Fertiliser shortage threatens world food supplies By Keith Bradsher & Andrew Martin, NYTS:
Monday, June 9, 2008 Truong Thi Nha stands just 137 centimetres tall. Her three grown children tower over her, just as many young people in this village outside Hanoi dwarf their parents.The biggest reason the children are so robust: fertiliser.
Ms Nha, her face weathered beyond its 51 years, said her growth was stunted by a childhood of hunger and malnutrition. Just a few decades ago, crop yields here were far lower and diets much worse.
Then the widespread use of inexpensive chemical fertiliser, coupled with market reforms, helped power an agricultural explosion here that had already occurred in other parts of the world. Yields of rice and corn rose, and diets grew richer. Now those gains are threatened in many countries by spot shortages and soaring prices for fertiliser, the most essential ingredient of modern agriculture.
Soaring price
Some kinds of fertiliser have nearly tripled in price in the last year, keeping farmers from buying all they need. That is one of many factors that have contributed to the rise in food prices that, according to the UN World Food Programme, threatens to push tens of millions of poor people into malnutrition.
Protests over high food prices have erupted across the developing world, and the stability of governments from Senegal to the Philippines is threatened. In the United States, farmers in Iowa desperate to replenish nutrients in the soil have increased the age-old practice of spreading tons of hog manure on their fields. In India, the cost of subsidising fertiliser for farmers has soared, sparking calls for policy reform. And in Africa, plans to stave off hunger by increasing crop yields are suddenly in jeopardy.
The squeeze on the supply of fertiliser has been building for roughly five years. Rising demand for food and biofuels prompted farmers everywhere to plant more crops. As demand grew, the fertiliser mines and factories of the world proved unable to keep up.
Few alternatives
Fertiliser companies are confident the shortage will be solved eventually, noting that they plan to build scores of new factories in the next few years, many in the Middle East where natural gas is abundant. But that will probably create fresh problems in the long run as the world grows more dependent on fossil fuels to produce chemical fertilisers. Intensified use of chemical fertilisers is certain to mean greater pollution of waterways, too. Agriculture and development experts say the world has few alternatives to its growing dependence on fertiliser. As population increases and a rising global middle class demands more food, fertiliser is among the most effective strategies to increase crop yields. Already, some experts calculate that synthetic fertilisers made with natural gas have led to greater crop yields and a 30 per cent to 40 per cent increase in the world’s population. In sub-Saharan Africa, where hunger and starvation have long been a threat, a lack of fertiliser is a primary reason yields lag behind the rest of the world. Efforts to get fertiliser into the hands of African farmers have been complicated by the recent price increases.
Simple arithmetic
“It’s a very basic and direct arithmetic point that putting fertiliser on the ground on a 1-acre plot can, in typical cases, raise an extra ton of output,” said Jeffrey D Sachs, the Columbia University economist who has focused on eradicating poverty. “That’s the difference between life and death.”
The demand for fertiliser has been driven by a confluence of events, including population growth, shrinking world grain stocks and the appetite for corn and palm oil used to make biofuel. But experts say the biggest factor has been the growing demand for food, especially meat, in the developing world.
Recently, Ms Nha, the tiny Vietnamese woman, stood in a field outside her village, her weather-beaten face shielded from the drizzle by a big straw hat. She took a break from wielding her wood-handled hoe and described the meagre diets of her youth.
Her family, including six brothers and sisters, struggled to survive on rations from the commune where they lived, eating little protein. The occasional pigs they raised on rice stalks and mush “fattened very slowly,” Ms Nha recalled. But market reforms in Vietnam during the last two decades gave farmers access to fertiliser and higher-yielding seeds. Rice yields for each hectare have doubled and corn yields have tripled, allowing farmers to fatten Vietnam's growing herd of livestock.
Several times a season, Ms Nha and her neighbours walk down their rows of corn with battered metal buckets full of chemical fertiliser, which looks like coarse gray sand. They sprinkle a bit at the base of each plant and carefully hoe it in.
Ms Nha’s husband, Le Van Son, remembers villagers’ amazement in the 1990s when they learned that a kilo of chemical fertiliser contained more of the major nutrients than 100 kilos of manure. Overall global consumption of fertiliser increased by an estimated 31 percent from 1996 to 2008, driven by a 56 per cent increase in developing countries, according to the International fertiliser Industry Association.
Fertiliser is basically a combination of nutrients added to soil to help plants grow. The three most important are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The latter two have been available for centuries, and today originate from mines. But nitrogen in a form that plants could absorb was scarce, and the lack of nitrogen led to low crop yields for centuries. That limitation ended in the early 20th century with the invention of a procedure, now primarily fuelled by natural gas, that draws chemically inert nitrogen from the air and converts it into a usable form. As the use of chemical nitrogen fertiliser spread, it was accompanied by improved plant varieties and greater mechanisation. From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 per cent. Scientists said that increase was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900.
Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba, calculates that without nitrogen fertiliser, there would be insufficient food for 40 per cent of the world’s population, at least based on today’s diets. Other experts have come up with slightly lower numbers.
Fertiliser inflation
In many countries, fertiliser cost increases have so far been offset by record high prices for crops. But fertiliser inflation has created a crisis in countries that subsidise fertiliser use for farmers.
In India, for instance, the government’s subsidy bill could be as high as $22 billion in the coming year, compared with about $4 billion three years ago, and has prompted calls to reform the programme that India depends on to maintain its food supply. Once new supplies become available, the rising use of fertiliser will still pose difficulties. Environmental groups fear increased use, particularly of nitrogen fertiliser made using fossil fuels. Because plants do not absorb all the nitrogen; much of it leaches into streams and groundwater. That runoff has long been recognised as a major pollution problem, and it is growing as food production increases. A barometer of that pollution is the rising number of dead zones where rivers meet the sea. In the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, nitrogen runoff from fields in the US Corn Belt washes downstream and feeds plant life in the gulf. The algae blooms suck oxygen from the water, killing other marine life.
More than 400 dead zones have been identified, from the coasts of China to the Chesapeake Bay, and the primary reason is agricultural runoff, said Robert J Diaz, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Urgent changes
“Nitrogen is nitrogen,” Mr Diaz said. “If it’s on land, it produces corn. If it gets in the water, it produces algae.” Earlier this month, a UN panel called for urgent changes in agricultural practices to make them less damaging. The panel recommended techniques that offer some of the same benefits as chemical fertiliser, like increased crop rotation using soybeans and other legume that naturally add some nitrogen to the soil.
But others say those approaches, while helpful, will be insufficient to meet the world's rapidly rising demand for food and biofuel.
“This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people,” said Norman Borlaug, an American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. “Without chemical fertiliser, forget it. The game is over.”
