Why fertiliser subsidies in Africa have not worked

ASK Anesi Chishiko about fertiliser, and she points to her goats and her trees. Manure and leaves are all that she folds into the earth on her family farm in Zambia. Inorganic fertiliser is too costly: the government offers subsidies, but only “clever people” know how to get them, she explains. Her maize sucks up nutrients more quickly than she can replace them. Each year, she says, the soil gets worse.

Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use little fertiliser: the region accounts for just 1.5% of the world’s consumption of nitrogen, a crucial nutrient. Governments, who want them to use more, spend nearly $1bn annually on subsidies. That is good business for traders, and good politics for leaders chasing rural votes. But it is not the best way to help small farmers like Ms Chishiko. Fertiliser often reaches them late, or not at all. And the cost saps budgets as surely as overcropping saps the soil.

An earlier generation of subsidies was phased out in the 1990s, at the behest of international lenders. Then, in 2005, Malawi revived its fertiliser scheme. Crop yields soared. Experts gushed about a “Malawi miracle”. Governments from Tanzania to Nigeria started forking out for fertiliser again. By 2015, they declared, African farmers would be using 50kg per hectare. The target was missed: south of the Sahara, farmers use only a third of that amount. But subsidies persist.

Cheaper fertiliser has pepped up farm production and, in places like Malawi, raised incomes. But it does not always help the neediest. In Zambia, studies have found that a third of subsidised fertiliser never reaches the intended beneficiaries, and is probably resold commercially, with crooked middlemen pocketing the subsidy. Much of the rest goes to bigger farmers, who could afford to buy their own. The system is a “failed project”, the country’s agriculture minister said last year. Past governments in Zambia have directed fertiliser to electoral strongholds. (In Ghana, by contrast, vouchers have been used to woo opposition voters.) The biggest schemes resemble welfare programmes. Zambia spends five times as much on farm subsidies as it does on cash transfers to the poor.

Zambia is now trying to reform. Instead of doling out bags of fertiliser, the government plans to give farmers “e-vouchers” (like a bank card) to buy their own inputs. The idea is to boost private suppliers and to cut fraud. A pilot scheme has already uncovered 20,000 “ghost farmers”—such as dead people and children—on existing registers. Other countries have also innovated: since 2012, Nigeria has zapped subsidies onto farmers’ mobile phones.

Yet fertiliser is often the wrong priority. It works wonders in test plots, but is less effective in real fields, especially in acid soils. And it is risky for farmers to spend money on fertiliser when, without irrigation, they are at the mercy of the rains. Tight budgets may now force a rethink. Nigeria wants to cut prices, and the need for subsidies, by making more fertiliser domestically: it recently struck a deal with Morocco for phosphate, a raw material. Meanwhile, African entrepreneurs are concocting organic alternatives out of everything from rice husks to urban waste. Muck and leaves alone may not replenish Ms Chishiko’s soil. But they could be part of the answer.