Deutsche Welle (DW) quotes IFPRI researchers Joseph Glauber and Avinash Kishore in the article looking at what farmers around the world are doing to save their crops in a situation of a global fertilizer shortage sparked by the war in Iran.
While one option for farmers is to switch to crops that are less fertilizer-intensive, that choice isn’t available to all farmers. “If you’re a rice producer in Southeast Asia, you may not have that many cropping options,” Joseph Glauber, former chief economist at the US Department of Agriculture who now works with the International Food Policy Research Institute, told DW.
Fertilizers could also be distributed more efficiently, with many sorts of technology that can help with application (e.g., drones, cameras, even AI). While helpful, these tools can be expensive and inaccessible for poorer farmers. Even more important than the method is motivation, Avinash Kishore told DW.
When fertilizer is subsidized, there’s little incentive for farmers to be careful in their application. But when urea prices shot up in 2022 in Bangladesh, farmers were able to use less and rice production held steady. “There’s a lot of room to use this resource efficiently,” Kishore said. “You don’t need some sudden injection of very expensive or complex technology.”