Under a lonely grove of trees in a field filled with bushes of bitter yellow eggplant — a Senegalese specialty — farmer Fallou Faye reaches into a sack and presents a crumbling brown material, an unlikely hero in a geopolitical crisis affecting farmers and ordinary people across the globe.
“Before, a sack of fertilizer cost 7,000 francs,” says Faye in Mboro, part of a lush vegetable growing region in eastern Senegal, as a braying donkey protests at the midday heat. “Now it costs 35,000 ($58; ¥8,000).”
Far from Ukraine, West African farmers like Faye are feeling the cascading effects of war there.
Agricultural fertilizer, the manufacture of which requires prodigious amounts of natural gas, has soared in price since the invasion by Russia. This makes food production more expensive, and in West Africa even small increases translate into acute suffering. The United Nations estimates that hunger quadrupled in 2022, with fertilizer prices adding to a lethal combination of high food import costs and intensifying conflict in the Sahel region of the continent.
Farmers are having to adapt, and scarcity, as ever, is the mother of invention. But few would have thought that a partial solution to the crisis would come from Okinawa Prefecture.
Faye’s antidote is bokashi, a fertilization method powered by fermentation — a process better known for producing Japanese ingredients such as koji than regenerating soil. In line with the practice, some Japanese farmers have fermented their food waste by burying it, rather than letting it compost and rot. This made the soil more fertile, mirroring how fermented food is linked to good health.
From Benin to Togo and Burkina Faso to Senegal, bokashi is taking hold across West Africa, with The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) regional coordinator Famara Diedhou describing it as a “bokashi revolution.”
Bokashi’s uptake is multifaceted: It’s cheap at just a tenth of the price of synthetic fertilizer; it’s much quicker to prepare than traditional composting methods, taking 12 days compared with 30; and uses local ingredients such as rice bran and straw, manure, yeast, clay and sugar cane molasses — with these being interchangeable depending on what’s available.
But above all, the results are what sets bokashi apart.
“Last year I grew 625 sacks of potatoes (with synthetic fertilizer),” says Faye. “This year I have 1,200 already, although I did increase the field size slightly.
“The land does not lie,” Faye says.
Fermented waste is good for the soil ecosystem in the same way that kimchi is good for a healthy gut — it all comes back to the microorganisms that it produces, according to Paula Fernandes, a scientist at the French agricultural research institute CIRAD.
“It produces a diversity of microbial communities, and this delivers a range of benefits,” says Fernandes, who has been conducting experiments with fermented fertilizers in Burkina Faso, Senegal and, soon, Congo.
“We’ve seen positive effects on growth, disease, and even partial improvements on animal health (for those that eat the plants),” says the researcher, who explains that microorganisms help plants break down the organic matter into usable energy and nutrients.
Meanwhile, El Hadji Abdoulaye Biteye, a technician from Senegal’s agricultural advisory agency, the National Agency for Agricultural and Rural Council (ANCAR), highlights what synthetic fertilizer does to the soil: “Increasing the microorganisms revitalizes the soil that has been killed by synthetic fertilizer and pesticides.”
Going global
But how did this Japanese practice find its way to rural West Africa, over 15,000 kilometers away?
To find out, we must travel back to 1982 and Okinawa.
Here, a quietly determined agricultural scientist, Teruo Higa, was conducting experiments on microorganisms at the University of the Ryukus. He describes a formative experience of chronic pesticide poisoning while working with agrichemicals as “deeply influential” on his research that followed.
“All this was due to my disregard for the laws of Mother Nature,” Higa explains. “Having learnt from the mistake, I took up the challenge of applying the power of microorganisms that I had learnt from my grandfather as a child.”
But in five years of research, he had seen little progress.
“We had been working on one microorganism at a time to clarify scientific cause-and-effect relationships,” Higa says. “However, nature is always more complex.”
Like many discoveries, it was happenstance that led Higa to his big breakthrough. At the end of a working day, he collected the different single strains into a bucket. But not wanting to waste them, he poured them onto a patch of grass.
