Summary
This paper stresses the need to address upcoming scarcity of phosphorus, a mineral nutrient that is essential for all life on Earth. Agricultural crops obtain phosphorus from the pool in the soil that can be replenished by recycling of organic material, or by application of inorganic fertilizer, originating from mines, largely concentrated in three countries only: Morocco/Western Sahara, China and USA. A complicating factor is that the phosphorus rock contains other substances as well, including the heavy metals cadmium and uranium. These substances currently end up in fertilizer and in phosphogypsum where they may pose threats to human and animal health. Hence scarcity and environmental considerations call for action to close the phosphorus cycle. The paper compares two options for intervention: mandatory recycling versus a ban on imports of contaminated phosphorus, and argues in favor of the second.
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Previous versions of this paper were presented at OECD Agriculture Conference, Paris, March 2009, Advisory Committee for Development Cooperation of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BZ/AIV/COS) in The Hague, November, 2009, the “P-summit” workshop organized by the International Fertiliser Society (IFS) and the Aleff Group, February 2010, in London, and the Consultative Meeting on Uranium Recovery from Phosphoric Acid organized by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD/NEA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Paris, June 2010. The author thanks participants in these meetings for their comments, specifically Ron Cameron and Robert Vance (OECD/NEA), Julian Hilton, Malika Moussaid, and Regis Stana (Aleff Group), Chris Dawson (IFS), Prem Bindraban (WUR/PRI) as well as Alex Halsema, Max Merbis, Roelf Voortman and Lia van Wesenbeeck (SOW-VU).
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Keyzer, M. Towards a Closed Phosphorus Cycle. De Economist 158, 411–425 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-010-9150-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-010-9150-5