‘Without artificial fertilizer you just perpetuate problem’

Dec 17, 2019 at 08:12 AM CST
The Wageningen alumnus Henk Breman and WUR researcher Tom Schut found out which African countries had succeeded in boosting their agricultural production over the past 50 years, and which factors lay behind that. The population of many African countries is growing fast, while food production to feed so many mouths is stagnating. But there are exceptions. ‘Look at Ethiopia and Rwanda. Food production per hectare is increasing fast in those countries, both of which have well-organized governments with a long-term strategy. Investments in agriculture there pay off,’ says Tom Schut, a researcher in the Plant Production Systems chair group. Together with Henk Breman, a Wageningen alumnus who worked on development projects in Africa for years, and the Israeli researcher No’am Seligman, Schut researched agricultural development since 1960 in 54 African countries.

Dec 17, 2019 at 08:12 AM CST

The Wageningen alumnus Henk Breman and WUR researcher Tom Schut found out which African countries had succeeded in boosting their agricultural production over the past 50 years, and which factors lay behind that. The population of many African countries is growing fast, while food production to feed so many mouths is stagnating. But there are exceptions. ‘Look at Ethiopia and Rwanda. Food production per hectare is increasing fast in those countries, both of which have well-organized governments with a long-term strategy. Investments in agriculture there pay off,’ says Tom Schut, a researcher in the Plant Production Systems chair group. Together with Henk Breman, a Wageningen alumnus who worked on development projects in Africa for years, and the Israeli researcher No’am Seligman, Schut researched agricultural development since 1960 in 54 African countries.