Rising costs fuel food inflation fears

The rising cost of meat, dairy products and vegetable oils will increase the world’s food import bill by 11.5 per cent in 2010, according to the United Nations, further stoking fears of rising food inflation in emerging countries ...

The price of dairy products increased 45 per cent in the first five months of the year, while beef and pork prices have also hit their highest levels in years.

Another factor contributing to the higher food bill is the rising cost of shipping, which on average is up about 75 per cent year-on-year ...

FT  03 June 2010    Haber Bosch

Food

UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: "Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products." ...

Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, said: "Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products - livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilisers and pesticides."

Both energy and agriculture need to be "decoupled" from economic growth because environmental impacts rise roughly 80% with a doubling of income, the report found.

Achim Steiner, the UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UNEP, said: "Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation."

The panel, which drew on numerous studies including the Millennium ecosystem assessment, cites the following pressures on the environment as priorities for governments around the world: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilisers, over-exploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational exposure to particulate matter.

Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions ...

Guardian  02 June 2010    

Vegetarian diet is better for the planet, says Lord Stern

Food production will have to increase by 70 percent

How will the world feed itself in 40 years' time?

By 2050, the predicted world population will require the resources of two Earths to sustain it ...

The world is going to get hungrier this century, and on a scale that will make the famines of the 1980s look paltry.

The maths are simple and devastating: in 40 years' time the global population will be 9.2 billion people – a third larger than it is now. But to feed us all, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says, we will need to produce twice as much food.

That's because, despite the threats of this century, most developing countries will get richer. At present 350m households in the world live on £8,000 a year or more. That figure is projected to increase to 2.1bn by 2030.

And the richer they are, the more wastefully people eat. Generally the poor eat vegetables, while the rich eat food that eats vegetables. Lots of it. To produce 1kg of beef takes 10kg of grass or soya-based feed.

A farmed fish will have eaten three times its weight in wild fish. And the rate at which the richest consume these things is amazing: Americans consume 120kg of meat each per year; in the developing world they eat 28kg.

If the world develops as economists predict, it is hard to see how we can possibly meet these demands: environmentalists like to say that the 2050 population would require the resources of two earths to sustain it.

No wonder the British government's chief scientific adviser John Beddington says: "Food security represents a greater threat to mankind than climate change itself." ...

Guardian  11 Oct 2009

Soaring fertiliser prices threaten world's poorest farmers

Soaring fertiliser prices threaten world's poorest farmers India and China hoard fertilisers to guarantee food stocks, while riots break out in Vietnam, Africa and Pakistan. ...

Fertiliser prices have mostly doubled and in some cases risen by 500% in 15 months as US farmers have rushed to plant more biofuel crops and countries such as India and China have bought fertiliser stocks in large quantities to guarantee their food stocks. But while the unprecedented price explosion has barely affected large commercial farmers, it is leading directly to civil unrest among small farmers in developing countries. There have been fertiliser riots or demonstrations in Vietnam, India, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan and Taiwan in the last few months. Last week one man was killed in a stampede at a government handout of fertiliser in Hyderabad, India. ...

World fertiliser prices have risen more than oil or any other commodities in the last 18 months. Of the three main types, diammonium phosphate (Dap) sold for US $250 per tonne in January 2007 but has risen to $1,230 per tonne. Potash-based fertilisers have risen from $172 to over $500 a tonne, and nitrogen based fertilisers have risen from $277 to over $450 per tonne. Much of the price rise is attributed to first world farmers who have applied high levels of fertilisers to maximise harvests of grain to take advantage of record grain prices ...

At least 50 new plants to make nitrogen fertiliser are believed to be under construction ...

Agriculture and development experts say the world has few alternatives to its growing dependence on fertiliser. As population increases and a rising global middle class demands more food, fertiliser has become the preferred route to higher yields.

Guardian 13 August 2008   Haber Bosch

Snared in a homemade ‘NitroNet’

How much nitrogen do we really need for food production? And how can we weigh up the environmental costs and benefits?

For example, Nobel Prizewinner Paul Crutzen has recently argued that emissions of nitrous oxide from fertilised biofuel crops can outweigh the carbon benefits of avoided fossil fuel use.

Others have highlighted a possible benefit of nitrogen in making forests grow faster, absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But the decisions get even harder when dealing with multiple nitrogen threats.

For example, policies to reduce nitrates in water have banned wintertime spreading of farm manures across much of Europe's farmland. The resulting focus on springtime manure spreading has intensified peak ammonia emissions, giving a new threat to biodiversity and air quality.

Climate Action 15 July 2008

Animal agriculture is a significant catalyst for the conversion of wooded areas to grazing land or cropland for feed production, which may emit 2.4 billion metric tons of CO2 annually as a result of deforestation (Steinfeld et al. 2006).

