A potential solution for food security in Kenya: implications of the Quzhou model in China

Abstract

Poor soil fertility due to low nutrient inputs is a major factor limiting grain production in Kenya. Increasing soil fertility for crop productivity in China has implications for food security in Kenya. The purpose of this study was therefore to investigate the historical patterns of grain production, nutrient inputs, soil fertility and policies in Quzhou, a typical agricultural county on the North China Plain, and to compare grain production in Quzhou County and Kenya to identify a potential approach for increasing grain production in Kenya. Grain yields in Quzhou increased from 1 to 3 t·ha⁻¹ between 1961 and 1987 by increasing manure application accompanied by small amounts of chemical fertilizer after soil desalinization. There was a further increase from 3 to 5 t·ha⁻¹ up to 1996 which can be mainly attributed to chemical fertilizer use and policy support. Hence, a beneficial cycle between soil fertility and plant growth in Quzhou grain production was developed and strengthened. In contrast, there was only a slight increase in grain yields in Kenya over this period, resulting from low soil fertility with limited external nutrient inputs, a consequence of poor socioeconomic development. It is suggested that grain yields in Kenya would likely be boosted by the development of a self-reinforcing cycling between soil fertility and plant growth with manure and chemical fertilizer use if supported by policy and socioeconomic development.

Keywords

China / grain production / Kenya / soil fertility

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Supplementary material

The online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2017133 contains supplementary material (Fig. S1).

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council (201913043), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1209192), the “Sino-Africa Friendship” China government Scholarship (2019-1442), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31701999).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Xiaoqiang Jiao, Jianbo Shen, and Fusuo Zhang declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2020. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)