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The World Bank says a transformed fertiliser market is needed in response to the food crisis looming in Africa, including Zambia.
World Bank Group President David Malpass emphasised urgency to make fertilisers more accessible and affordable to avoid prolonging the food crisis.
Malpass emphasised in his post on a blog that lives and livelihoods depended on the choices of policymakers in Africa.
“Fertiliser subsidies in both developed and developing countries can be repurposed towards measures that reduce overuse, decreasing the sector’s carbon footprint while increasing fertiliser availability.
“If the countries that over apply fertiliser reduced their consumption to adequate levels, access could increase in countries consuming well below the world average,” he said.
The continent produces approximately 30 million metric tonnes of fertiliser each year, twice as much as it consumes.
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Malpass observed that approximately 90 percent of fertiliser consumed in Sub-Saharan African, which Zambia is part of, was imported, mostly from outside the continent.
This, he said reflected inefficiencies in shipping and port costs, distribution chains, information availability and other trade frictions.
He explained that each factor needed a concerted effort by African nations to fix the system.
“Better trade infrastructure and trade facilitation measures such as harmonised rules have an important role. When technically and economically feasible, local production can complement trade by reducing transport and logistics costs.
“A large urea fertiliser plant recently opened in Nigeria to convert natural gas into fertiliser, but a portion is used to subsidise inefficient Nigerian buyers and a large portion is exported to Latin America, leaving farmers in Africa dependent on other markets,” he said.
Several external programmes are helping on the margins such as the US$6 billion International Finance Center (IFC) Global Food Security Platform, which is providing credit access to address liquidity constraints in the private fertiliser supply chain, and the US$30 billion World Bank food and nutrition security package focused on developing countries.
Commenting on these initiatives, Malpass cautioned that countries must ensure these efforts increased availability without inadvertently destroying the decades-long effort to build up private fertiliser markets in Africa.
“This means continuing to support market development and enabling the private sector.
Importantly, we must also take advantage of existing opportunities to use public spending to build longer-term food systems resilience,” he said.
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