This sector has particularly devastated Latin America, the region experiencing the largest net loss of forests and greatest releases of stored carbon into the atmosphere, resulting from disappearing vegetation (Steinfeld et al. 2006). One of the chief causes of Latin America's deforestation is cattle ranching (FAO 2005a).

Other important ecosystems are also threatened by increasing farm animal populations.

Brazil's Cerrado region, the world's most biologically diverse savannah, produces half of the country's soy crops [Klink and Machado 2005; World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 2007a, 2007b]. As noted by the WWF (2007a), the region's animal species are competing with the rapid expansion of Brazil's agricultural frontier, which focuses primarily on soy and corn.

Ranching is another major threat to the region, as it produces almost 40 million cattle a year.

Farm animal production also results in releases of up to 28 million metric tons of CO2/year from cultivated soils (Steinfeld et al. 2006). Soils, like forests, act as carbon sinks and store more than twice the carbon found in vegetation or in the atmosphere (Steinfeld et al. 2006).

Human activities, however, have significantly depleted the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil, contributing to GHG emissions (Steinfeld et al. 2006).

Desertification, or the degradation of land in arid, semiarid, and dry subhumid areas, is also exacerbated and facilitated by the animal agriculture sector (FAO 2007).

By reducing the productivity and amount of vegetative cover, desertification allows CO2 to escape into the atmosphere.

Desertification of pastures due to animal agriculture is responsible for up to 100 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually (Steinfeld et al. 2006).

Nitrogen from fertilizer and feed production. Feeding the global population of livestock requires at least 80% of the world's soybean crop and more than one-half of all corn (Ash M, Nierenberg D, personal communication; Halweil B, Smil V, personal communication), a plant whose growth is especially dependent on nitrogen-based artificial fertilizers.

Natural sources of fixed nitrogen, the form easily available as fertilizer for plants, are limited, necessitating artificial fertilizer production. Before the development of the Haber-Bosch process, the amount of sustainable life on Earth was restricted by the amount of nitrogen made available to plants by bacteria and lightning.

Modern fertilizer manufacturing, heavily reliant on fossil fuels, has taken a once-limited nutrient and made it available in massive quantities for crop farmers in the industrialized world and, increasingly, the developing world. ...

www.ehponline.org May 2008

Food crisis threatens security

The UN secretary general issued a gloomy warning yesterday that the deepening global food crisis, in which rapidly rising prices have triggered riots and threatened hunger in dozens of countries, could have grave implications for international security, economic growth and social progress. The World Bank estimates food prices have risen by an average of 83% in the past three years, and warns that at least 100 million people could be tipped into poverty as a result. A range of factors has been blamed, including poor harvests, partly due to climate change, rising oil prices, steep growth in demand from China and India, and the dash to produce biofuels for motoring at the expense of food crops. ...

The Guardian 21 April 2008    More ...

Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch (Nobels 1918 and 1931) are responsible for the world population explosion. Through a very energy dependent process, Haber created the process for artificial industrial fertilizer and Bosch perfected its mass production. Their Haber-Bosch process is often called one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. In Europe, for example, it took one farmer to feed 2.5 people in 1900, currently the ratio s/he will feed well over 100. Yara Haber & Bosch are primarily responsible for the world's population going from from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.

Industrial fertilizer is the cornerstone of the green revolution. It's production consumes between 1-1.5 percent energy used worldwide with massive amounts of carbon dioxide as a byproduct produced. It's created by fixing nitrogen and hydrogen that occurs naturally in the air through a process known as ammonia synthesis to create industrial fertilizer.

We're still working with 100 year old technology. Nothing has come close to what Haber originally created. Currently, production is at 500 million tons produced per year, and it sustains about 40% of the population. That's 2.4 billion people who exist because of that, and in turn, need energy to make the fertilizer to get food on the table...and our dependence will only increase as the global count moves well beyond 6 billion people.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture released figures for fertilizer, prices have risen 117 percent since April 2000 (and 65% since 2007), rising faster than any other raw material used by farmers. The price of ammonia has tripled.

This is especially bad for those farmers in developing markets where cost of production takes a much bigger proportion of their capital expenditures than it would a farmer's in a developed country.

Add to that the pollution problem brought on by industrial fertilizer and the monoculture mentality to which it's inextricably tied. The creation of industrial fertilizer created this massive world population that is unsustainable without it.

The big question is will there be a breakthrough that is less energy and environmentally intensive to be able to meet fast growing population's demand for food. Industrial fertilizer is not a sexy product. That could contribute to the reason no one has invested in newer processes. More importantly, up until recently, the cost of producing fertilizer (tied in to the cost of energy to produce it) wasn't an issue because it was cheap to produce and as an outcome, soft commodities e.g. produce and food products were cheap to buy at the markets. No one is going to be interested in a sexy-granola-hybrid car when there are larger fundamental issues that need to be addressed and solved - what to eat. Hopefully, it will happen before there is a large disruption.

Sagefield Post 12 June 2008

Haber Process