Fertilizer’s Role in World Food Production
“This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.” – Norman Borlaug, American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries.
During the last 100 years, the rate of population growth increased to such an extent that more efficient farming methods weren’t just desirable but essential to avoid massive famine. Kick started in Mexico during the 1940s with the development of high-yielding wheat, the Green Revolution helped feed our growing population and also limited the amount of land that was cultivated to raise crops. If populous India had not used the high-yielding crops delivered during the Green Revolution, then it would have had to farm additional acreage about the size of California to produce the same quantity of grain.
From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 percent. 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. But now, we need a second green revolution in other parts of the world, notably in African nations. Indeed, as the International Fertilizer Development Center notes “no country has been able to expand agricultural growth rates and eliminate hunger without increasing fertilizer use.” This is particularly significant given that fertilizer use in Sub Saharan – the world’s lowest – is at less than 8 kg per hectare.
Today, fertilizers are responsible for between 40 and 60 percent of the world’s food supply.
Fertilizer is among the most effective strategies to increase crop yields. Not only do fertilizers boost yields and the nutritional content of foods, they also help to conserve land safeguarding recreational land and wildlife habitats. This is very significant considering the world’s options for increasing food production are limited both by the supply of land and water resources. According to the United Nations, there were over 3.5 billion acres of arable land wordwide in 2005. While expansion of acreage is expected to increase in South American nations like Brazil and Argentina, increasing world population, among other factors, limits any significant expansion of global arable acres. In fact, arable land resources are shrinking. For example, China alone lost over 100,000 acres of arable land in 2007 and over a million acres of U.S. agricultural land are lost to development uses each year.
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