With a soft thud, Fosu Boateng puts the cloth bag at his feet. This is it: one bag of fertilizer, from Vietnam. He has to make do with this this sowing season, the farmer was told by his supplier in Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana. And despite government subsidies, the manure is still expensive: converted more than 20 euros for 25 kilos, three times as much as a year ago.
Boateng sighs under his brown felt cowboy hat. “I usually use eighteen bags for an entire season.” There are still a number of empty copies lying around in his shed. Origin: Russia, printed on the packaging in faded block letters. A reminder of better times – before the war with Ukraine, Ghana got more than a third of its fertilizer from there. But because exports from Russia are still limited, farmers worldwide are faced with shortages.
Russia, until recently the largest exporter of fertilizers and related products, claims that Western sanctions are hampering trade. According to Reuters news agency, the European Commission will soon roll back a number of sanctions against Russian banks, with the aim of easing global trade in food and fertilizer products.
National crisis
Ghana is also suffering from the turmoil in trade. “It’s a national crisis,” said Edward Yeboah, director of the National Soil Research Institute CSIR. The use of fertilizers took off in Ghana from the 1960s. Yeboah: ‘We have been dependent on it for decades now. We just thought it would always be available. But look at us now – we are competing with the rest of the world for the fertilizer that is still in circulation. And the big, richer players are first in line.’
A walk along farmer Boateng’s rice fields offers a taste of what lies ahead for Ghana: a yellow haze hangs over the tops of the grass. Two weeks ago he should have spread manure here, but he didn’t. Yeboah, visiting Boateng, studies a yellowed blade. ‘This plant is clearly stressed from a lack of nitrogen,’ is his diagnosis. “His harvest will not yield much.”
Yeboah is a member of the National Manure Council, a group of experts appointed by the government in April to find solutions to the dire manure shortage. Because the lack of fertilizer affects not only farmers, but ultimately also the food supply in the country. Although Ghana imports a lot of food, carbohydrate-rich basic products such as cassava, maize and yam root largely come from its own soil.
Plans for its own fertilizer factory are in the works, but the multi-billion dollar project has yet to get off the ground and will certainly take years. That is why the government is also focusing on another plan: animal manure. The Ministry of Agriculture is campaigning for the use of chicken poop, the handful of organic fertilizer factories in Ghana are working overtime. One of these factories is Safisana, founded in the Netherlands, where human excrement is converted into biogas. The dried residual product, ground and mixed with market waste, spreads a sickly odor over the factory site on the outskirts of the capital Accra.
Manure and patience
‘I actually like the smell of it,’ says factory manager Kofi Boateng (not related to the farmer). Smiling and dressed in blue overalls, like the rest of the staff, he oversees the production of 1,250 bags of organic fertilizer per month. By November, that number should be increased to three thousand. Yet, even in these times of scarcity, there are no rows of desperate farmers standing at the gates.
‘The market has been dominated by fertilizers for so long that many farmers don’t know what to do with natural fertilizers,’ explains Boateng. Fertilizing a field requires not only enough manure, but also a bit of patience: a good result will only show itself later, after a number of harvests, when the soil has optimally absorbed the nutrients.
With Ghana forced to try a natural alternative, Boateng hopes this will result in a definitive culture shift. ‘Fertilisers should be a thing of the past,’ he says. ‘Because if you look at Ghana and other countries in Africa, we have the raw materials. If we use it for composting, we not only make ourselves more independent from fertilizers, but we are also doing a good job for the environment.’
The factory works together with a neighboring farmer’s cooperative. Eva Osei, past retirement age but still addicted to farm life, tears open a bag and throws its contents into a sink. She then spreads the manure over her field with large strokes; the wind takes it a little further.
Organic fertilizer turned out to work well for her tomatoes, says Osei, dressed in a floral dress, her face dripping with sweat. The onions she is now going to grow, without fertilizer, are still an experiment. “You really have to take the time for it,” she says. “But I want to give it a shot and see what comes out.”
That could turn out well, thinks soil scientist Edward Yeboah. ‘Root crops are doing quite well despite the lack of fertilizer. But grains, for example – that’s a problem. Animal manure can never completely replace fertilizer in terms of the nutrients it contains.’
According to Yeboah, this means that having your own fertilizer factory is the only way to become less dependent on foreign countries. And animal manure? Why not. ‘Then we have to combine the two, which is even more sustainable. That would be the best.’