Better soils for healthier lives? Assessing the link between soil nutrients and malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa

Malnutrition, the sub-optimal consumption of essential nutrients like zinc, severely affects human health. This burden of malnutrition falls disproportionally heavy on developing countries, directly increasing child mortality and childhood stunting, or reducing people’s ability mending diseases. One option to combat malnutrition is to blend missing nutrients in crop fertilizers, thereby increasing crop yields and possibly the nutrient density in harvested crop products, thus enriching crop products destined for human consumption. But, the effectiveness of so-called agronomic fortification remains ill-understood, primarily due to a paucity of field trials. We hypothesize that, if at all this is an effective strategy, there should exist a causal link between malnutrition and natural variation in the quality of soils to begin with.