A Faustian Bargain

In the township where I grew up, a fertilizer factory was a part of the project in which mining lignite and generating electricity from it was the star.  This fertilizer factory was the first in the southern part of India to manufacture urea. 

Despite the fact that urea was in great demand, the plant managed to run into losses, the economics of it was perhaps beyond the imaginations of paper-pushing bureaucrats!

A reminder that urea is a concentrated nitrogen fertilizer.  For a rapidly growing population, there is only so much nitrogen that soil can naturally offer, which is why we have relied a great deal on urea.

How important is this synthetic fertilizer? 

As I blogged here a few years ago, "Half of us wouldn’t be alive today if not for synthetic nitrogen. ... Another mind-blowing way to think about it: On average, half of the nitrogen in your body was synthetically fixed."

Of course, practically everything that we do is a Faustian Bargain.  We pay a big price for our reliance on urea.

What would happen if we suddenly stopped relying on this synthesized nitrogen?

We are experiencing it now, not because the world decided to get away from urea but because prices have rocketed up thanks to a "a freakish confluence" of factors.  The high prices and shortages have choked quite a few economic activities, including farming.

But, isn't avoiding fertilizers and going organic a positive development?

Conceptually, yes.  But in a world of 8 billion people, it is doubtful that we can feed everybody without synthesized nitrogen in particular.  And this is what Sri Lanka is finding out the hard way after the government's campaign toward organic farming:

[Farmers] and agriculture experts blame the policy for a sharp drop in crop yields and spiraling prices that are worsening the country’s growing economic woes and leading to fears of food shortages. 

Prices for some foodstuffs, like rice, have risen by nearly one-third compared with a year ago, according to Sri Lanka’s central bank. The prices of vegetables like tomatoes and carrots have risen to five times their year-ago levels.

Why did prices rise so much?

[Three-quarters] of Sri Lanka’s farmers relied heavily on chemical fertilizers, while just about 10 percent cultivated without them. Almost all major crops grown in the country depend on the chemicals. For crops crucial to the economy like rice, rubber and tea, the dependence reaches 90 percent or more.

One does not need to be an agronomist to understand why a sudden withdrawal from synthetic fertilizers would result in such shortages and price hikes.

Now Sri Lanka’s government, run by members of the Rajapaksa family, is rushing to avert a crisis. Late last month, Sri Lanka’s plantation minister, Ramesh Pathirana, confirmed a partial reversal of the policy, telling the country’s Parliament that the government would be importing fertilizer necessary for tea, rubber and coconut, which make up the nation’s major agricultural exports.

And in the old country that has been hit by shortages and inflation?  I assume that there are many more tragic stories like this one:

Danpal Yadav, 44, a rice grower in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, was already reeling under debt because of low crop yields last season. After coming home empty-handed from visits to government fertilizer distribution centers, he grew anguished and talked about suicide, his family said. 

Time was running out for Mr. Yadav to nourish his fields. On Oct. 28, after sleeping outside a fertilizer center for three days and getting nothing, he returned home and bolted the door. 

His brother Vivek later found him unconscious. He had consumed poison. Doctors declared him dead at a hospital. 

“He was desperately trying to find fertilizer,” Vivek Yadav said. “This is the story of every farmer during this season.”