Like the other inhabitants of Bokki village, Seydou Boubacar depends on agriculture and livestock for his living. In 2000, this 40-year-old farmer began using fertilizer micro-dosing technology on his land located southeast of Niamey, Niger’s capital. Years later, the decision helped buffer him and his 12 family members against the food shortage in the summer of 2010.
“The bad rainfall in 2009 was very hard for most people and many families ran out of grain,” says Boubacar. “But this time I did not suffer. I have enough in my granaries to feed my family and some friends.”
Boubacar was one of the lucky few. In July 2010, over seven million people (more than half of Niger’s population) were threatened by hunger. Wracked by recurring droughts, the thatch grain stores that cover the rural landscape began to run empty, months before the September harvest that would replenish them.
This is a familiar story in a country that is considered one of the poorest in the world, and which already suffered a widespread famine in 2005. Today, Niger is still unable to able to produce enough food for its growing population.
But there is hope.
Scientists at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) feel that the wide-scale application of fertilizer micro-dosing could have prevented the shortfall.
ICRISAT’s regional hub based near Niamey has tested micro-dosing with more than 25,000 farmer families in the dry zones of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, with favorable results. The method has been proven to increase the production of millet, the dryland staple of these Sahelian countries, by 50-100 per cent. At the same time, it can also double farmer incomes.
By adopting fertilizer micro-dosing methods, Niger could produce surplus millet in good years, store it, and then use it to help ride out the bad years. All the farmers would have to do is use a bottle cap to apply tiny amounts of fertilizer (about one-sixth of the quantity normally used on grain crops in the USA) directly to the roots of their plants. ICRISAT experiments show that this can increase millet grain yields in Niger by an average of 55 per cent.
Before using fertilizer micro-dosing, Boubacar used to harvest about 187 kg of pearl millet per hectare. By using this technology, he almost tripled his harvest to 520 kg per hectare in 2009. This has had a huge impact on his family’s nutrition and wealth.
“When I started micro-dosing in 2000, I had only two sheep, but today I have 20 sheep, 20 goats, two cattle and 10 donkeys,” he says.
Dr. Jupiter Ndjeunga, ICRISAT’s economist in Niger, believes the 2010 crisis could have been avoided. “If only one quarter of Niger’s farmers had practiced fertilizer micro-dosing in 2009, the grain shortfall would have been erased,” he says. “This would have cost the country only a small fraction of the cost of food aid that was needed when the food crisis hit in 2010.”
If poor farmers were given access to these simple technologies, millions of people like Boubacar would have more food and increased incomes, which, in turn, could help avert future food shortages.
Further reading: Hunger in Niger Could Have Been Prevented, Scientists Say
Photo essay: In pictures: Famine-beating farming in Niger
Photo credit: ICRISAT
http://www.cgiar.org/consortium-news/micro-doses-of-fertilizer-could-help-poor-farmers-beat-famine/
