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Rabat – Agricultural land can become an important tool in reducing greenhouse gasses, according to a recent item by Dr. Kaushik Majumdar, who is the director-general of the African Plant Nutrition Institute (APNI).
Dr. Majumdar was the main topic of a video to mark the coming 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.
UN Food Systems Summit
This year’s UN Food Systems Summit will take place on September 23. It aims to bring together issues around global food systems within the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The virtual summit, organized from New York will be led by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and will aim to encourage further action on the interconnected fields of climate change and food systems.
The “people’s summit” aims to further highlight that “everyone, everywhere must take action and work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food.”
The ANPI
It is not a simple task to produce vast amounts of food for billions of people in a sustainable way. Organizations like the African Plant Nutrition Institute, an NGO based at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.
The NGO is headquartered in Morocco but also has offices in Ivory Coast and Kenya. The APNI focuses on soil health and plant nutrition as a way to improve soil quality, manage nutrients and help fight climate change.
Many climate change solutions often appear to be in conflict with the need to feed a growing human population, or hostile to the livelihoods of farmers. The APNI takes an approach that promotes what it calls “farmer-centric strategies for changing climate and weather conditions.”
One of the solutions that the APNI promotes is carbon sequestration, a method of using farmland to capture carbon, the primary greenhouse gas emitted from human activity.
Carbon Sequestration
“If you are doing a good job of managing plant nutrients, that means you are going to capture more carbon in above and below-ground biomass,” expanded Dr. Majumdar.
“Food security to me, is people having adequate access to nutritious and safe food, at an affordable price, all the time,” the APNI director-general stated. “Unfortunately for most of the regions of the global south this is not realistic yet.”
The APNI’s mission revolves around plant nutrition, an important topic for plant fertility and agricultural yields, as well as for “a resilient and food secure Africa,” according to the APNI chief.
By prioritizing good plant nutrition the biomass that makes up the soil of agricultural land can serve as a “carbon sink,” that absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. “Capturing (carbon) in a stable form is crucial for resilient productive agriculture,” Dr. Majumdar summarized.
