Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
condominiums on prime real estate on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the Hawaiki Tower in
Honolulu, and Nauru House, once the tallest building in Melbourne.
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The USA still has 11 per cent of known reserves of phosphate, but there have been estim-
ates that production will halve over the first 15 years of this century, and tail off after that.
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Canada's substantial grain exports are entirely dependent upon phosphate imports from the
US and Togo. The world's largest reserves are in Morocco, where in the early 1990s, guer-
illas from the former Spanish Sahara contested the ownership of disputed phosphate-rich
an attempt to sell the phosphate deposits at Eppawela to the US company Freeport McMor-
an, which intended to strip mine an area of 56 square kilometres, relocating 12,000 people
in 26 villages. Freeport McMoran planned to exhaust the supply over a period of 30 years,
whereas campaigners claimed the supply could meet Sri Lanka's needs for the next 200
tracting a Chinese bid, but again this was fought off by protests.
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This economic and political scarcity can be addressed by agricultural and food systems
which recycle most of the phosphate in manure, human sewage and animal bones, but there
are three problems here. The first is that because the centralization and transportation of
livestock makes animal disease such a high risk, we no longer recycle slaughterhouse and
food wastes, but incinerate them (see
Chapter 5
). The second is that the easiest way to
transport excessive volumes of animal manure is often to mix it with water, but this makes
composting and storage of nitrogen more difficult and encourages leaching into the sur-
rounding environment. The nature of the problem can be seen by a visit to a typical strug-
gling UK dairy farm, where manure from the milking parlour is hosed into a lagoon to sit
around bubbling methane, or over flowing into the nettles, until it is pumped out onto the
fields.
The third and principal problem is that nutrients accumulate in what Günther calls HEAP
traps - HEAP standing for Hampered Effluent Accumu-lation Process - while other loca-
tions are deprived. These HEAPs are caused, first of all by feeding grains to animals, since
grains are in themselves a transportable form of nutrient concentration; and second, by try-
ing to obtain economies of scale by feeding a great many animals in a small space. John
Driver of Albright and Wilson, a firm who have been manufacturing phosphates for over
150 years' agrees:
Problems have arisen due to the intensification of livestock production, particu-
larly pigs and poultry. This has resulted in local excesses of manure production, far
beyond the capacity of nearby farmland to absorb the output. In such situations, al-
ternative disposal routes have to be found; incineration is amongst those already being
employed.
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