Files
Abstract
Studies based on data from the 1980s and 1990s found that African farmers faced declining incentives to use fertilizer in the post-structural adjustment period, which was characterized by the elimination of crop price supports to farmers and skyrocketing fertilizer prices associated with currency depreciation and the curtailment of input subsidy programs (Kherallah et al. 2002). As a result, fertilizer use in Sub-Saharan Africa stagnated throughout the 1990s at roughly 10 kilograms (kgs) per cultivated hectare (Kherallah et al. 2002). Much has changed since then. Over the past decade, world food and fertilizer prices have risen dramatically and become highly unstable. Soil conditions have changed with an increasing proportion of the region’s population living on farmland characterized as degrading (Barbier and Hochard 2016). However, since Kherallah et al. (2002) (which is based on data ending in the 1990s), there has been no comprehensive as sessment of trends in African farmers’ incentives to use fertilizer.