From Kansas to China's Sichuan province, farmers treat their fields with phosphorus-rich fertilizer to increase the yield of their crops. What happens next, however, receives relatively little attention. Large amounts of this resource are lost from farm fields, through soil erosion and runoff, and down swirling toilets, through our urine and feces. Although seemingly mundane, this process cannot continue indefinitely. Our dwindling supply of phosphorus, a primary component underlying the growth of global agricultural production, threatens to disrupt food security across the planet during the coming century. This is the gravest natural resource shortage you've never heard of.Ponder.
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The geographic concentration of phosphate mines also threatens to usher in an era of intense resource competition. Nearly 90 percent of the world's estimated phosphorus reserves are found in five countries: Morocco, China, South Africa, Jordan, and the United States. In comparison, the 12 countries that make up the OPEC cartel control only 75 percent of the world's oil reserves.
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The United States has only 12 phosphorus mines. The supplies from the most productive mine, in Florida, are declining rapidly -- it will be commercially depleted within 20 years. The United States exported phosphorus for decades but now imports about 10 percent of its supply, all from Morocco, with which it signed a free trade agreement in 2004.
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Already, signs are emerging that our current practices cannot continue for long. Between 2003 and 2008, phosphate fertilizer prices rose approximately 350 percent. In 2008, rising food prices sparked riots in more than 40 countries. Although the spike in fertilizer prices was only partially responsible for the higher food prices, the riots illustrate the social upheaval caused by disruptions to the world's food supply. The 2008 food riots were only stopped by government promises of food subsidies -- a viable strategy only as long as governments can afford the ever-increasing costs of food support.
And yes; this is required.
30 comments:
Shouldn't it be recoverable from waste treatment plants? I know that the local ones spread the treated solid waste materials on fields.
hmm it is in feces... and fertilizer is feces... I'm no chemist... but that kinda sounds the same...
A lot is wasted as run off from fields. Algae blooms in rivers can be caused by the fertiliser run off.
Back before World War II, farmers up here in Maine used to use lobsters (and other fish) for fertilizer. There are numerous images showing farmers with wagonloads of lobsters just dumping them in their fields and plowing them under. We could do the same by making large factory farms for fish and converting them to fertilizer.
respects,
Indeed. There are remedies, but it all goes back to supply and demand. People will only pay so much for cetain foods before they start to cut back or eliminate it from their diets.
Having said that, a LOT of folks should consider bringing back "Victory Gardens" as a means to help offset food costs as well as adding better vegetables to their diets. It ain't rocket science, and the exercise would help out a number of folks too. Makes a great family project, because with all hands involved, the work goes faster and easier, and the kids, especially, get some good lessons on how things grow.
Back then lobster was a trashfish, and along with other local aqaquatics (like river herring) very abundant. Local fishers used to use lobster as chum and bait. Unfortunately these days everything is sufficiently overfished that it wouldn't work to use natural / aquafarm type stuff.
Recovery is probably a good option depending on cost.
Going to be an interesting century if these "Resource Wars" errupt.
The Population Bomb, exhausting Oil Reserves, Global Warming, etc etc ad nauseum. Phibian, I am so exhausted of "The Crisis of the Century of the Week" that I just don't believe it. Flat Out. I'll believe there's a crisis when ... well, when I start seeing people trying to SOLVE the problem. The same group of Nay-Sayers and Snake Oil Salesmen shouting "Crisis!!" is not sufficient. Hell, it's not even necessary, as I'd bet a years salary these idiots wouldn't know a real crisis if it sat on their face.
Yup, it is going to happen.
I wish green initiatives talked about efficiency more than they did how it helps the enviroment. Because we will not be able to sustain life as we know it with our current levels of efficiency. This brick wall we're sprinting towards does NOT have a military solution to it either. Our only choice is to increase our efficiency in most every aspect of our lives.
There is a solution to the problem. More wise use of what resources we have and organic products. It is no secret.
The only problem with that is organic farming is extremely inefficient and does not produce anything like commercial farming. Think in terms of 90% of the populace starving. It takes commercial pesticides and fertilizers to produce foods at the rate we do to keep our people and those of the world fed.
There are other alternatives...starvation is not only not an answer, it is also a sure fire way to start a tiddly little war which will temporarily reduce populations.
