Fertilizers

ISSUES

The Agricultural World’s Addiction to Fertilizer

Global use of fertilizers has more than doubled in the last thirty years. More than 200kg per hectare is used in Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea; 50kg in Australia, 10-20kg in sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia, and an average of 100kg in other countries. This is partly due to the collapse of areas devoted to growing vegetables. During the 2006-2007 season, 164 million tonnes of fertilizer were used, of which 98 million tonnes were for nitrogen, 27 million tonnes for potassium and 39 million tonnes for phosphates. China is the world’s largest mineral fertilizer consumer using 49 million tonnes, followed by India (22 million tonnes), the United States (21 million tonnes), Brazil (9 million tonnes), Indonesia (3.5 million tonnes) and France (3.4 million tonnes). According to the United Nations (UN), since 1960 the number of dead zones in seas and oceans has doubled each decade, particularly because of nutrients such as nitrogen...

NEWS

Sorry, most of the news are only available in French language for the moment.

FRANCE - BREST - Des associations de défense de l'environnement du Finistère ont déposé mardi une nouvelle plainte contre X au...

FRANCE - PARIS - La Cour des Comptes accuse une nouvelle fois l'Etat de manquer de détermination face aux pollutions des eaux...

FRANCE - RENNES - Le ministre de l'Agriculture Bruno Le Maire a présenté vendredi à Rennes les détails d'un plan gouvernemental...

Univers GoodPlanet par Netvibes

DEBATES

The Nitrogen Fix: Breaking a Costly Addiction

Fred Pearce

A single patent a century ago changed the world, and now, in the 21st century, Homo sapiens and the world we dominate have an...

A Big Chance for Small Farmers

During 2002-2006, I led the United Nations Millennium...

Nutrient overload: Unbalancing the global nitrogen cycle

As a basic building block of plant and animal proteins,...

FOCUS

How to feed the world

Today more than 900 million people are in danger of starvation. The grain market is at the mercy of the harvests: poor results place millions of lives at risk, as in 2008 when there was widespread famine across many countries. By 2050 the population will have reached 9...

VIDEOS

03/02/2010	Coline Serreau dresse dans « Solutions locales pour désordre global », son...	23/12/2009	Soumana Doumbia, geographer, tells us about the difficulties that farmers...
29/10/2009	Une part notre alimentation est produite dans les pays en développement,...	27/08/2009	André Ollivro, du Collectif urgence réchauffement climatique, explique que...

GREEN TIPS

Since the 1980s, the engineer Pierre Rabhi has been developing agroecology in very poor rural areas in...

INDICATORS

Arable land
Degraded soils
Pesticide use

CHECK OUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD ON OUR 3D GLOBE