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The war between the U.S. and Iran has strained shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and some of the Gulf's biggest exports are fertilizers and their ingredients. The war caused a price spike for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, which imports 80% of its fertilizer. And while prices have now eased, they remain high in some countries. As NPR's Durrie Bouscaren reports, farmers in Zambia have found an unlikely solution in an old Korean and Japanese method.
DURRIE BOUSCAREN, BYLINE: On 12 acres outside of Lusaka. Kanangwa Newlove says she has built a paradise.
KANANGWA NEWLOVE: Oh, my God. Our journey was quite long.
BOUSCAREN: She started small after her daughter was born. She wanted to grow food without pesticides or chemicals.
NEWLOVE: I started taking some vegetables to my work, to my workmates. And before I knew it, I was supplying the supermarket. You know, it went on and on and on.
BOUSCAREN: Sixteen years later, shady fruit trees dot her fields. Long tomato vines drape over trellises. There are tidy rows of corn and pumpkins and a local vegetable called blackjack. Eleven varieties of lettuce.
NEWLOVE: It's sort of, like, just a labor of love.
BOUSCAREN: But she found that organic farming had a big drawback.
NEWLOVE: And actually expensive because we were buying compost.
BOUSCAREN: Enter bokashi. It's a Korean and Japanese method where you use fermentation to break down food scraps and plant material into a nutrient-rich compost that's much faster than traditional methods.
NEWLOVE: We now could have a potent fertilizer, organic, which is ready in between 12 and 15 days. I mean, for us, that was amazing.
BOUSCAREN: Bokashi uses household ingredients - dried leaves, animal dung, ash from a fireplace - but then you add molasses and yeast to jump-start the fermentation process, so it breaks down quickly.
NEWLOVE: It was a game changer for us, to be honest.
BOUSCAREN: Smallholder farmers produce about 80% of the food supply in Zambia, leaving them vulnerable to price shocks. The global cost of fertilizer tripled after the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Prices spiked again this spring when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. While fertilizer costs have largely returned to pre-war levels, farmers say they're also looking for more sustainable options.
DONALD ZULU: So that's where now bokashi becomes key.
BOUSCAREN: Donald Zulu is a lecturer and researcher at Copperbelt University in northern Zambia. He says the government subsidizes fertilizer, but there isn't enough. Seeking an alternative in 2024, he started working with local farmers to study how well bokashi worked on corn and cabbage.
ZULU: The results were very encouraging that bokashi echoed the yields obtained from mineral fertilizer. But interestingly, the combination of half rate of bokashi and half rate of mineral fertilizer outperformed all the other treatments.
BOUSCAREN: This suggested that small-scale farmers could use bokashi, which is cheaper, and grow a comparable amount of food. Rabecca Mwila of the Knowledge Platform for Organic Agriculture and Agroecology (ph) for Africa says farmers in Zambia are increasingly looking for alternatives as they face risks beyond their control.
RABECCA MWILA: Climate change has actually worsened the situation for farmers.
BOUSCAREN: She says the enthusiasm for bokashi really comes from a frustration that decades of chemical fertilizer use has contributed to the degrading of fertile farmlands.
MWILA: But because of the overuse of synthetic inputs, the soil is completely depleted.
BOUSCAREN: She says bokashi offers an alternative that's sourced close to home and helps rebuild the soil.
MWILA: Inputs such as bokashi have come in to provide, like, a cushion for them.
BOUSCAREN: Mwila says the farmers she speaks to who have started incorporating bokashi talk about seeing earthworms in their soil again after a long time.
Durrie Bouscaren, NPR News.
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