Fertilizer for Sale? Potash and a Sustainable Food Supply

Potash is not like diamonds and oil. It does not sound sexy, but it's certainly useful, and it's critical to today's food supply. If you're interested in sustaining the food supply, potash is on the menu, at least at the moment.

What is potash all about? Well, a long time ago, the minerals in the oceans dried up and eventually turned into rock. This rock contained abundant potassium carbonate, something that we think of as potash. While this rock was relatively abundant, so was the demand for fertilizer. Come the green revolution the increasing demands for fertilizer, and now 95 percent of the world's potassium carbonate is used as one of the components of fertilizer. Potash is a big business, even if it doesn't sound sustainable or sexy.

For plants, potash is a very useful substance. It helps house plants create big, showy flowers. Potash helps all plants retain water, resist disease, and maintain good yields. For better or for worse, many of the world's farmers rely on potash to strengthen their crops.

Why care about potash? Well, just like water, some of us have it and some of us don't. The countries that are blessed with an abundant potash supply are starting to realize that they want to keep it and manage it themselves. Recently, the Canadian government blocked an international bid to take over the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. In the past 25 years, this is only the second time that the Canadian government has blocked a corporate takeover, which means that the Canadian government has recognized the importance of this resource to the food supply.

Should we question these potash politics? It would be pleasant not to need to worry so much about one particular resource, as this is the stuff that international conflict is made of. There need to be alternatives to chemical-intensive agriculture. There certainly are alternatives, from green manure to plain old manure. Permaculture techniques take nutrient cycling even further, showing us how to create agricultural ecosystems that sustain themselves with the deposition, decomposition, and uptake of nutrients into food plants. However, even if these techniques should be practiced widely, they are not practiced widely yet. At the moment, the control of potash helps a country control the sustainability of its food supply.

Perhaps potash is more like diamonds and oil than you might think. And if it is, we need to treat is as a precious resource, like water or farmland. Unlike water, we also need to consider alternatives to this resource - alternatives that are more sustainable in the long term.