Global Fertilizer Day

/ Fossil Free Agriculture, Resources, Yara Campaign

fertilizer

Every year, on October 13th, the fertilizer industry, represented by the IFA (International Fertilizer Association), celebrates the Global Fertilizer Day. This is a key moment for the industry to communicate its key messages about its importance in providing nutrients to plants. 

In recent years, the industry has been focusing on promoting its sustainability actions, highlighting its efforts to reduce the environmental impacts of fossil fuel-based Nitrogen fertilizer.

The goal of this social media pack is to use the power of social media to disrupt the industry’s narrative on its frequently used hashtags and tell the whole story of chemical fertilizers and how they are misused. We will focus on the full impacts of Chemical Nitrogen fertilizers, from their production process to their application to soils and their waste material.  

⚡️ Join us to disrupt the industry’s narrative and tell the real story of the impacts and risks connected to chemical fertilizers. Please share far and wide ⚡️

Environmental Impacts: Fertilizers have adverse effects on nature and human health.  

  • Nitrogen is key to plant growth, but while fertilizing crops with nitrogen increases productivity in the short term, farmers in many countries are overusing synthetic fertilizers, and that has severe environmental consequences, including biodiversity loss, soil and freshwater degradation, and substantial greenhouse gas emissions. 
  • Excess nitrogen in its various forms contributes to a range of health impacts, including toxic air and groundwater pollution. The largest losses of N from the agri-food system are in the form of ammonia and nitrate. High nitrate concentrations in water bodies can lead to harmful algal blooms, which are toxic to humans and other organisms. 

Nitrogen pollution in waterways is the third most influential driver of biodiversity decline after habitat destruction and greenhouse gas emissions. Nitrogen can contaminate groundwater and create harmful algal blooms in waterways that lead to oxygen depletion in aquatic ecosystems. Dead zones, or areas largely devoid of marine life, are growing worldwide — like in the Gulf of Mexico, which connects the USA, Mexico, and Cuba, where the dead zone in 2024 was more than 6,700 square miles or 17,300 square kilometers.

Fossil Fuel Dependency & Emissions: Nitrogen fertilizers are fossil fuels in another form.

  • Nitrogen fertilizers, largely made from fossil gas feedstock, account for around 30% of petrochemical emissions. Their use on farms, which is expected to grow in the future, creates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas at least 265 times more potent than carbon dioxide and with a lifetime of more than 100 years. (Source)
  • Fossil fuel and fertilizer companies are also partnering on a host of new fossil-based ‘blue’ ammonia projects — ammonia made from fossil gas coupled with carbon capture and storage—with the goal of selling ammonia as an alleged -clean- or -low-carbon- fertilizer or fuel. It is neither. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has a decades-long history of overpromising and under-delivering, with expensive and highly subsidized projects frequently failing to meet emissions reduction targets (Source).
  • About ⅔ of nitrogen fertilizer emissions come from their application in the fields, and the industry has no concrete plans for these.
  • The cost of producing fertilizers is closely linked to energy prices, particularly in the case of nitrogen fertilizers. Natural gas often accounts for 70% to 80% of the operating costs of producing ammonia and urea. Therefore, increases in gas prices inevitably translate into higher food prices. (Source: IEA) 
  • The food system’s dependence on fossil fuel-based fertilizers makes it vulnerable to market shocks. As demonstrated by the recent food price crisis following the Ukraine invasion, gas supply disruptions can significantly impact food production costs and availability.

Fertilizer Companies are Powerful Profiteers  

  • It’s not just market shocks that have raised prices. The global fertilizer industry operates as an oligopoly, with the top nine companies controlling the majority of the global market. Profiteering by these companies allowed their profits to double and triple in 2021 and 2022 compared to 2020, while food prices skyrocketed; in 2022, the top 9 fertilizer producers reached a profit margin of 36% on average while global food prices increased by 9,9%, fastest increase ever seen since 1979.  (Source)
  • Consortiums of industry players like the International Fertilizer Association (IFA) influenced the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) to influence global policy and push for increases in fertilizer use and production (Source).

Food Security: Dependency on chemical fertilizers is weakening our food system

  • A food system reliant on fertilizers and consolidated fertilizer companies is vulnerable. Its dependence on a fluctuant resource such as gas and reliance on geopolitical relations such as that with Russia and China. Food security is not only possible without chemical fertilizers: real food sovereignty can only be achieved if we build food system autonomy that does not rely on fossil fuel-based chemical fertilizers. 
  • The fertilizer industry regrets that fertilizer consumption funds Russia’s war effort because many countries depend on fertilizer imports from Russia. Indeed, European countries reduced gas imports to sanction Russia but increased their fertilizer imports, which they say is just gas in another form. The fertilizers industry uses this argument to claim that we need to increase domestic production. But in fact, increasing domestic production capacity would not resolve the need for gas feedstock from countries like Russia. What we really need are plans to reduce our food system’s dependence on fertilizers. 
  • Fertilizers are a key enabler of intensive monocultures and intensive livestock farming. Reducing fertilizers is key for the agroecological transition: weaning high-consuming food systems necessarily means diversifying cultures and fostering extensive livestock farming. 