I have found that the soil that is the end product of waster treatment is a helluva fertilizer, and that is no kidding.
If I'm correct, then I think our huge dependence and subsidy of corn doesn't help. Corn is a tremendous user of both phosphorous and nitrogen and causes a lot of runoff of both down the river basins and into the GOMEX.
Oh, and so much for biofuel costing less than oil...
There was a quite long and detailed article/post on this coming problem over a year ago at "The Oil Drum." I failed to book-mark it, so will have to go over there and thrash around. A quite lengthy and good lengthy commentary section. Yes, I know, TOD is populated mainly by lefty "warmist" academics and sundry "intellectuals" and a smattering of working industry professionals, but this post was excellent. It would behoove one and all to bestir themselves and seek it out.
I think I'm going to call YNSN "Eeyore" from now on. "We're all doomed!" :)
Did anyone else notice the article quoted FDR warning about declining phosphorus content, predicting all sorts of ill effects? That he did so about 10 years before the Green Revolution so approvingly mentioned by the article? Did no one else appreciate the irony & disconnect there? I doubt, by the way, that the tremendous increase in food supply from the 1950s forward was primarily due to phosphorus. In fact, I can remember about 35 years or so ago people like this predicting mass famine, giving rise to movies like Soylent Green. Now they tout the "revolution" they used to deny. More irony.
My suspicions were raised by the fact that a foreign policy publication did a piece on fertilizer. Follow the links; er link. The only actual cite (predicting a shortage in 30-40 years) came from phosphorusfutures.net(Global Phosphorus Research Initiative). First interesting thing: frequent use of the word "sustainable." Big alarm bells going off. Second interesting thing: co-author of the article Stuart White is a member of Global Phosphorus Research Initiative!
In other words, Professor White is quoting his own work in support of ...his own work...
Please excuse my cynicism.
Um, no. First you have to establish that there is a problem to begin with. The posted article is nothing more than updated 1970s doomsaying, just as John pointed out. Anyone else notice no economists were cited in that article? First order of scarcity: if something becomes expensive and/or scarce, substitutes will be found, such as the below suggestion we recover phosphates from waste treatment plants. Remember the Medieval Energy Crisis caused by scarcity of wood in Europe a thousand years ago? That's because it never happened. Europeans pretty much deforested large parts of the continent, then started using coal as a replacement. Remember how over-harvesting whales led to a whale-oil shortage? No? Because we started using petroleum derivatives instead.
The article also conveniently ignored most of the actual events mentioned were caused by stupid ideas like subsidies for ethanol, to make our petroleum supply more "sustainable."
I don't recall the fellow's name, but P.J. O'Rourke once mentioned someone who established a strong case that every recorded famine has been caused by bad government and/or politics, not lack of food. While that may over-state the case, one would be hard-pressed to find counter-examples. This tells me bad politics, bad economics, and silly ideas are more to blame. Note that the food riots took place in third-world countries, never known for efficient operation of, well, anything.
It's alled "Milorganite" in some places. Not a new idea.
Milorganite comes from the sewage treatment plant of Milwaukee...and I used it first back in 1969. Damn fine stuff...stinks to high heaven, but works like a champ.
Out in Southeast Asia they used to call the stuff "night soil" although there wasn't any treatment plant involved.
One of my neighbors (a retired CPO) by our first place in San Diego couldn't stop raving about Milorganite (he did have a great looking lawn).
<p><span><span>Here is a novel idea, a fart tax. Everyone can wear a fart sniffer meter and at the end of the month, people who have not used their monthly fart quota can get a fart rebate from the fart czar. If you exceed your fart allotment then it is going to cost the fartee a really crappy fine. It has the same mentality as the carbon tax BS except farts are real and selling imaginary clouds is a fantasy based on deception, fraud and lying. We won’t mention the latest scam to make a ton of money off of carbon credits (clouds), lol. If you are going to sell people this level of BS then the least you can do is tax them on real BS. These new snake oil salesmen like Gore and all his pals are just total frauds and liars at their core. If you want to see a huge scam, look at DDT’s removal. It might have been one of the first times that an “activist” used emotional BS not based on actual scientific data to get something like DDT banned. DDT is one of the safest chemicals used and real empirical science was not even referenced in its removal. Look at the millions of people that have died as a result of DDT being banned and the bugs have just destroyed the poor people in some third world countries. These environmentalist retards lack many functioning brain cells and don’t care who gets screwed over. I do not hear the environmental wack job moonbat Nazi environmentalist SOBs apologizing for the millions of people that have died since DDT was pulled by an activist! <span> </span></span></span></p>
Heck...
