Nairobi, Kenya
[Remarks as Prepared]
ASSISTANT TO THE ADMINISTRATOR AND FEED THE FUTURE DEPUTY COORDINATOR FOR DEVELOPMENT DINA ESPOSITO: Honorable President [William] Ruto, Excellency Ambassador [Josefa] Sacko, honorable ministers, distinguished guests.
On behalf of the United States, congratulations to the African Union Commission, AUDA-NEPAD, and the member states of the African Union on this Summit and the clear agenda you have set to improve fertilizer and sustainable soil health management on the continent.
I would like to thank the Government of Kenya for hosting this important event. It is a fitting follow-on to the milestone Africa Climate Summit hosted here last year.
The climate crisis is both redefining global food security challenges and creating a new sense of urgency about how we address those challenges. The Summit’s Action Plan reflects that evolution, with its focus on win-win solutions for both people and planet.
It was nearly two decades ago when Heads of State and Governments of the African Union gathered in Abuja to adopt a related Declaration that focused almost exclusively on fertilizer production and consumption to spark agricultural transformation.
Despite some successes, the recent global food, fuel, and fertilizer crises revealed both the continued fragility and import dependence of Africa’s food systems and brought home a few core truths central to the conversation here this week.
First, despite the intervening decades since Abuja, fertilizer use on the continent remains far too low and inefficient. Second, under current circumstances, it is fertilizer’s low value proposition that leads to this low use. Its inability to deliver for farmers rests centrally on issues of poor soil health and poor fertilizer application.
These limit fertilizer’s impact and increasingly contribute to Africa’s stubbornly low yields – which by some estimates are still attaining just 30 percent of their potential. Without addressing these conditions, Africa’s smallholder farmers cannot fully benefit from the improved crop varieties that will be central to adapting to a changing climate, and the disheartening trends of growing hunger and malnutrition will continue.
The U.S. welcomes the new and stronger focus on soil health in this Summit’s Action Plan as well as its recognition of the need for a multi-pronged approach – from sound policy, improved regulatory and trade regimes and finance, to research, markets, and capacity building.
We also applaud the Action Plan’s focus on ensuring women and girls – who have unique constraints when it comes to accessing improved inputs and information – benefit from this plan.
Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s flagship global hunger and poverty initiative, supports this strategic partnership and invests more of its portfolio in Africa than in any other region of the world. This is a recognition of both the continent’s great need and great potential. And this Summit will help guide our investments going forward.
Thanks to Supplemental funding from our U.S. Congress, the U.S. has invested over $230 million specifically for soil health and fertilizer since the deepening of the global food crisis in 2022. Through these investments, we are supporting the African Development Bank’s Emergency Food Production Facility and other financing mechanisms to help farmers, agro dealers, organic and inorganic fertilizer enterprises, traders and others overcome constraints created by the crisis.
We are scaling access to improved inputs like drought-tolerant seeds along with information on improved production practices, including crop rotation, conservation agriculture, and application of organic soil amendments like compost, biochar, and lime.
And we are expanding research investments as part of Feed the Future and the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, which focuses research on nutritious crops that have lacked significant investment to date, are climate resilient and can further improve soil health.
USAID’s new investments include a $40 million effort to expand utilization of improved soil maps and extension support that tailors advice on the types and amounts of fertilizer needed, and how to apply them, alongside advice on appropriate Integrated Soil Fertility Management practices – a feature of the Summit Action plan.
We call this approach “Space to Place” as it links geospatial data to on-farm knowledge. It has proven to increase production and decrease fertilizer wastage by up to 80 percent. The government of Ethiopia has adopted it and the U.S. – in concert with the International Fertilizer Development Center and other partners – is committed to scaling this approach to five additional farming systems across west, eastern, and southern Africa.
The United States stands ready to make further multi-year investments to advance the Action Plan across all of its various elements and to do this in a coordinated way, guided by the Soils Initiative for Africa, and emerging coordination Hubs to ensure coherence and complementarity across investments.
It is our hope that this agenda figures as part of the next phase of CAADP [Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme] commitments, and that nations commit to not only regularly track progress, but course correct when needed to deliver on the Plan’s ambitious and clearly identified goals.
Success will require a broad coalition of support, and we are pleased to join fourteen other donor partners in a Joint Development Partner Statement to be released later today. This statement elaborates on our commitments and reaffirms our readiness to coordinate through an African-led process and framework.
Again, my congratulations on the Summit. We look forward to supporting Africa’s leaders in taking concrete steps that guide your nations, the global fertilizer industry, and development partners in supporting your vision of a food secure, climate-resilient, environmentally sustainable and prosperous Africa that is not only feeding itself, but helping to feed the world.
Thank you.