Sustainable Farming Practices to Promote Food Security in Africa

One of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN is to end hunger. This objective is to eradicate hunger, achieve food security, increase nutrition, and support sustainable farming. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Microsoft through its Africa Transformation Office (ATO) highlighted their collaboration to support the adoption of digital technologies in Africa’s agricultural industry in a session during Adaptation and Agriculture Day at COP27 in Egypt to promote the attainment of this goal. The cooperation is supplying digital agriculture tools that help African agricultural businesses improve their resilience to changes in the environment and boost their food security. 

With its abundant agricultural potential, Africa has the chance to address issues with food security by using sustainable farming methods. The adoption of agricultural practices that encourage long-term sustainability is essential as the continent deals with population increase and climate change. We’ll look at sustainable farming methods in this blog post to see how they might improve food security in Africa and support a robust and effective agricultural industry.

Both access and quantity issues play a role in Africa’s food security issues. Africa imports substantially more food than it exports, and during the past 50 years, while per-capita food output has consistently decreased, the amount of imports has climbed substantially. Conflict zones and inaccessible rural areas are particularly underserved. Therefore, having enough food and nutrients is a requirement but not enough for food security. Here are some some sustainable farming practices that can be implemented to promote food security in Africa :

1) Agroforestry : Agroforestry is described as an agricultural system that integrates trees, shrubs, and crops while being planned for and controlled as a whole. Agroforestry aims to generate a more diversified and socially useful output from farming. It is the practice of integrating planting of trees with agriculture to create different farming systems that will help improve soil fertility as well as conserve water and generate more income for farmers. Practicing Agroforestry has a vital role in reducing the impact of climate change especially towards crop failure and reduced carbon concentration in the environment. 

2) Crop Rotation: Crop rotation is an important and effective method used since the beginning of farming that has been shown to preserve the soil wholesome and healthy. Crop rotation makes sense logically; by picking the crops in a particular pattern, the nutrients and salts from the soil that were consumed by the previous year’s crop cycle are replaced by the crops grown this season. To regulate the nutrients required, row crops, for instance, are planted after cereals.

3) Biodynamic farming: In biodynamic agriculture, a diverse array of animals, plants, and helpful insects work together to improve soil fertility, promote plant development, and support one another’s health.

Through the application of techniques like composting, applying the waste of animals from livestock farms, cover cropping, or rotating complementing crops, biodynamics focuses on providing the required health and soil fertility for food production on-site.

Working with cosmic natural phenomena is also very important since it has an impact on the soil’s health, plants’ health, and animal health. Gardens, grape cultivation, farms that cultivate a variety of crops, and other types of agriculture can all use biodynamic techniques.

4) Conservation Tillage :In order to maximize certain economic and environmental benefits, conservation tillage is a sustainable agricultural method that tries to reduce the frequency or intensity of tillage operations.

Tillage systems have historically been utilized as a way to break up compacted surface soil, suppress weeds, remove plant debris, and get ready for planting. Even though tillage can be a crucial part of an effective and lucrative agro-ecological venture, reducing mechanical activities and soil disturbance in a field can have positive effects such as lowering fuel costs and product costs and reducing underneath erosion from tractor activities .

5) Permaculture: The goal of permaculture is to maximize efficiency in production and reduce wasteful use of resources through design, planning, and intentional farming Techniques used in permaculture design include growing grains without tillage, spiraling herbs and plants, sheet mulching, having each plant serve several roles, and making swales on contour for holding water high in the landscape.

It emphasizes the application of perennial plants, including fruit trees, nut trees, and shrubs, to work as a coordinated system that simulates how plants in a natural environment would work.

The importance of sustainable agriculture is enormous, it contributes to environmental conservation, prevents air pollution, reduces the cost of farm production, it is beneficial to animals and also it helps the farmers and producers benefit economically.