How a fertilizer ban became a part of Sri Lanka’s Crisis
https://www.newsfirst.lk/2022/05/29/how-a-fertilizer-ban-became-a-part-of-sri-lankas-crisis/
I admit my ignorance. What keeps the US or Brazil, for example, from producing all the fertilizer it needs, from its own resources?
Hunger as a military tactic is nothing new
We’re going to have a self-inflicted famine.
The most effective weapons in the world are food, energy and fertilizer. We live in a new bipolar world. The western globalists are wrecking their economies to divest themselves of most their capacity to produce all three. The BRICKS+ side attracts the world’s most prolific producers of all three. I wonder who’ll dominate?
The government in March 2021 banned chemical fertilizer to conserve depleted currency reserves.
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it ordered **only** organic fertilizer could be used. It was part of the Green mind grope.
Jeez Gordon, this was openly discussed last year
The author sounds like a deranged neo-liberal.
You folks do understand we spread human waste from treatment plants to fertilize our farm fields, right?
The stench over many miles is near unbearable.
2020 was a tough year for many industries, but phosphate rock largely escaped the wrath of the pandemic, thanks to its crucial role in agriculture. According to the US Geological Survey’s most recent data, the top ten phosphate rock-producing countries for 2020 were as follows, with estimated production for the year listed for each.
1.China, 90 million metric tons
2.Morocco & Western Sahara, 37 million metric tons
3.United States, 24 million metric tons
4.Russia, 13 million metric tons
5.Jordan, 9.2 million metric tons
6.Saudi Arabia, 6.5 million metric tons
7.Brazil, 5.5 million metric tons
8.Egypt, 5 million metric tons
9.Vietnam, 4.7 million metric tons
10.Peru and Tunisia are tied for 10th place, each with an estimated 4 million metric tons of production for the year.
Numerous other countries also made a contribution of more than 1 million tons each to global production, including, in descending order of estimated production, Senegal, Israel, Australia, South Africa, Kazakhstan, India, Algeria, and Finland.
https://feeco.com/2020-world-phosphate-rock-production-overview/
Although 2020 knocked the proverbial wind out of many industry sails, it left the potash market largely unscathed, due to the critical nature of the nutrient’s role in agriculture. In fact, production is estimated to have risen in 2020 compared to 2019.
According to the US Geological Survey’s most recent data, the top ten potash-producing countries are as follows, with estimated production for the year listed for each. Not surprisingly, Canada continues to account for the largest share, with a lead almost double that of the next in line, Russia. This year, Russia moved into second place, knocking Belarus down one spot with a slight lead in tonnage.
Canada, 14 million metric tons
Russia, 7.6 million metric tons
Belarus, 7.3 million metric tons
China, 5 million metric tons
Germany, 3 million metric tons
Israel, 2 million metric tons
Jordan, 1.5 million metric tons
Chile, 900 thousand metric tons
Spain, 470 thousand metric tons
Laos didn’t make the top ten with just 400 thousand metric tons of production. Remaining countries contributed an additional 550 thousand metric tons of production.
In total, the world produced an estimated 43,000 million tons of potash in 2020.
https://feeco.com/a-look-at-world-potash-production-for-2020/
I am shocked how many of you fools continue to believe there’s going to be a famine in North America. There is nowhere on the planet where more excess food, over and above that necessary for domestic consumption, is produced for export. It may be true that the idiots in California will continue to screw things up for their farmers within California but that is but a fraction of food output in all of North America.
Furthermore, North America is naturally endowed with an obscene abundance of easily obtainable mineable minerals for the production of fertilizer. Potash being the largest one. But even if we never touched this resource, we have so much land and space devoted to cattle, we have a never ending supply of manure for use as fertilizer.
And in addition to cow manure we have treated sludge coming out of our sewage treatment plants that is excellent fertilizer and is being utilized as such. I believe it is illegal to use this to fertilize crops intended for human consumption but there’s no restrictions on using for livestock feed crops. This is also a never ending supply.
Additionally, anhydrous is manufactured directly from natural gas. North America (Canada + USA) has so much natural gas resources we can never run out. On top of that Canada is gifted with abundant fissionable nuclear fuel. If for some reason we really wanted to limit the natgas production we could stop using natgas for fuel and use it purely for anhydrous production if we really needed to. We have plentiful nuclear material available in Canada.
Then there’s crop rotation. More aggressive planting of nitrogen fixing legumes can easily be implemented to reduce reliance on anhydrous. Yes this will cut back some on the yield per acre per year because more acres will be in the other rotation…which brings me to the land bank. We have a lot of acres let fallow in the land bank program. This can easily be reversed if yields drop.
And finally, we have all this ethanol production going on right now that could easily be stopped if push comes to shove. Let’s say the yield per acre of feed corn goes down due to some fertilizer supply snafu. Hello? Ethanol? Are you fools able to think at all? Divert all that ethanol corn to the cows. Problem solved. Not that this extreme measure will ever be necessary. It’s just something available to illustrate the absurdity of this famine fear mongering.
There’s no famine coming to North America. You dam fools.