Project in DRC Aims to Increase Fertilizer Use
July 03, 2012
A Congolese woman carries her baby and personal belongings through a banana plantation near the town of Rangira, affected by recent fighting between government forces and rebels around North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
This is the VOA Special English Agriculture report.
North Kivu is a war-torn province that used to be called the breadbasket of the Congo. Now, some farmers are being trained to increase the productivity of their land with fertilizer.
The International Fertility Development Center is supporting the project. The IFDC is a nonprofit group based in the United States.
The project includes planting trees. Trees help prevent the loss of soil through erosion. They also provide charcoal for fuel. And they provide fertilizer in the form of leaves. These get plowed into the soil.
Other farmers are experimenting with chemical fertilizer. The farmers use a mixture of chemical and organic fertilizer. They also use improved seed. They say they have succeeded in growing three or four times as much maize, rice, beans and potatoes.
The fertilizer costs around a dollar and thirty cents a kilo. But workers from the IFDC say if it triples a yield of potatoes, for example, it means twice the profit.
Farmer Adrien Kangele says the new methods promoted by the group could be a solution to ethnic conflicts in the Kivu region. Fertilizer brings peace, he says, because more people can earn a living from the soil in this densely populated area.
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