Most efforts to raise fertilizer use in SSA over the past decade have focused on fertilizer subsidies and targeted credit programmes with hopes that these programmes could later be withdrawn once the profitability of fertilizer use has been made c

The costs of doing nothing about land degradation are several times higher than the costs of taking action to reverse it.

The application of nitrogen (N) fertilizers is still insufficient across cropping systems in Africa south of the Sahara, while plant uptake of nitrogen is often inefficient and wasteful even when farmers apply fertilizers.