Better soils for healthier lives? Assessing the link between soil nutrients and malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa

Publication

Malnutrition, the sub-optimal consumption of essential nutrients like zinc, severely affects human health. This burden of malnutrition falls disproportionally heavy on developing countries, directly increasing child mortality and childhood stunting, or reducing people’s ability mending diseases. One option to combat malnutrition is to blend missing nutrients in crop fertilizers, thereby increasing crop yields and possibly the nutrient density in harvested crop products, thus enriching crop products destined for human consumption. But, the effectiveness of so-called agronomic fortification remains ill-understood, primarily due to a paucity of field trials. We hypothesize that, if at all this is an effective strategy, there should exist a causal link between malnutrition and natural variation in the quality of soils to begin with.

Until now, data limitations prevented the establishment of such a link, but new soil micronutrient maps for Sub-Saharan Africa allow for a detailed assessment. In doing so, we find statistically significant relations between soil nutrients and child mortality, stunting, wasting and underweight.

For instance, a simultaneous increase in soil densities of copper, manganese and zinc by one standard deviation reduces child mortality by 4-6 per mille points, but only when malaria pressure is modest. The effects of soil nutrients on health dissipate when malaria pressure increases. Yet, the effects are fairly small in magnitude suggesting that except for a few regions agronomic fortification is a relatively cost ineffective means to combat malnutrition.

Authors

PBL Authors
Ezra Berkhout Tom Kram
Other authors
Mandy Malan

Specifications

Publication title
Better soils for healthier lives?
Publication subtitle
assessing the link between soil nutrients and malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa
Publication date
21 August 2018
Publication type
Publication
Publication language
English
Product number
3019