Africa’s Silent Crisis: Soil Erosion and How Farmers Fight Back
In 2022, Kagarko, a ginger farmer from Aribi in Kaduna, Nigeria, watched his harvest collapse from the usual 100 bags to just 10. A year later, Boniface, a yam farmer from Kogi State, suffered the same fate when her tubers were fewer, smaller, and barely worth storing.
Once, farmers in these communities built barns to hold abundant harvests, but now those barns are almost empty. Their land is losing life, its fertility being stripped away by years of monocropping, excessive pesticide use ,and soil exhaustion.
What is soil degradation and why it matters
Soil degradation means the loss of soil’s fertility, structure, or organic matter that once made the land productive. According to a 2024 report, one-third of the world’s soils are degraded, with over 40% of that damage being in Africa.
Among the most destructive forms of degradation is soil erosion, when wind and water strip away the nutrient-rich topsoil that is essential for plant growth. Each year, an estimated 75 billion tons of soil are lost globally, leading to around US$400 billion in financial losses, the same report noted.
In sub-Saharan Africa, soil erosion can strip up to 100 tons of soil per hectare annually, slashing yields by 30–50% on badly eroded land. If this trend continues, food production in parts of Asia and Africa could drop by up to 40% by 2035.