Today’s idea: Our dwindling supply of phosphorus for fertilizer threatens to disrupt food security across the planet during the coming century, an article argues. “This is the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.”

Stephen Morrison/European Pressphoto Agency

Food | You may remember the food-price unrest of a few years back, sparked in part by shortages and soaring prices of fertilizer. Yet large amounts of phosphate-based fertilizer continue to be wasted, write James Elser and Stuart White in Foreign Policy, “lost from farm fields, through soil erosion and runoff, and down swirling toilets, through our urine and feces.”

The two academics say the long-term problem isn’t insufficient production (the problem recently); it’s finite supply:

Our supply of mined phosphorus is running out. Many mines used to meet this growing demand are degrading, as they are increasingly forced to access deeper layers and extract a lower quality of phosphate-bearing rock. … Some initial analyses from scientists with the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative estimate that there will not be sufficient phosphorus supplies from mining to meet agricultural demand within 30 to 40 years. Although more research is clearly needed, this is not a comforting time scale. The geographic concentration of phosphate mines also threatens to usher in an era of intense resource competition. Nearly 90 percent of the world’s estimated phosphorus reserves are found in five countries: Morocco, China, South Africa, Jordan and the United States. In comparison, the 12 countries that make up the OPEC cartel control only 75 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

The upshot, the authors write, could be international tension, rising prices, even “a Malthusian trap of widespread famine.”

“We need to dramatically reduce the demand for phosphate rock by eliminating our wasteful practices,” they write, noting that phosphate can be recycled over and over. [Foreign Policy]

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