Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [51]
Because fertilizer has been relatively cheap, farmers have been encouraged to apply ever greater quantities in their desperate struggle to produce. As with topsoil and groundwater, we squander fertilizer resources today without considering the consequences tomorrow. One of the consequences of our heavy consumption of fertilizer is increasing dependence on imports. Americans might be alarmed at how our dependence on imported strategic metals can be used to justify U.S. political or even military intervention abroad. Americans would probably be even more alarmed about becoming dependent on imported food. But is being dependent on the fertilizer needed to produce food really much different?
Let’s look at the three major types of fertilizer:
Nitrogen fertilizer. We won’t run out of nitrogen, since it makes up about 78 percent of our air, but the price of natural gas, used to make ammonia, the most common nitrogen fertilizer, has risen so rapidly that we have begun to import ammonia from countries with cheap supplies of natural gas. We now import about 20 percent of our supplies.52
Potash. Today we import about 85 percent of our potash (from Canada), and by the year 2000 we are expected to import 90 percent.53
Phosphate fertilizer. The U.S. is the world’s leading producer, but our high-grade reserves will probably be exhausted over the next 30 to 40 years at the current rate of use, according to a 1979 government report. “We will probably move from assured self-sufficiency and a dominant exporter position to one of increasing dependency on possibly unreliable foreign sources of supply,” says the ominous report. “Since phosphates are a fundamental necessity to agriculture … the situation … is somewhat analogous to that now being experienced with oil”54 (my emphasis).
Livestock Pollution
Some people believe that although we feed enormous quantities of high-grade plant food to livestock with relatively little return to us as food, there is really no loss. After all, we live in a closed system, don’t we? Animal waste returns to the soil, providing nutrients for the crops that the animals themselves will eventually eat, thus completing a natural ecological cycle.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way anymore. Most manure is not returned to the land. Animal waste in the United States amounts to 2 billion tons annually, equivalent to the waste of almost half of the world’s human population.55 Much of the nitrogen-containing waste from livestock is converted into ammonia and into nitrates, which leach into the groundwater beneath the soil or run directly into surface water, thus contributing to high nitrate levels in the rural wells which tap the groundwater. In streams and lakes, high levels of waste runoff contribute to oxygen depletion and algae overgrowth.56 American livestock contribute five times more harmful organic waste to water pollution than do people, and twice that of industry, estimates food geographer Georg Borgstrom.57
Cheap Water for Cheap Grain
In a true accounting, the two bushels of topsoil washed away with every bushel of corn grown on Iowa’s sloping land would be seen as a subsidy to our cheap grain. In other words, if we were to use all of the conservation measures we know of to prevent this erosion, the cost of producing our grain would go up, as it would if we were to add in all of the costs of dredging the soil from our waterways or charge for feedlot pollution. Failing to account for these costs amounts to hidden subsidies. But in addition, you and I as taxpayers are paying direct subsidies right now.
Our tax dollars have paid for more than one-half of the net value of all irrigation facilities in the United States as of 1975.58