Minerals | Food threatens to decrease because the important basic ingredient of fertilizers is becoming scarce – Livestock in rich countries is quite a phosphorous sucker

When recently published by the scientific journal Nature Food researchwhich evaluated the impact of the war in Ukraine on the price of food in the world, the results were startling.

If the prediction turns out to be true, it will add one hundred million people in Africa and the Middle East to the circle of malnutrition. About a million people are at risk of starvation, a study by the University of Edinburgh estimates.

The price of food was estimated to increase by 81 percent from 2021. As much as 74 percent of the price increase would be due to one reason – the increase in the cost of fertilizers.

Worrying the forecast is a reminder of how dependent the world’s food production is on fertilizers and how greatly the scarcity of fertilizers weakens food security, especially in poor countries.

The current increase in the cost of fertilizers is a result of the rise in energy prices. But another kind of crisis is already looming in the near future.

Earth’s food production depends on the mineral phosphorus, whose deposits on Earth are limited. It is phosphorus that has to be mined from the rock. In order to get that, you have to establish mines.

Mineral phosphorus 70 percent of the known occurrences are in Morocco or its controlled territory.

To Bou Cra a phosphorus mine in the Western Sahara is so big it can be seen from space. Likewise, a 98-kilometer-long conveyor belt that transports phosphorus to the Atlantic coast stands out in the pictures. All the inhabitants of the town are mine workers.

Western Sahara is disputed, as the Sahrawis who live in the area say the area belongs to them and they demand Morocco leave. Any conflict in the region is quickly reflected in the price of phosphorus.

However, the biggest concern about phosphorus is its depletion. Of course, phosphorus is one of the most common elements in the world, so it is not running out per se.

However, sources of easily usable mineral phosphorus are decreasing. The scarcer they become, the steeper the price of phosphorus rises.

Problem with phosphorus is that the degree of its beneficial use is low.

It is estimated that less than 20 percent of all the phosphorus added to the earth’s fields in the world – more than 20 million tons per year – ends up as a nutrient in the human body.

Most of the remaining 80 percent is bound and stored in the soil in a form where plants cannot use it directly.

Part of the phosphorus is washed away with feces and urine into waste water plants. Some of it is washed away from the fields into the waterways along with erosion.

Since phosphorus reserves are decreasing, we should learn to use fertilizers containing it more efficiently.

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According to a recent study, there is a huge inequality in the use of phosphorus between poor and rich countries.

Phosphorus more efficient use is also a matter of international law. Phosphorus applied to the fields is not distributed evenly to the world’s fields.

Fresh of French research according to, there is a huge inequality in the use of phosphorus between poor and rich countries. The study was published Nature Geoscience in the journal.

In Western Europe and North America, the use of phosphorus has increased since the 1950s. Of all the phosphorus found in their soil, 70 percent is mineral phosphorus.

in Asia phosphorus has been used since the green revolution of the 1970s. Even there, already 60 percent of the phosphorus in the soil is of mineral origin.

In South America, the corresponding figures are 40 percent and in Africa only 30 percent.

This means that rich countries have increased their grain yields by using enormous amounts of scarce phosphorus, but Africans have gotten hardly any of it.

The most effective according to the researchers, the use of phosphorus would be to direct the remaining mineral phosphorus to Africa. There it would immediately show up in higher yields.

Whether this comes true is a different matter. Africans cannot afford phosphorus fertilizers. So how will Africans manage without them?

The answer is that African agriculture is largely dependent on domestic animals. Africa has 20 percent of the world’s cattle, 27 percent of sheep and 32 percent of goats.

Through their manure, some of the scarce phosphorus can be recycled back to crops. Without their animals, Africans would starve to death. The sufficiency of phosphorus in Africa is only getting worse.

Phosphorus is washed out of the soil along with erosion. It is disappearing in South America, Eastern Europe, parts of China and Indonesia, but especially in Africa. This is the assessment published in the journal Nature Communications in 2020 research

The continent with the least amount of phosphorus and where it is most needed also loses its little phosphorus very quickly.

According to the researchers, it is also contradictory that agriculture suffers from a worsening lack of phosphorus in the continent with the largest phosphorus reserves.

In western Europeincluding Finland, the situation of phosphorus use is completely opposite.

Between 1960 and 1990, the fields were fertilized so much compared to the uptake by the plants that now the need for phosphorus in crop cultivation is low. Lead researcher Perttu Virkajärvi The Center for Natural Resources confirms that the use of phosphorus fertilizers has clearly decreased here today.

“Even if phosphorus is put into the field, it is rarely seen directly as an increase in yield,” says Virkajärvi.

Phosphorus stored in the soil can instead be seen in water bodies, which become euphoric when they receive the important nutrient.

Although the content of easily soluble phosphorus in fields has decreased since the 1990s, there is so much phosphorus in various forms in Finnish arable land that it will be dissolved in water bodies for a long time to come.

If western agriculture would use fewer animals, the need for phosphorus would decrease.

In Western countries, meat and milk production are big phosphorus sinks, because they require a lot of arable land to grow feed.

A 2019 study by the Stevens Institute of Technology modeled how much the production of animal-derived foods affects the world’s need for phosphorus.

The starting point of the assessment was that in the Western diet, about 15 percent of phosphorus comes from animal-derived foods. Modeling showed that if this proportion decreased to 11 percent, the need for mineral phosphorus would decrease by up to 46 percent.

There however, it is not the whole truth. If the share of animal products in phosphorus intake falls below 11 percent, the need for mineral phosphorus starts to increase again, according to modeling.

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The key to phosphorus recycling is specifically animal manure.

This would be because the animals would no longer produce enough manure to recycle phosphorus back into the field. Therefore, a supplement of mineral phosphorus would be needed.

If animal production were completely abandoned, mineral phosphorus would practically become the only source of phosphorus. It would quickly come under heavy pressure, research from 2019 states.

One problem with manure use is that livestock areas are often separate from grain production areas. In Finland, too, livestock farms are in central Finland, but grain is cultivated in the south. Transporting heavy manure is not economically viable.

Livestock manure moreover, it is usually not used even when it would be possible. This is evident from another Stevens Institute of Technology from the researchin which the utilization of livestock manure as a source of phosphorus was evaluated.

According to it, 72 percent of the world’s cultivated area with livestock production in nearby areas is dependent on imported phosphorus. It says that the phosphorus in the livestock manure is not utilized. There were such areas especially in China, India, Brazil and the United States.

In addition, the researchers calculated that the key to phosphorus recycling is specifically animal manure. It contains five times more phosphorus than human feces.

With animals can also play a role in how to reduce the proportion of phosphorus that eutrophicates water bodies in arable land.

The cultivation of grain and vegetables removes quite a bit of phosphorus. Instead, according to a Finnish study, grasses use phosphorus most efficiently. And grasses have traditionally been considered part of livestock farming.

“A hectare of grassland absorbs about 15-30 kilos of phosphorus from the soil per year,” says Virkajärvi.

The superiority of grasses as a phosphorus remover is due to the fact that grasses are perennial, unlike crops.

They start growing about a month before the spring crops have even been sown. They have more time to take phosphorus from the ground and transfer it to their cells.

In addition, their roots are denser and extend wider than the roots of other crops, so they rake in phosphorus from a larger area.

Phosphorus taken up by grasses is made available to other plants along with livestock manure, which is key in organic production.

The number of grasslands started to decrease in the 1990s when animal farms were closed, but in the 2000s the decrease has stopped and in some places even increased.

This is good news, because the appropriate placement of grasses near water bodies can significantly reduce the phosphorus load in water bodies