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Food system resilience to phosphorus shortages on a telecoupled planet

Nature Sustainability volume 5, pages 114–122 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Agricultural trade and globalization pose new challenges for resource management and governance. In particular, many countries are dependent on imports of non-renewable mineral phosphorus (P) fertilizers for their agriculture. We propose a framework to assess the possible impacts of future disruptions in P resource availability by comparing countries’ P fertilizer use for export production (virtual P) to their existing domestic P resources (labile soil P stocks and phosphate rock reserves). We find that up to 26% of global P fertilizer use is linked to exported crop and livestock commodities, creating complex resource interdependencies across countries. Vulnerabilities to P resource shortage may be moderated by existing domestic P resources in some countries, which could mitigate either short- or long-term impacts of fertilizer trade disruptions. However, greater coordination among trade partners that acknowledges and manages multiple forms of mineral P interdependencies is needed to provide resilient access to P inputs for national food supplies globally.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual framework illustrating P telecoupling in the global food supply chain.
Fig. 2: Global virtual P use related to trade flows among countries.
Fig. 3: Representative examples of countries’ vulnerability to PR shortages based on their virtual P use for exports, domestic soil P stocks and current domestic PR extraction.
Fig. 4: Trends in fertilizers, food prices and total agricultural import and export (in monetary value) indexes from 1990 to 2020.

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Data availability

Data are available in the respective Supplementary Data files. The R code used for computing all calculations is available at http://github.com/Pie90/SYSRISK/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bordeaux Sciences Agro, University of Bordeaux, UMR 1391 ISPA, Gradignan, France

    Pietro Barbieri & Thomas Nesme

  2. INRAE, UMR 1391 ISPA, Villenave d’Ornon, France

    Pietro Barbieri & Thomas Nesme

  3. Department of Geography, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Graham K. MacDonald

  4. INRAE, UMR GREThA, University of Bordeaux, Pessac, France

    Antoine Bernard de Raymond

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  1. Pietro Barbieri
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  2. Graham K. MacDonald
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  3. Antoine Bernard de Raymond
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  4. Thomas Nesme
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Contributions

P.B., T.N. and A.B.d.R. conceived the study. G.K.M and P.B developed the conceptual framework and the country classification. P.B. conducted all data analysis and calculations. All authors were involved in the interpretation of the results and contributed in writing and revising the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pietro Barbieri.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Sustainability thanks Thomas Kastner, Kazuyo Matsubae and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–4, Tables 1–7, Methods and references.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data 1

This dataset contains the list of the 138 items retained for the analyses as well as all coefficients used in the calculations.

Supplementary Data 2

This dataset contains the share of grain-based feed necessary for one animal based on the use of eight main crop species.

Supplementary Data 3

This dataset contains the fertilization rates for each of the 163 countries considered in the paper and for each crop species or crop category.

Supplementary Data 4

This dataset contains the virtual P exports, soil P stocks and PR reserves for each of the 163 countries considered in this study.

Supplementary Data 5

This dataset contains (1) the raw IFA data on P fertilizer application for all available countries and crops, (2) the harvested area as retrieved from FAOSTAT in July 2019, and (3) the respective calculation of P fertilizer rate per hectare of cropland.

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Barbieri, P., MacDonald, G.K., Bernard de Raymond, A. et al. Food system resilience to phosphorus shortages on a telecoupled planet. Nat Sustain 5, 114–122 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00816-1

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