We need phosphate to grow food. But should we be digging it up from the sea floor?
We need phosphate to grow food. But should we be digging it up from the sea floor?
PRI's The World
October 04, 2016 · 12:30 PM EDT
By Nina Feldman
The view from the sleepy town of San Juanico, Mexico, is about what you’d see from any village along the Pacific coast of Baja California — craggy coves, turquoise waves, a couple of surfers and fishing boats. But 25 miles offshore, there’s something different. The sediment at the bottom of the sea out there is rich in phosphate, a mineral form of phosphorus that’s vital to the rest of the world.
You can’t grow food without phosphorus, which is why this stretch of sea floor has drawn the attention of a group of Mexican and foreign companies. They want to dredge up the phosphate off of San Juanico and use it to make chemical fertilizer.
Most of the phosphorus used for fertilizer currently comes from phosphate rock on land, but those supplies are dwindling, and most of what’s left can be found in just two countries, Morocco and China. That’s got a lot of people worried about a supply crunch and a cascading impact on global food supplies and prices.
“If phosphorus were to become more scarce,” says Dana Cordell of the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative in Australia, “it’s likely that food prices could rise, and there would be more hungry [people].”
More:
http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-10-04/we-need-phosphate-grow-food-should-we-be-digging-it-sea-floor
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