BY MBONO MDLULI
MBABANE – Minister for Agriculture Mandla Tshawuka has invited fertiliser investors to come and set up fertiliser production plants in Eswatini.
Minister Tshawuka has made this invitation today (May 7, 2024) when delivering a country statement at the Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. According to information sourced from the Ministry of Agriculture’s Facebook page, Eswatini is one of 10 African countries that have surpassed the 2006 Abuja Declaration target by attaining 57kg/ha in soil nutrient content.
“This is a result of concerted efforts over time. However, as a country, we still face challenges like importing all our fertilisers, hence being subjected to shocks of events that happen outside our borders such as the Russia/Ukraine conflict,” Tshawuka was quoted as saying on the page.
“We therefore extend an invitation to reputable investors in this sector to come and set up fertiliser manufacturing plants in the country.”
The minister said the other challenge they faced was that most of the fertilisers were synthetic. There was still need for a lot of research and development in the organic side of soil nutrition and soil health in general. Again, the country was open for business in that regard, according to Tshawuka.
Tshawuka lamented the lack of funding when it came to agriculture. “Like most African countries, we are having funding challenges for this sector, hence we are looking forward to creative solutions to this problem from this meeting,” Tshawuka concluded.