This patch significantly changed his understanding of soil. Noticing a remarkable growth, it dawned on him that soil needs a diversity of microorganisms, not just one. Fermentation, he says, is the key to producing that diversity.
“The greater the population (of microorganisms), the richer the ecosystem,” emphasizes Higa.
While mainstream agriculture focused on the power of chemicals to drive yields, Higa was part of a movement that predicted how the overuse of petrochemicals could damage the microbiology of our soils, as well as the climate. Fast forward to today and the synthetic fertilizer industry, worth $193 billion in 2021, is responsible for 5% of global emissions thanks to its natural gas-guzzling manufacturing process and the release of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas 273 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of warming the planet — when applied to soils.
In 1993, bokashi went global. In Costa Rica, a pony-tailed Colombian researcher, Jairo Restrepo Rivera, encountered the Japan International Cooperation Agency teaching bokashi to smallholder farmers.
“The results of the bokashi were surprising, but concrete,” explains Rivera, who travels the world running workshops on low-tech farming solutions such as bokashi and produces related content for his 42,000 Instagram followers.
“Fermentation and producing microorganisms are what can recover our soils,” the researcher says.
“I traveled all over Central and South America, Europe and Australia, putting this practice into the hands of farmers,” says Rivera. “I can now say there is no continent that does not know bokashi.”
But it took until 2017 for the bokashi revolution to reach Africa. AFSA’s Diedhou says the introduction of the practice was a turning point for the alliance of farmers, which rejects industrial farming for agroecology, a farming philosophy based on ecological and social principles.
“At the time, AFSA was mainly focused on advocacy, but there was such a strong demand from farmers for practical advice to find alternatives to chemical inputs,” explains Diedhou.
He had heard about the exploits of Rivera and did everything to bring him to the AFSA annual meeting in 2017.
According to Diedhou, the gathering of farmers was suitably impressed with his session on bokashi. “Systematically, people came up to me and said we need to spread this practice.”
From there, it rippled throughout the continent.
Biteye was invited to the first session in Senegal. He saw the potential and began integrating the practice wherever possible.
“You can source everything locally for bokashi. Farmers become autonomous,” says Biteye, showcasing a political streak. He explains that farmers no longer depend on products linked to volatile global markets and transnational corporations.
“I’ve trained hundreds of producers directly, and our team at ANCAR has trained thousands,” Biteye says proudly. “It’s the first step towards agroecology.”
Spreading the word
That said, synthetic fertilizer use continues to dominate, with the majority of West Africa’s millions of farmers yet to be convinced by bokashi. Even Faye, who learnt about bokashi in January, only experimented with one field and still applied half the normal amount of chemical fertilizer, hedging his bokashi bet.
Will he continue to make bokashi, even if fertilizer prices go down? “If God wills it,” he says.
The manufacturing process requires turning over the mixture twice a day for two weeks. While less time consuming than composting, it is still lengthy and tiring for busy farmers like Faye. Biteye says a machine to turn the bokashi would encourage higher uptake.
Still, one farmer who is convinced is Binta Ba, the only female farm owner in Mboro.
In an orchard of lime trees, Ba lies down in the shade in an elegant, orange-patterned dress with a matching headdress. Once the conversation turns to bokashi, she strides confidently toward her onion patch.
“I’ve been making bokashi for two years now,” Ba says, flicking harvested onions into a sack. “If I’d used chemical fertilizers, a lot of these onions would be rotten.
“The plants are healthier, and that means they conserve better,” Ba adds.
And she is continuing the spread of bokashi through the continent, teaching curious farmers in her community after praising the technique on her WhatsApp group.
The war in Ukraine could be an opportunity for farmers in West Africa to break the stranglehold cheap fertilizer has on the agricultural industry and ultimately curb emissions. But for farmers like Ba and Faye there’s little time to think about climate change. For them, it’s either adapt or go hungry.
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