We could munch on a fricasseed Al Gore for several days!
Somebody pass the A1 sauce....
Well, I do not think many folks would like pure jackass and that is all that Mr. Snake Oil Salesman is.
This fits in well with the Mother Giaia Cultists. They will think a 90% reduction of the human race is a good start as long as they get to keep all of comforts.
Mining phospahte here in Fla, like most extraction enterprises, can be a nasty business. Tampa used to be one of, if not the highest export terminals in terms of tonnage cause most of it was phosphate rock. East and south of Tampa, large strip mines have laid waste to unreclaimed areas that resemble the moon surface. Kinda, as I have not been to the moon. At the port of Tampa/ Manatee, where processing is done, large stacks of gypsum spoil are stacked 100's of feet high and over hundreds of acres. Blowing fine dust and acidic runoff are constant problems that require monitoring and mitigation. The weight of the stacked gypsum has been known to crack the thin, subsurface, limestone crust and give rise to sinkholes. But we must eat and phospahte based fertilized will continuw in demand. The Fl phosphate industry has reclaimed many former mines for recreational and forestry purposes. There are still federal lands in Fl that supposedly overly significant phospahte deposits. Ocala national forest and the Withlacoochee state forest come to mind. The feds have the mineral rights and I find myself wondering if dig baby, dig is to be the follow on to drill baby, drill. Thats not playing very well here on the Fl Gulf coast this week.
I bet 10$ that if things really come to crunch we will have German scientist coming to new
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
I believe Al Gore would taste rancid.
That's the nice thing about us Badgers, even out feces are of value!
I apologize for typing to quickly and not being more specific.
What will happen is that affordable Phosphorous will go away. What will happen is poor Nations will not be able to grow as much food as they do now.
What I hope happens is innovation that leads to a subsitute. What I hope happens is that better farming practices come from the loss of such easy farming methodologies. What I hope happens is an increase in the efficiency in which we produce what we need to survive.
What I think will happen is there will be chaos caused from the loss of phosphorous. There may be small wars because of it. Where I am looking most squarly is China. China already is suffering through drought in its north west and has already seen civil unrest from it. This does not bode well for them, and I am sure they know it. They've got rare earth metals cornered, they're working to corner Iron and water (India just discovered that the Chinese are building a damn on a river they share with China... Which will probably diminish India's share downriver) and as soon as they do they will move next to ensure their supply of Phosphorous.
Resources are not 'running out'. But the pie can only be divided so many times. Call it doom and gloom. I call it paying attention to what is coming next. You next move onto how to deal with it. Nothing is insurmountable. But, placating yourself with notions of crazy enviromentalism, or being a doom sayer doesn't help. Observe the challenge, orient yourself in relation to the challenge, decide what to do and then act. That is all I am trying to do.
Then you missed the overall significance of "drill, baby, drill!" It was not a mindless chant of rapacious exctraction. It was, rather, an enthusiastic endorsement of using all available domestic sources of energy production. One of the myths surrounding the McCain campaign was that he had no more imagination than to continue the status quo; that is more drilling "baby, drill!" In reality, McCain endorsed an opportunistic "all of the above" approach which included drilling, a fact lost on the MSM who were already emotionally committed to the Obama presidency.
fdchief says "<span>Mining phospahte here in Fla, like most extraction enterprises, can be a nasty business." Yes, and so can butchering sheep, pigs, and cows. That doesn't mean most of us have lost our taste for meat. ;) </span>
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: in this case, the claim is BS. The only link given in the article was to work written by one of the articles' writers. Am I the only one who sees the absurdity of citing oneself in support of ...oneself?
Call me when there's some independent confirmation.
P.S. Phib, is there any way to add a spellchecker, since Firefox's internal spellchecker is disabled by the Java app which handles comment input? I do pretty well proofreading my work, but an independent utility for back-up would be nice. :)
Hopefully there will be a surplus of curry....
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