As Food Prices Rise, Fertilizer Shortage Now Threatens World’s Farms
Posted on 14 October 2008 by admin
by David Gutierrez
(NaturalNews) The world is faced with a global fertilizer shortage, experts say, placing even more strain on food prices.
In the last few decades, an increasing reliance on industrial fertilizers has led to surging demands for the largely fossil-fuel-based products. Between 1996 and 2008 alone, fertilizer increased by 56 percent in less industrialized nations and 31 percent worldwide.
The bulk of this increased demand comes from rising meat consumption in the less industrialized world, as more people adopt a Western diet. Coupled with the recent push to devote more land to production of biofuels, the cultivation of more grain as animal feed has placed pressure on existing fertilizer production infrastructure, and a shortage has been anticipated since at least 2003.
Due to a limited supply being outstripped by demand, synthetic fertilizer prices have increased nearly threefold in the last year alone. Some Midwest dealers have experienced supply problems, leading them to restrict how much fertilizer each customer can purchase.
“If you want 10,000 tons, they’ll sell you 5,000 today, maybe 3,000,” said Iowa fertilizer dealer W. Scott Tinsman Jr. “The rubber band is stretched really far.”
Rising prices have placed an incredible financial strain on companies that subsidize their farmers’ fertilizer. In India, for example, the yearly fertilizer subsidy has increased from $4 billion in 2004-05 to an estimated $22 billion this year.
Fertilizer producers are building more than 50 new factories to eliminate the shortage, but analysts say that the supply problem will rear its head again in the long term. Because synthetic fertilizers are based heavily on fossil fuels, shortages in oil will eventually make themselves felt in the fertilizer industry. In addition, the negative ecological and health consequences of industrial fertilizer, such as creating massive “dead zones” in oceans around the world, will only worsen with increasing use.
A recent report by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recommended that people consume more local food and that farmers use more natural farming techniques, including non-industrial fertilizers.
Sources for this story include: biz.yahoo.com.
Reprinted from NaturalNews.
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Tags | Dead Zones, Diet, Farming, Fertilizer, Food, Global, Meat, Natural, Oceans, Organic, Shortage, Vegetarian, Western
November 14th, 2008 at 9:20 am
The food shortage is “manufactured”
1. The IMF/World Bank “Structured Adjustment programs” removed nation support systems for third world farmers and drove them into bankruptcy. Countries were blackmailed into producing agricultural goods for export not food and allowing international corporations to buy land and dump subsidized grain, further driving independents into bankruptcy.
2. Four privately owned grain traders control 90% of the grain. Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, Andre, and Bunge. Dan Amstutz, drafted the original text of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. Amstutz worked for 25 years as a grain trader and VP at Cargill “Throughout his very successful career Dan Amstutz represented and championed ideas and goals of NAEGA membership “ (North American Export Grain Association)
3. The Agreement allows internationals to easily move Ag products over international borders but places heavy financial and paperwork burdens on small farmers. (NAIS-animal ID and Guide to Good Farming Practices) It also increased contamination and disease risk by removing quarantine and drastically reducing food testing (by 90% in the USA)
4. Food cartels with “monopoly” like buying power set prices and contract terms. Independent farmers are presented with contracts shifting liability from the multinational corporation to the independent farmer.
5. The “new international” plan for agriculture promotes wholesale destruction of crops and livestock without recourse to testing or vaccination. (see DISEASE-FREE STATUS OIE Animal Health Code)
6. Is the extermination of family farms planned or just bureaucratic bumbling? This question was answered during discussion of the agricultural conditions for entry by Poland into the EU. The EU chair lady bluntly stated the EU plans to oust a million Polish farmers from their land. Another EU member proudly announced Portugal had already removed 60% of their farmers. After traditional farmers are regulated out of business, corporations move in buying land cheaply and instituting environmentally devastating monoculture farming. The EU has doubled the intake of herbicides, multiplied the use of fungicides by six times and increased the area sprayed with pesticides by almost a hundred per cent in the past two decades. All very profitable for the Ag chemical giants like Dow and Monsanto.
Between animal ID and tracking (paid by farmer) the massive paperwork and fines associated with Good Farming Practices and the shift of liability no one in their right mind will grow food in the USA in the comming decades.
Worse the Global Diversity Treaty allow Multinationals to “harvest” thousands of years of seed breeding for patenting from third world peasants. The European Union is leading the way with laws limiting the sale of seed to only those who can afford enormous fees And Animal patenting is also targeted with an international patenting services already setup and over 600 animal patents registered internationally.
The problem is much bigger and personal than anyone realizes. Industrialized farming according to the PEW report, does not support the local community, actually produces less food and causes a loss of topsoil as well as a buildup of poisonous chemicals. Traditional farming using animals for pest control and fertilizer on bio-diverse farms actually produce more food for less money with much less polution
Research at Purdue University has shown commercial chickens are very vulnerable to disease due to genetic defects. Industrial mono culture farming could be devastating especial since the Ag giants are intent on wiping out all but commercial varieties of crops and livestock (patented of course)
We did not learn our lesson from the USSR. They killed off most of their good farmers and went from a net exporter to a net importer of food. Unfortunately this time it is farmers worldwide and 3000 years of biodiversity in farm products at risk.