Fertilizer: Africa’s Growth and Development

Effective farming and agricultural production requires three productive elements: land, equipment and fertilizer. Africa has a whole lot of the first element but lacks much of the third. (Equipment varies from certain regions and areas throughout the African continent. More on this elsewhere; not here).

Of course, agricultural production wouldn’t be effective with out people and labor — Africa has plenty of that, too.

Significantly, the world’s largest reserves of phosphate rock — phosphorus is a crucial element formed into the production of crop inputs and soil nutrient expansion — lies in the territories of the Kingdom of Morocco and Western Sahara.

Although this part of the world is commonly referred to as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Morocco’s giant state-owned conglomerate, OCP, is striving to expand its production capacity, marketing channels and distribution capabilities to cover Sub-Saharan countries as far as Uganda in the East and Namibia in the South.

I already wrote about a trade dispute case involving Morocco’s OCP and The Mosaic Company. Read more about the legal analysis with this story: https://readmedium.com/big-year-for-d-c-62a64978a5cf

The most important aspect of all of this talk about fertilizer availability and Africa’s economic growth is that many countries of Sub-Saharan Africa continue to struggle with modern agricultural production, leading to some of the highest rates of food insecurity, malnutrition and poverty in the world.

This devestating fact of the world’s uneven economic distribution makes accessibility to land, equipment and fertilizer all the more troublesome, to the detriment of many African populations’ basic survival needs.

How can African farmers sustain a livelihood under such lack of agricultural modernity? Is it a lack of international investment? Are economic priorities being placed on the development of other commodities?

World hunger is a pervasive global phenomenon, for which food security should be a major driver of Africa’s growth and development going forward. Making Africa prosperous might come from the effective use of phosphorous.