Food shortages from the fertiliser shortage - what will happen globally?

[howdoyouknowforsure]

Starvation and food insecurity are going up rapidly in low income countries, in large numbers. What damage limitation can be done at this point to stop as many people actually dying from hunger over the next few years?

Crop yields are way down in so many countries.

It won't be long before food scarcity has a serious impact on wealthier countries - but for low income countries things are already dangerous.

What will the next few years look like?

And by "dangerous", I mean for so many people things are so utterly precarious, and ultimately unsustainable.

There's an account in the New York Times where a family in a Nigerian city are surviving on boiled weeds so they can afford to feed their children

I didn't realise there was a fertiliser shortage, got any links?

My first thought is the best fertiliser comes from animal poo, so we kinda need those cows, sheep, pigs and chickens which so many people want to get rid off so they can eat plant based food. Tbh though my greatest fear is lack of good quality water. For us, the animals and the plants.

I can remember listening to a podcast where the Korean woman was so confused why we threw away so much in western countries. Simple things like poo and wee were collected as standard and NOTHING was thrown away. Perhaps we are going to have to change our ways as a result.

As always, food shortages will hit 3rd world countries hardest, and the poor in rich countries hard.

Tbf not all poop is a good fertiliser.
But overall yes! People throw out so much. It's a combo of buying too much and ahop quality down. And many in uk and rich countries lost the knowledge of using "rubbish".

Yes, waste is one huge problem. But industrialised farming isn't going to work forever, it has wrecked the land/ soil/ environment.

Without industrialised agriculture though we won't produce as much food as possible to feed the billions of humans who urgently need food this week, and this year. It feels like a catch 22 at the minute.

Chicken poo is a great fertiliser but is ruining rivers in areas where it's used heavily. We should also be looking at old-school crop rotation and moving towards crops that give better nutritional value in return for the resources they take to grow, like broad beans. That's easy for me to say pottering about on my allotment though, much riskier to try something new when you're a farmer relying on your crops to make a living.

Surely chicken poo is better for the rivers than engineered/chemical based fertiliser?

Yes to crop rotation, but land also needs to lie fallow sometimes too.

But this won't deal with the global hunger emergency that is unfolding right now - I don't know if there is anything that can though?

It looks like food shortages are going to snowball in a very serious way.

It is important to consider the carbon dioxide fertilization effect (CFE) when considering this issue. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions have increased photosynthesis rates globally at astonishing rates, raising crop yields and natural plant biomass alike (literally greening the planet). There is plenty of research that confirms this - eg https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115627119
We should bear this in mind as we rush for 'net zero' - there could be significant unintended consequences! However, I have not seen any evidence of serious consideration being given to this by policy-makers.

Surely it's the same stuff reaching the rivers.
For some reason no one suggests the 'farmers' producing the chicken poo (35,000 hens) aren't asked to reduce the numbers of these poor animals. Instead environmentalists have to accept dead rivers and fish when they dispose of the poo.

GAs is needed to make modern chemical fertilisers hence the cutting off of Russian gas supplies to Europe last year seriously affects this.
Then the war in Ukraine might disrupt wheat supplies from Ukraine which normally go worldwide so a double whammy.

Modern crop rotations in combination with cultural farming practices have largely removed the requirement for fallow seasons.

I don't think we'll have a "shortage" of food in the UK, but it will become expensive due to the extreme price rises of fertiliser and other agricultural inputs in the past year. The food shortages will hit developing countries the hardest.

The reality is that as we ask farmers to move away from reducing activities like using chemical fertiliser, we will see yield loss for a period of time while they transition. Couple that with climate change and other extreme events, like war, and producing food will get harder and harder over the next few decades.

There are vast amounts of research going on to produce new crop varieties which are more climate resilient and resource efficient, and agricultural practices which do less harm to the planet while maintaining, or even, improving productivity.

Farmers have been well aware of the impending food crisis for many years and are doing their best to find ways to improve their crops. Sadly the government continues to remove subsidies and payments which support their livelihoods so they can't afford to take the risk of trying something new. Next time you vote, make sure you pay attention to the proposed agricultural policies.

I do think it should be a case of ‘ every little helps’, with people who can growing some produce at home.

Yes people aren’t going to be self sustaining on an average uk garden, but if they don’t need to grow a few things, it would save money, allow those things to stay in supermarket for people who can’t grow, and give surplus to friends and neighbours. Things like courgettes and butternut squash grow easily, and in large quantities. Things like berries you plant once and the grow again every year ( and good cost saving)

Things like wheat have standards, so if the crop is a certain moisture level or weight when it’s harvested that determines who it feeds - animals or humans. They’ll just have to lower the standard if needed to keep us fed. We are growing less food as the government is still subsidising environmental projects instead of food production.

