Battered by soaring fertiliser prices and rioting rice farmers, the global food industry may also have to deal with a potentially catastrophic future shortage of phosphorus, scientists say.
Researchers in Australia, Europe and the United States have given warning that the element, which is essential to all living things, is at the heart of modern farming and has no synthetic alternative, is being mined, used and wasted as never before....
...In the past 14 months, the price of the raw material - phosphate rock - has surged by more than 700 per cent to more than $367 (£185) per tonne....MORE
HT: naked capitalism
