Integrated Soil Fertility Management for Sustainable Food Security: Evidence From Cameroon

Abstract

The application of organic and mineral soil fertility amendments is widely promoted by agricultural practitioners to cope with land degradation and declining soil fertility, which pose serious threats to food security. However, the impact of the individual and combined use of organic and mineral soil fertility amendments on food security and nutrition is not fully understood. To inform evidence-based policymaking, this study evaluates the individual and synergistic impacts of organic and mineral soil amendments as part of an integrated soil fertility management technology on food security and nutrition. We apply the multinomial endogenous switching regression and inverse probability weighted regression adjustment to survey data collected from 768 farm households in Cameroon. Our results indicate that the combined use of organic and mineral soil amendments has the greatest positive association with household dietary diversity, followed by the individual use of organic and mineral soil amendments, respectively. We find that mineral soil amendments drive the consumption of meat, pulses and nuts, and roots and tubers, whereas organic soil amendments are associated with the consumption of most food groups except fruits and meat. The combined use of mineral and organic soil amendments favors the consumption of cereals, milk and dairy products, eggs, fruits, meat, pulses and nuts, and roots and tubers, highlighting the value of integrated soil fertility management. Our findings reaffirm the value of integrated soil fertility management for food security and nutrition and underscore the need for interventions to promote integrated soil fertility management practices in agrarian settings.