There is no such thing as a food shortage that isn’t man made. All shortages are created or perpetuated for political interests. Amartya Sen wrote about this in detail to explain why famines happen in modern times. We don’t need to overthink this, we need to ask why our corrupt politicians in collusion with global leaders cause supply side shortages. To benefit their cronies interest, of course. If the decisions taken during Covid and the post Covid inflation didn’t prove this, nothing ever will.

This is well acknowledged and most crop yield models using GCMs take this into account when predicting how climate change will impact yields going forward. However, overall the models ( eg for wheat- critical crop globally) still predict yield declines due to the impacts of higher levels of heat stress and drought. The impacts are significantly lower if you introduce adaptive practices such as irrigation and fertiliser but these aren’t always cost effective or even possible- the aquifer used to irrigate a lot of Texan wheat is close to exhaustion. Also, higher levels of CO2 do increase biomass but there is increasing evidence that this is at the expense of nutritional quality ( protein and B vitamins in particular) which is problematic from a good security perspective .

TLDR: you can’t look at the CO2 effect in isolation when determining the impact of climate change. It has provided some mitigation but this is geographically uneven and won’t prevent catastrophic yield losses becoming more frequent.

There will be lots of knock on effects but in the west we will mostly be insulated (so long as we are moderately wealthy) and will remain ignorant because our media has no interest in reporting the issues. The news Organisations no longer have specialists who understand the data coming out on crop yields/failures and distribution problems.

Despite our constant exhortations for everyone to reduce, reuse, recycle, the reality is that we are unbelievably wasteful and have lost simple knowledge and skills. It’s quite sad. But we’ve also created a society where you barely have the time to learn those skills, so it’s not like we can easily fix it. We would need to reengineer everything to move away from disposable and convenience. And we won’t do that because business doesn’t want to, workers have no time to then do the harder stuff, etc.

You mean the entitlements theory with the 5 pillars ( access, availability etc?). I think it still stands but he wrote it in 1981 ish against a hugely different backdrop. He basically said availability wasn’t an issue ( it was all about access to land and/ or money) because cc wasn’t a thing then, yields were increasing due to rapid tech innovation, population was lower, mass urbanisation hadn’t yet happened across most of the global south, international trade in agricultural products was way lower. And of course trade is both the solution and the problem ( evidence points both ways, mainly trade is good but promoting free trade and also doing export bans every time you get in a tight spot is a dick move). Then there’s food aid ( aka grain dumping depending on perspective).

I agree that there’s massive waste though and the consolidation of the global supply chain is worrying. I’m not sure there’s deliberate starving of people in general. I think it’s largely inefficient markets ( made worse by piecemeal legislation that created black spots) combined with nationalism at times of bad harvests- no government is going to export grain while prices are spiking at home. They just won’t.

Happy to be chatting Sen anyway- it’s been a while!

It's legal in the UK to use sewage sludge on the land and that's where about 90% of it ends up. There are rules about how, when and where though. The more likely a crop is to be eaten raw (like soft fruits) the stricter the rules. It also needs to be tested for various things. The UK even imported nearly 30,000 tonnes of it from the Netherlands a couple of years ago. They've banned it for use on land and normally burn it.

It does provide nitrogen or phosphorus to crops and improves the soil. But it raises its own issues. Environmental scientists have pointed out that all sorts of things can be in the waste from microplastics to antidepressants and antibiotics (microbial resistance anyone?) And it can contain potentially toxic elements like metals as well as pathogens like salmonella and e-coli. That's why it has to be tested.

But increasingly the UK government seems keen to follow the Netherlands and focus on the energy value of sludge - it can be used to produce gas through anaerobic digestion.

there are many different farming systems suitable for many different climates and terrains.

what doesn't work well in the long term are huge fields that need a lot of input in terms of cultivation and fertiliser/pesticides/herbicides.

tbh we need to get away from cheap meat, eggs, dairy. that causes the most issues with emissions and the need for crops grown for feed that could be used to feed us directly.

and uk is not immune to crop failure.
see the last vouple of days where a huge potato (and other) crop has been destroyed by rain flooding.
or last year's draught.
we are lucky that as a rich (yes, uk is rich) nation uk can import all they need. at a price of course.

People need to stop being so obsessed with best-before dates. There are many posts on MN where posters are ditching food that is one day out of date. Wondering if they can eat eggs that are 2 days past their date. Food waste is horrendous.

The solution is less people.
A few less billion of us to feed would solve all the environmental issues…