Facts & Stats about Fertilizers:

IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE:  Plants require several nutrients to grow. The three main nutrients that plants rely on are nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K), commonly abbreviated as NPK. These are called Macronutrients, and the three are added to soils as fertilizers and other micronutrients that plants need in smaller amounts. Nitrogen fertilizers are the only synthetic type of plant fertilizers. They are made through a process called the Haber-Bosch, which combines Nitrogen from the air with Hydrogen, virtually all made from fossil based feedstocks, namely fossil gas and coal. Phosphorus and Potassium fertilizers are mined as Potash and Phosphate salts. They represent 90% of worldwide fertilizers consumption. In this toolkit, we focus mainly on Nitrogen fertilizers, which we refer to as fertilizers, synthetic fertilizers, or chemical fertilizers in this document.

Synthetic N- Fertilizer Emissions:  

  • Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizer emissions account for around 2% of global greenhouse (GHG) emissions, surpassing emissions from the global commercial aviation sector. (Source)
  • Synthetic N fertilizer production accounted for 38.8% of total synthetic N fertilizer-associated emissions, while field emissions accounted for 58.6%, and transportation accounted for the remaining 2.6%. This means that around ⅔ of Synthetic N fertilizer emissions come from their application in the fields (mainly in the form of Nitrous Oxide (N2O). (Source)

Nitrous oxide (N2O):

  • Nitrous oxide (N2O) is the third most important greenhouse gas (after carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4)), leading to human-induced global warming. N2O is 273 times more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 over a time horizon of 100 years. (Source)
  • Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, which are mainly due to excessive fertilizer use, have increased by 40% between 1980 and 2020 (Source)
  • Anthropogenic N2O emissions – responsible for about 6% of warming from GHG- are exceeding projections in the worst emissions scenarios used by the IPCC and their growth is constantly accelerating. (Source)

Nitrogen Use Efficiency:

  • 85 to 95% of nitrogen applied to soil is lost and does not make it to us as food. The current annual nitrogen surplus is double the amount compatible with the planetary boundaries for a safe operating space for humanity, and overall nitrogen use efficiency in food systems is only 5 to 15%. (Source) 
  • The vast majority of nitrogen removed from agricultural land, in the form of crops or grassland, is used as livestock feed. In total, livestock consumes about 85% of total N from agricultural land, which results in decreased nitrogen use efficiency. (Read more: Table Nitrogen Explainer)

Fertilizer Politics:

  • Approximately 1-2% of the world’s energy is allocated to fertilizer production, with about 95% of that energy being used for nitrogen-based fertilizers. (Source: IFA, 2009)
  • Fertilizer is a political commodity heavily subsidized as it has become a cornerstone of food safety. Fertilizer companies are often heavily state-dominated and influential with their respective governments. A study done in 2016 found that fertilizer accounts for 44% of food commodity costs.
  • The cost of producing fertilizers is closely linked to energy prices, particularly in the case of nitrogen fertilizers. Natural gas often accounts for 70% to 80% of the operating costs of producing ammonia and urea. Therefore, increases in gas prices inevitably translate into higher food prices. (Source: IEA) 
  • In addition to recent gas price shocks, skyrocketing fertilizer prices are also, in part, the result of fertilizer company consolidation and profiteering. (Read More: The Fertilizer Trap)
  • There is a vast disparity in Nitrogen fertilizer use across the world, which ranges from 330 kilograms per Hectare of arable land (kg/ha) in Egypt, 166 kg/ha in China, to 0.02 Kg/ha in South Sudan, and 0.83 Kg/ha in Somalia. The world’s average use of Nitrogen fertilizers is 65.45 kg/ha of arable land. (Read More: Nitrogen fertilizer use per hectare of cropland, 1961 to 2021 (ourworldindata.org)
  • In May 2024, African countries set a goal to triple their fertilizer use to reach an average of 50 Kilograms per hectare of arable land on the continent, a plan that was met with resistance from several civil society groups as 15% of agricultural soils in Africa are affected by acidity issues.

The Industry’s Decarbonization Plans:

  • The fertilizer industry is using ‘blue’ or ‘decarbonized’ ammonia as an escape hatch to continue and expand their usage of fossil fuel feedstocks. Blue ammonia is made of fossil gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is expensive and has a long history of overpromising and underperforming. (Source)
  • The fertilizer industry is describing blue ammonia as both a clean fertilizer and clean fuel. It is neither. (Source)
  • Green ammonia, made from water electrolysis powered by renewable energy, composes only a fraction of overall ammonia production, which is 99% fossil-based (Source). 

Key Links & Resources:

Do you want to learn more about how Yara, the world leader in the production of synthetic fertilizer, uses lies, myths and sneaky streategies to greenwash its image? Read more about the campaign #YaraFertilizesChaos on our website.

[Shout out to @lava.hhv for the graphics]

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