It's a double disaster since the soil is impoverished while the atmosphere is inundated with carbon gasses such as CO2 and CH4. The loss of carbon is in addition to the loss of the 60 kilograms of nutrients per year noted above. Like some nitrogen compounds carbon compounds can just evaporate from land when it is exposed to the atmosphere by cultivation. It's like skinning an animal or stripping the bark off a tree and exposing its moist interior. Sod busting is gaiacide.

Facing the problem squarely is a good first step to coping with it. Agriculture is inherently destructive so if we are going to practice it - and we must - then we must anticipate the degradation and have methods to restore exploited lands.

The June fertilizer summit, convened by the African Union's New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), will aim to produce a list of actions to nourish soils.

This will include measures to improve the cost and availability of fertilizers, and to help farmers to adopt best practices. Development experts say that this must also be an integral part of broader measures to build up infrastructure such as roads and schools and open up access to local and international markets.

Others have noted that it costs more to move imported fertilizer a few tens of miles from coastal ports to where it is needed than it does to move the fertilizer across the ocean from where it is manufactured. This is an old problem of course but it is made worse in undeveloped areas by the lack of infrastructure - roads, fueling stations and so forth that facilitate movement of goods to and from the interior. Even if they didn't need to import fertilizer they still would need to export produce to urban markets. They lose coming and going.

A bit of conventional wisdom from livestock growers that applies as well to packs of humans as it does to herds of cattle is that it is easier and cheaper to move the livestock to their forage than it is to move the forage to the livestock. We see a lot of this in developing countries as starving farmers move to coastal cities where there is imported food. This is moving from the pan into the fire in some ways since the system becomes more fragile and it's not a pretty solution in any event - developing world mega-cities ringed by slums filled with rural immigrants are powder kegs of social unrest as well as reservoirs of disease and misery. And it doesn't match the fantasies of donor nations burdened with Jeffersonian ideals of "sustainable" yeoman farmers exporting surpluses to wealthy nations to pay for education, health care and the joys of modern life in bucolic rural settings.

The real tragedy here is that the rural poor of developing countries will be exploited by developed country ideologues struggling with one another to impose their views on each other through proxy battles in developing countries. It's a pattern reminiscent of ancient religious battles - each side seeking to convert the savages to their religion - and the more recent version of the same pattern as socialists and republicans fought one another in post-colonial developing world venues. The socialists are now a motley collection of "green" NGOs and European welfare states, and the republicans are the more market oriented interests - Jacobites vs. updated Whigs. Same old, same old.

It may be futile to focus on reality - to analyse real world problems and propose feasible coping methods - since political forces will dominate policy decisions, but futile gestures aren't the same as empty symbolic gestures and can be worthwhile. Lal is on the right track. To rejuvenate African soil it will take both imported fertility and home grown organic matter. The process won't be quick - it will take several seasons - and it won't work unless the methods are consistently applied for the duration. Results will gradually improve over time, outputs will increase as inputs decrease. There is no fundamental reason why African soils cannot yield as well as developed world soils if they are restored and managed. But there's no way to repeal the 2nd law, African farms will never be perpetual motion machines. In the end it is energy that must be continually imported though it will most often be the embodied energy of equipment and supplies, including fertilizers. Many will be disappointed and wish to deny this. Good luck with that.

Update

The Commons has posted a Paul Driessen essay on a relevant issue:

Analyst Paul Driessen writes about the battle currently being waged in La Oroya, Peru, by a company determined to clean up a polluting factory and improve the lives of the town's inhabitants and the local Archbishop and NGOs like Oxfam who put ideological purity above such life-enhancing measures.

Pitched battles over ideology and public policy certainly are not confined to classrooms or legislative chambers. They are also fought in poor communities of Africa, Asia and Latin America, often pitting multinational corporations against multinational activist groups.

The corporations seek to extract energy and minerals, provide much-needed jobs and capital, and serve investors and consumers – without harming human health or the environment. They often collide with well-connected global activists who loathe foreign investment, free enterprise, and especially extractive industries – and want to influence elections and policies in these regions.