Fertilizer use in Africa as compared to other developing regions has been limited. What types of policies and programs are needed to realize the potential benefits of fertilizer in African agriculture? This book summarizes key lessons learned from past efforts to promote fertilizer in Africa, provides an overview of the current state of knowledge concerning technical aspects of fertilizer use in Africa, and presents good practice guidelines for promoting sustainable increases in fertilizer use.
Scenes of starvation have drawn the world's attention to Africa's agricultural and environmental crisis. Some observers question whether this continent can ever hope to feed its growing population. Yet there is an overlooked food resource in sub-Saharan Africa that has vast potential: native food plants. Africa has more than 2,000 native grains and fruits--"lost" species due for rediscovery and exploitation. This volume focuses on native cereals, presenting information on where and how they are grown, harvested, and processed, their benefits and limitations as a food source, and the the futures of each grain.
Sometime around 1500 AD, an African farmer planted a maize seed imported from the New World. That act set in motion the remarkable saga of one of the world's most influential crops--one that would transform the future of Africa and of the Atlantic world. Africa's experience with maize is distinctive but also instructive from a global perspective: experts predict that by 2020 maize will become the world's most cultivated crop.
James McCann moves easily from the village level to the continental scale, from the medieval to the modern, as he explains the science of maize production and explores how the crop has imprinted itself on Africa's agrarian and urban landscapes. Today, maize accounts for more than half the calories people consume in many African countries. During the twentieth century, a tidal wave of maize engulfed the continent, and supplanted Africa's own historical grain crops--sorghum, millet, and rice. In the metamorphosis of maize from an exotic visitor into a quintessentially African crop, in its transformation from vegetable to grain, and from curiosity to staple, lies a revealing story of cultural adaptation. As it unfolds, we see how this sixteenth-century stranger has become indispensable to Africa's fields, storehouses, and diets, and has embedded itself in Africa's political, economic, and social relations.
The recent spread of maize has been alarmingly fast, with implications largely overlooked by the media and policymakers. McCann's compelling history offers insight into the profound influence of a single crop on African culture, health, technological innovation, and the future of the world's food supply.
This book highlights some of the main areas of debate around the subject of agricultural policy in Eastern Africa. Its major aim is to introduce the reader to different issues of economic and social change arising from agricultural development and to provide an understanding of some of the major difficulties faced by African countries in pursuing an agricultural policy.
Upon its initial publication in 1965, The African Husbandman helped a generation of scholars and officials appreciate that Africans' agricultural practices were both more complex and more malleable than was often thought. Allan's work also pioneered research methods that wedded ethnographic and ecological fieldwork in ways that demonstrated the inextricable links between social arrangements, environmental conditions, and land use patterns. If certain facets of Allan's analysis have now come under scrutiny, such as his concept of carrying capacity and his belief in the positive consequences of colonialism, his general tenet that to improve agricultural prospects in Africa one first has to understand it from the cultivators' point of view has only been strengthened with time. As long as there are individuals struggling to make sense of African agricultural productivity.
Cassava is Africa's second most important food crop. The cassava transformation that is now underway in West Africa is fueled by new high yielding TMS varieties that have transformed cassava from a low-yielding, famine-reserve crop to a high-yielding cash crop for both rural and urban consumers. The book highlights the role of cassava as a "poverty fighter" by increasing cassava productivity and driving down the cost of cassava in rural and urban diets.
Vertisols are heavy clay-like soils that although fertile and potentially productive are difficult to cultivate. They occur extensively in many warmer climates such as Africa, Australia, India and Texas. Based on a workshop held in Zimbabwe in May 1999, organized by the Department of Research and Specialist Services (Zimbabwe) and the International Board for Soil Research and Management (IBSRAM), this book reviews the current state of knowledge on the management of vertisols in Africa, with comparative chapters covering other parts of the world.
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