News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #20
This week, exploring the broad theme of environmental justice around the world and here in the United States.
THE COMPLICATED GEOPOLITICS OF FERTILIZER: How the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and extreme weather events are upending the fertilizer trade, creating a crisis across Africa. (New York Times)
This is a long and complicated story but definitely worth reading, because it is a great explanation of the dangers of relying on fossil fuels AND why the transition away from them is so difficult.
It’s easy to forget that making fertilizer requires fossil fuels, largely because it requires a tremendous amount of energy to produce, as well as other raw materials. Though its production and use contributes to many environmental catastrophes — carbon dioxide emissions, land-based mining, nutrient pollution and toxic algae blooms — it adds nutrients to the soil, which crops need to grow, helping to produce enough food to feed everyone, and in most places (because of agricultural practices like monocropping and *checks notes* excessive fertilizer use), we need it to grow food. The invention of fertilizer and high-yield varieties of crops have prevented millions of people from going hungry.
Currently, we need natural gas to make fertilizer, so when the price of natural gas spikes (as it has because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), or some of the other kinds of raw material (potash, which is a source of phosphates in fertilizer, and much of which comes from Belarus) are hard to come by (see: Belarus), or global trade stops (pandemic) (ship stuck in the Suez Canal), that means that fertilizer prices skyrocket in some places that don’t necessarily have their own fertilizer industries. Nigeria actually makes a lot of its own fertilizer, but it’s mostly exported to South America, and relies on raw material from around the world, which has gotten in supply chain bottlenecks.
As a result, farmers across many different parts of Africa are struggling to buy fertilizer, which means that many people are going hungry, especially as farmers try to grow crops that might sell better (soybeans) instead of staples that they can feed to their own families like rice and corn. Some have started using organic fertilizer, like manure, which is better in the long-run, but the yields in the meantime are much less.
“Since February 2022, the price of fertilizer has more than doubled in Nigeria and 13 other countries, according to a survey by ActionAid, an international relief group. Concern about food insecurity has been “alarmingly high” in much of West and Central Africa, according to a World Bank bulletin.
In Nigeria alone, Africa’s most populous country, nearly 90 million people — roughly two-fifths of the nation — suffer from “insufficient food consumption,” according to data from the World Food Program.”
People can’t recover immediately either if fertilizer prices go back to normal, because they haven’t been able to make enough money to afford what they might need the next year to plant and harvest.
The knock-on effects are enormous too: beyond the immediate disaster of hunger and malnutrition, families can’t afford to send their children to school, their daughters often bearing the brunt. What happens to these kids in the long run?
GETTING SPECIFIC: A major new report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine offers a plan to make U.S.’s promise of net-zero emissions by 2050 a scientific reality. (NPR)
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