Food security, one of the basic human rights, seems to be ever eluding
the people of sub-Saharan Africa. With each occurrence of crop failure,
agriculturalists around the world reawaken to the challenge of ensuring
sta- ble, adequate food production in the tropical African environments.
The International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC), with its mandate
of alleviating food shortages through judicial use of fertilizers,
formulated a program to study fertilizer use strategies for sub-Saharan
Africa. With gener- ous financial assistance from the International Fund
for Agricultural Devel- opment (IFAD), IFDC, in collaboration with the
International Crop Re- search Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
(ICRISAT) and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IIT
A), initiated a research project aimed at assessing means to remedy soil
nutrient deficiencies that constrain food production in the humid,
subhumid, and semiarid tropics of Africa. The results of this project
were summarized during a workshop held in Togo, March 25-28, 1985; the
proceedings of that meetings are found in this vol- ume. The project
established collaboration with numerous national programs that were
responsible for much of the data collection. The data presented in
Chapters 6 and 9 include much of this information. We wish to
acknowledge the contribution of the individual scientists, J.T. Ambe, F.
Ganry, M. Gaoh, M. Issaka, J. Kiazolu, J. Kikafunde-Twine, K.
Kpomblekou, F. Lompo, H.