Small is big. Have fertilizer, will drink Coke!
Frank A. Hilario
October 31, 2009
Limpopo is rich in its tourism but poor in its soils. South Africa is, of course, not new to radicalism, as it is home to Nelson Mandela, the revolutionary who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993. Today, we are looking at science revolutionaries in peace.
A revolution is not a dinner party, Chairman Mao once said. It's true for science too. Where people don't wear shoes at all, it doesn't mean that you can easily sell a pair; you still have to convince them that they need one. Where farmers know their soils are infertile as in South Africa, that doesn't mean they will buy your sales pitch about fertilizers; you still have to show them that it's a good thing and that they can afford it. These Limpopo farmers are learning their necessary lessons about the Coca-Cola bottle cap fertilizer. In the photograph, it looks to me the farmers are all women. In learning radical science, is the female of the species deadlier than the male?
This fertilizer revolution first happened not in South Africa actually but in one of the least developed countries in the world, the West African nation of Niger, about 5,600 km away. This was reported in the January 2001 issue of SATrends, the monthly e-newsletter of the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT. With this Institute, the technology was developed and tested by the University of Hohenheim (Germany), the International Fertilizer Development Center, IFDC; the National Agricultural Research Institute of Niger; and the Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO; and with several non-governmental organizations not named, all working together. The team that came up with the radical technique was based at ICRISAT's West Central Africa regional hub, the ICRISAT Sahelian Centre located 40 km east of Niamey, Niger.
The revolution is called microdosing (or micro-dosing), which is the application of a bottle cap of fertilizer to every hill in a row. No more, no less.
I'm not sure why,' said Andre Bationo, a soil scientist working with IFDC and ICRISAT, 'but farmers tend to favor the Coca-Cola caps over other brands' (icrisat.org). (And in the Philippines, we don't know either why in the countryside Filipinos invariably call any soft drink 'Cokes' - plural, yes. 'Do you have Cokes?' 'Which Cokes would you like: Pepsi, Cosmos, Sprite, or Coca-Cola?') The reason may be practical: 'They deliver the fertilizer in precisely the right amount, about 6 grams per individual group of plants.' They're applying phosphorus, the key limiting nutrient in Niger. That comes to about 4 kilograms of P to a hectare. In Europe and North America, farmers usually apply 3 to 6 times that amount.
The Nigerian crop was millet, the world's most drought-tolerant cereal crop, according to ICRISAT. In exceedingly dry Niger, millet stands between survival and starvation. According to the World Bank (cited by ICRISAT), millet yields in Niger have gone down 3% every year since the mid-1980s. With P microdosing, the yields have jumped 50 to 100%. I note that where they give the soil about 25% less, they get from the soil about 75% more. The Nigerian team had come up with one of the minor miracles in science.
One implication of the results is that the 4 kg of P applied to a hectare is the point of increasing returns of millet in Africa, while the 12 to 24 kg of P were the points of diminishing returns. The team of scientists had to have their economics right before they could help the illiterate farmers.
Another implication is that the amount of water to apply should be only a miserly volume of water for the crop to use up all the stingy amount of P fertilizer. That's a huge relief to Niger where the drought was so serious that in September 2000, we are told, President Mahamadou Tandja delayed a parliamentary meeting and asked his ministers to go to the mosque and pray for rain.
ICRISAT tells us 2001 was actually the 3rd consecutive year that the Coca-Cola method worked its wonders. The microdose apparently made the millet mature earlier, and thus escape the drought, and thus increased the yield.
At Limpopo, for 2 years, extension officers of the province, along with experts of ICRISAT and the Limpopo Agricultural Strategic Team, had been selling the idea of microdosing to the local farmers (SATrends, October 2009). But they were not buying until a new twist was added to Coke-capping the fertilizer: Instead of being sold as 50-kg bags, the fertilizer was now sold as 10-kg packs. It didn't only look, it was affordable.
For the record, in 2006, SASOL Nitro, a Limpopo fertilizer maker, had begun offering those packs, and the farmers bought the idea, with the following reasons, as revealed in a survey: (a) the 10-kg pack was inviting as it was only 1/5 investment compared to the 50-kg bag, and (b) the packs were easier to carry and transport home than the bags.
What happened after that, according to ICRISAT, is that sale of fertilizer at the Progress Milling outlets in Limpopo increased from 15 tons in 1999-2003 to 96 tons in 2005-2006 to 140 tons in 2006-2007. In 4 years, that's an increase in volume sales to about 10 times. And the yields of those who bought the fertilizer packs increased by at least 25%.
For the creation of the Coca-Cola fertilizer phenomenon in Niger, ICRISAT credits public-private partnership, describing it as 'an environment where all the players succeed in achieving mutual objectives.' A win-win-win situation.
Personally, I see it as another instance towards the fulfillment of the vision of Creative Capitalism of Bill Gates of Microsoft (for more details, see my 'Bill Gates, Nobel Prize for Economics 2008!' americanchronicle.com):
(Creative capitalism is) an approach where governments, businesses and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.
If we all worked for the poor in that sense, the poor we will not always have with us.