The use of compost from household waste in agriculture

The management of urban household waste constitutes one of the most immediate and serious environmental problems facing the municipality of Yaoundé-city in Cameroon. On the other hand, the mineral fertilizer is entirely imported at an increasing rate in the country. Thus, this book suggests the composting of household waste as an option which would allow at the same time to clean the Yaoundécity at lower cost, to improve global environmental conditions and particularly to reduce mineral fertilizer use and imports. Hence, the book analyses the substitution possibility between compost and mineral fertilizer as well as the impact of using compost on the producers of rural areas and on the consumers in the city and surrounding villages in order to find out the optimal compost use and distribution. The field survey results show that composting household waste is beneficial both environmentally (reducing frequency of diseases or pollution costs) and agronomically since compost use leads to higher crop yields. Results from the Cobb-Douglas production function prove that compost use is statistically significant in explaining the yield variation of the main field crops and more importantly, compost is the most productive input for the total farmers group. Using the von Thünen model, it is proved that the household waste management problem in the Yaoundé-city could be solved by just processing the waste into compost in order to be distributed and used for agricultural production in villages surrounding the city. In that way, the compost could substitute mineral fertilizer helping thereby to save part of the imported mineral fertilizer quantity and the total import expenditures in Cameroon.