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Rye harvest in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (archive photo): The FAO warns of falling food production due to rising prices and scarcity of artificial fertilizers
Photo: Jens Büttner/ dpa
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects food production to fall due to the fertilizer crisis.
Because of the scarce supply and the high costs of artificial fertilizers, there may be significantly less fertilizer in 2022 than before, said Josef Schmidhuber, deputy director of the FAO Markets and Trade Division, the SPIEGEL.
»If the weather turns unfavourable, we will have to reckon with a noticeable drop in food production.«
As a result of the sharp rise in the price of natural gas, various artificial fertilizers have skyrocketed in price.
According to the FAO, urea, for example, cost a good three and a half times as much in November as it did at the end of 2020.
The raw material ammonia, the production of which consumes enormous amounts of natural gas, has become so expensive that large fertilizer manufacturers have had to temporarily shut down factories.
"With these high gas prices, it's often no longer worth producing fertilizer," Schmidhuber told SPIEGEL.
And so plant food is becoming increasingly scarce worldwide.
It gets more expensive in the supermarket
The two largest nitrogen fertilizer exporters, Russia and China, have cut their exports by 37 percent and 40 percent respectively within a month, according to FAO figures.
The leading phosphate fertilizer exporter, Morocco, has also recently been selling noticeably less abroad.
For Germany, Schmidhuber, who was born in Germany, “only” expects higher food prices.
In poorer countries, there is a risk of a noticeable decline in harvests, since many farmers there can no longer afford the fertilizer.
The quality can also suffer.
"If less fertilizer is used in wheat cultivation, for example, then the protein content of the wheat drops," said the FAO expert.
Food had already become massively more expensive around the world in 2021: by an average of 23 percent, according to the Food Price Index of the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Now a renewed price surge is programmed.