Limpopo Basin Focal Project: soil fertility & water availability

Amy Sullivan (July 2010)

Where: South Africa

amy sullivanAmy Sullivan, Project Leader of the Limpopo Basin Focal Project, talks about the research carried out on the project.  She notes that the natural resource access and distribution within the Basin are skewed, in terms of biophysical, economic, political and social considerations. She points out that the majority of Africans share water from one of the sixty basins across the continent, with all the policy, targeting and priority-setting  implications that entails.  She talks about a range of soil fertility interventions, and how some are not used for the right farmer. She notes that "factors other than water availability are limiting productivity in Mozambique" and discusses possibilities for the Zambezi Basin, and the prevalence it shares with Limpopo for downstream flooding. The project is led by FANRPAN and the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) of South Africa on behalf of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food