Saltwater is killing crops. In the runup to COP, The Africa Report looks at how it is affecting farmers in Africa.
Vicentia Ayee Ayorkor looks concerned as she examines a handful of carrots she pulled out of the ground. They’re too small. She is afraid they won’t sell well at the market, but she’s got a field full of them, so she keeps harvesting the scrawny vegetables by hand, the Ghanaian sun beating on her back.
Ayorkor knows exactly what the problem is. “The salt is disturbing the farm,” says the 40-year-old smallholder farmer. Her family’s land has been inundated with saline water. In high concentrations, salinity prevents crops from growing or considerably reduces their yield, as with Ayorkor’s carrots.
She is one of thousands of farmers losing crops and income to soil salinity in the Volta Delta region on Ghana’s southeast coast. Her land is sandwiched between the Gulf of Guinea and Keta Lagoon, two saltwater bodies that infiltrate the groundwater used for irrigation from below and flood the surface during storm surges that are increasing in frequency because of climate change.
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No agriculture extension officers
Although researchers and some government officials have been calling for more action to address rising salinity and its ruinous effects for years, farmers in this area who spoke to The Africa Report say they’ve had no help, and local agriculture officials note that their hands are tied by lack of support from central government.
“Nobody even cares about what we are doing. Not agriculture [extension] officers,” says Angela Avetey, a neighbour of Ayorkor’s and a fellow farmer, referring to the local district officials who support farmers directly.
“Nobody comes, so we always teach ourselves. You experience something, you tell your neighbour, your farm colleague, [that] this is what is happening. We need help.”
Agriculture director Godwin Tettey in Keta Municipal District, where Ayorkor and Avetey live, does not dispute that growers aren’t getting support. “We are understaffed,” Tettey says, adding that he only has four extension officers, each supposed to liaise with more than 3,000 farmers.
It’s one of a litany of problems. Tettey says that as of September, his office has not received its budget allocation for 2024 from the food and agriculture ministry, and he sometimes covers his staff salaries out of his pocket.
Saline-saturated environment
Neither the ministry, nor the Keta Municipal Assembly, which Tettey says usually distributes that money, responded to a request for comment.
Other ministry decisions, he says, have been just as counterproductive. In 2017 and 2018, the ministry sent him seeds to distribute without first surveying farmers’ needs in the saline-saturated environment.
They are still sitting in his warehouse because they weren’t salt-tolerant varieties. “The farmers refused to take it because they say it doesn’t do well,” Tettey says, adding that he asked the ministry for seeds designed to withstand the salt, “but believe me, those things never came.”
The district office also lacks the technical knowledge it needs to combat salinity. “We don’t have the expertise,” Tettey says. “We are not trained in that regard, so if some organisation comes and wants to collaborate, we are ready.”
There have been successful collaborations in other countries, providing a replicable model that could work here. In Bangladesh, agriculture officials have partnered with NGOs that specialise in saline agriculture supported by foreign aid to successfully train thousands of smallholder farmers to grow food even through bouts of extreme salinity.
Salt-tolerant seeds
Some of those organisations, such as The Salt Doctors, based in The Netherlands, are helping local authorities to implement similar programmes in Senegal and parts of East Africa.
The steps are simple: Farmers get salt-tolerant seeds, learn to prepare their fields for optimal drainage and planting, test their soil using inexpensive salinity meters, and tailor their crops to that salt level.
One company working in Keta Lagoon, Seawater Solutions, is approaching the problem from another angle. Its mission is to restore mangrove ecosystems. As part of that work, the company originally wanted to teach farmers to grow edible halophytes, or plants native to high-saline coastal environments, as a way to replace income from harvesting mangroves.
But the unfamiliar crop was roundly rejected by locals, says Raphael Ahiakpe, country director for Ghana. So instead, he has them growing in the lagoon’s saltwater for fish feed used in low-tech aquaculture projects.
Experts say these kinds of techniques and alternatives are badly needed on a large scale. Countrywide, 318,000 hectares of land is degraded due to soil salinity, with serious implications for food systems. Inland, irrigation is the primary cause of agricultural salinity.
Rising sea levels
But in coastal areas, the sources multiply. The rate of sea level rise in Ghana is about 3.1mm per year, “which is quite high,” says Kwasi Appeaning Addo, director of the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies in Accra. The Volta Delta is a naturally low-lying area, lending itself to flooding from the sea, but Addo says the land is also subsiding, or slowly sinking, compounding sea level rise dangers like the storm surges that Ayorkor and Avetey have experienced.
Destructive storm surges destroyed property and crops in 2021, 2023 and again in April this year. Some of Ayorkor's and Avetey’s neighbours still had saltwater standing centimetres-deep in their vegetable fields in June.
Ayorkor says she’s seen the storm surges and flooding become more frequent in her 18 years as a farmer. Avetey’s crops failed for three in the last four planting seasons because of the salinity.
“The challenges are enormous,” says Addo, noting that Ghana’s coastal problems, including salinity, pose serious dangers for “food security, human security, and migration. It puts a lot of pressure on people.”
Tettey and Addo agree that eventually people will have to be relocated from coastal areas, which are home to a quarter of the country’s population. But they acknowledge there will be fierce resistance, rooted in social structures.
For now, Avetey says, “We’re here. We don’t have any other opportunities. This is what we do.”