Biting the Science That Feeds Us: The War against Fertilizers

Advocates of the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement urge shareholders and corporations to look beyond the bottom line toward a better world. But the movement is not succeeding in that aim when — often through government-backed initiatives — ESG-style policies make it harder to feed the planet.

Specifically, pressure from the eco-lobby (which encompasses ESG thinking, which it influences and is in turn influenced by) against both the exploration of natural gas and the manufacture and use of synthetic chemicals has complicated the acquisition and use of effective fertilizers in farming.

Tragic events in Sri Lanka and tumultuous events in Europe — perfect case studies demonstrating some of the consequences of ESG-friendly policies — foreshadow what could happen if ESG and the mandates it has spawned aren’t curtailed.

Fertilizer isn’t sexy, and that’s one reason why, so far, it hasn’t been part of the front-line battles over environmental policies in the U.S. Gas stoves and gasoline-powered cars — similarly under threat from Green New Deal–style regulation at the state and federal level — are more visible and better-loved. “Most people don’t think about fertilizer,” writes Alex Fitzsimmons in the Atlantic, “but few innovations are as central to modern life.”

Fertilizer supplies nutrients to make plants grow. For centuries, fertilizer was made from composted food waste and human and animal manure. Agriculturalists made various improvements to these methods — including crop rotation to delay the depletion of nutrients in the soil — but farmers still generally couldn’t supply food for a substantial increase in population without acquiring more land.

The creation of synthetic fertilizer in the early 20th century changed all this. In 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber developed a process to turn nitrogen in the atmosphere into ammonia by combining nitrogen with fossil fuels under high pressure. When exploration methods for natural gas improved, it became the choice fuel material and is today the key fuel in 70 percent of synthetic fertilizers in use across the world.

Synthetic fertilizers enabled greater food production with less land, proving the adage of the late economist Julian Simon that human ingenuity is the “ultimate resource.” In the 1960s and 1970s, doomsayers predicted mass famines because of increases in population in developing countries such as India. But Simon, pointing to advances in the manufacture of synthetic fertilizer and other agricultural innovations, disputed this, making a famous bet with leading population “expert” Paul Ehrlich that natural resource prices on average would fall. Simon won his bet, and the mass famines predicted in countries like India failed to materialize. Synthetic fertilizers helped fuel the “Green Revolution,” the farming phenomenon that sent global agricultural output skyrocketing and food prices falling from the 1960s to the 1980s. India became a net exporter of food grains in the 1990s.

Yet Simon warned in his 1996 book, The Ultimate Resource 2, that ill-conceived government policies could cut off this progress in feeding the world and lead to disastrous consequences. “Though a ‘simpler way of life’ has an appeal for some, it can have a surprisingly high economic cost,” Simon wrote. He pointed out that one calculation found that if U.S. farmers were to forswear modern “tractors and fertilizers to ‘save energy’ and natural resources,” they would require 180 million additional acres of cropland to sustain current output, about half of the cropland now in cultivation.

Unfortunately, the hypothetical abandonment of synthetic fertilizer became a reality in Sri Lanka in recent years with tragic results. In April 2021, Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa banned the import and use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in farming. Almost overnight, farmers had to go back to relying solely on the composting and manure fertilizers that existed before the Haber process was created more than 100 years ago.

According to the Daily Caller, “The move was part of Sri Lanka’s effort to pursue environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.” Sri Lanka had signed onto a “green finance taxonomy” agreement with the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank — which doles out aid to Sri Lanka and other developing nations — in which it pledged to move away from synthetic fertilizers.

Read more at Capitol Matters