Simon Rorschach explains how Brazil’s fertilizer crisis reveals a world in which cheap food, secure supply chains, and comfortable globalization can no longer be taken for granted.
Brazil has begun preparing for a world in which food cannot depend on ships arriving on time. One of the planet’s largest agricultural producers now wants to cut its reliance on foreign fertilizer. The industry minister has set a stark target: reduce fertilizer imports by half and spread purchases among more countries so that one broken supply route cannot threaten the harvest. The problem is enormous because Brazil is the world’s largest fertilizer importer and buys abroad almost everything its farms consume. Four countries dominate those supplies: Russia, China, Canada, and Morocco. Russia led the field for years, though China has lately been gaining on it. Brazil built an agricultural giant on this international system, and now it is trying to protect that giant from the system’s failures. Soylent Green imagined food scarcity as the final condition of an exhausted society. Brazil is nowhere near that nightmare, but its new policy starts from the same hard truth: whoever cannot secure the inputs for food production eventually loses control over something more important than trade.
