With the demand for food growing continuously the need for increasing agricultural output and productivity has become inevitable, but because of the increasingly huge demand for food, depletion of nutrients in the soil is faster than that of which they are replaced by natural processes, consequently, fertilisers are being widely increasingly used by farmers across the globe.
Today about 50 percent of the world’s soils are subject to direct management by humans. But global soil change is also occurring in more remote areas due to the spread of contaminants and alterations in climate, Richter’s report says.
Worldwide, soils are being transformed by human activities in ways that we poorly understand, with possibly dire implications.
“Properties and processes in the soil are more dynamic and susceptible to change than we previously thought,” Richter said.
“Only recently are we documenting how [many aspects of soil chemistry and composition] are all highly responsive to human activities.”
Rattan Lal, of Ohio State University in Columbus, is a past president of the Soil Science Society of America.
He said that severe soil degradation is increasing globally at a rate of 12.4 million to 24.7 million acres (5 million to 10 million hectares) annually.
In parts of Africa and Asia where the problem is most severe, soils are simply put to too many uses, Lal said. (Source: Current website)
However, this agricultural input being a by-product of the fossil fuel industry it is subjected to the fluctuations of oil prices which is mostly upward and today the price of fertilisers are relatively high driving cost of production for farmers to high levels-in some cases so high that farming becomes unfeasible or unprofitable. On the other hand consumers are faced with high prices for food items.
Currently, our rice farmers are complaining seriously about the debilitating effects on the high prices they have to pay for fertilisers. As a result it was their overwhelming view to utilise the $400M assistance programme offered by the government to help with fertiliser puchases.
According to The Christian Science Monitor in an article of March last year the situation in Asia was so terrible that; “Rice farmers here are staying awake in shifts at night to guard their fields from thieves. In Peru, shortages of wheat flour are prompting the military to make bread with potato flour, a native crop. In Egypt, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso food riots have broken out in the past week.”
“In Asia, where rice is on every plate, prices are shooting up almost daily. Premium Thai fragrant rice now costs $900 per ton, a nearly 30 percent rise from a month ago.
Exporters say the price could eclipse $1,000 per ton by June. Similarly, prices of white rice have climbed about 50 percent since January to $600 per ton and are projected to jump another 40 percent to $800 per ton in April.
The skyrocketing prices have prompted millers to default on rice supply contracts and bandits to steal rice as they aim to hoard the crop, and sell it later, as prices continue to rise.
In 2007 the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index increased an unprecedented 40 percent from 2006, and this year it is projected to continue rising. Surging oil prices (in turn, boosting fertiliser and transport costs) combined with a drop in production due to droughts in Australia and the Ukraine have helped to drain global food stocks.
It is therefore logical that some alternative means would have to be found to produce fertioisers at a cheaper cost or some other method (s) would have to be developed to fertilise the soil because from all indications a point may be reached where it would be unsustainable for farmers to purchase artificially made fertilisers.
In this regard, Executive Director of the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), Dr Arlington Chesney, who recently visited Guyana, provided some degree of optimismwhen he disclosed that a fertiliser project is being conducted by his organisation that could save Guyana a substantial amount of money annually while also increasing crop yields.
“We’ve been doing some trials on different types of urea (a nitrogenous fertiliser) that could reduce the amount of urea used and give higher yields for rice. The results are not final as yet. We have to do another season but they look good, and they could save the country overall about US$2-3M in fertiliser prices a year.”
He explained that the use of the fertiliser could be reduced by as much as 20% while increasing yields by 40% by altering the structure of the urea and depositing it about 2.5 centimetres below the surface of the soil rather than on top of it.
This is indeed an interesting and encouraging development which provides hope for our farmers and the agriculture industry in the region and farmers in particular would now anxiously await the findings of this project.
