Fertilizers help feed the world, but excessive use is poisoning water, polluting the air and accelerating climate change. Despite the damage fertilizers can cause, roughly a third of the world’s largest food companies don’t acknowledge any risk, while most companies that recognize the hazards do little to address them, according to a new report by Planet Tracker.
The report examined more than 5,000 company filings from 45 food system giants between 2018 to 2023 and found that many companies don’t report how they manage fertilizer-related risks, which makes it difficult to address the problem of overuse.
“When we look at the issues caused by fertilizer, there aren’t any companies doing enough,” Emma Amadi, lead author of the report and an analyst of food and water use at the U.K.-based nonprofit Planet Tracker, told Mongabay in a video interview. “If the use and overuse of synthetic fertilizer isn’t tackled, we’re not going to achieve a more sustainable food system.”
On average, crops take up only about half the nitrogen applied to them as fertilizer. The excess runs off into rivers and lakes and render water unsafe for people and wildlife. Excess nitrogen in soil can be converted to nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change and erosion of the ozone layer, which in turn leads to increased risk of skin cancer.
“The planetary boundary (or global environmental limit) for nitrogen is being exceeded by 2 to 3 times each year,” the report notes.
In Guatemala, nitrogen runoff from oil palm plantations is fueling algal blooms in Lake Atitlán, a UNESCO World Heritage site, suffocating aquatic biodiversity and causing health problems for local residents. The same has happened in Lake Erie in the U.S., and in India, fertilizers are contributing to widespread contamination of groundwater.
Worldwide, excess nitrogen in drinking water has led to increased rates of colon cancer and blue baby syndrome, a sometimes fatal condition that causes the lips and fingertips of babies to turn blue as oxygen is replaced with nitrogen in the blood.
“So much environmental policy has focused almost exclusively on the farm and the farmer. But farmers have far less autonomy than people assume,” David Kanter, the global chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, who was not involved in the report, told Mongabay.
“Some of the big actors in the agri-food system actually have a lot of influence over nitrogen use and production, and they should be held accountable,” he added.
The Planet Tracker report and Kanter both acknowledge the importance of fertilizers for food security, but they say it can be scaled back by 50-70% if the food industry takes action to improve efficiency and curb waste.
Banner image: A third of large food corporations ignore synthetic fertilizer risks. Image courtesy of Dan Agostini/Diálogo Chino.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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