Thoughts on CoCoFe from the Expert Pannel on Mitigating Agricultural Nitrogen of the of theTask Force on Reactive Nitrogen (TFRN) under the Working Group on Strategies and Review of the UNECE Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution.

The objectives of the CoCoFe are to help answer to the following questions:

  1. maintaining or increasing global food production;
  2. maximizing the efficient use of plant nutrients to enhance sustainable agriculture;
  3. minimizing the environmental impacts from the use of fertilizers including pollution by loss of nutrients via runoff, leaching, greenhouse gas emissions and other mechanisms;
  4. minimizing environmental and human health impacts from pollutants such as heavy metals in fertilizers;
  5. maintaining and increasing food safety.

To contribute to answer these questions, the following comments apply:

  1. The justification of fertilizer for helping to feed the current and future human population is valid. But how much of fertilizer is used for non-food amenities (e.g. lawns, Cannabis), or non-essential food crops(wine grapes, hops, raspberries) and feed crops. So perhaps focus on minimizing fertilizer inputs to non-essential crops, i.e. accept greater yield loss risk. Also, maintaining a sustainable global food production would imply an even distribution of fertilizer resources and of crop production. Nutrient imbalances are a reality within Europe and worldwide, therefore a better fertilization management and increasing nutrients use efficiency are the way to guarantee sustainable increasing need for food production. Good management implies region specific knowledge and actions.
  2. We must recognize that the dialectic commercial and publicgood intentions of the fertilizerindustry as exemplified by the various‘Institutes’ (IPNI, CFI, EFI)responding to CoCoFeis blurred. It is very difficult to tease out this duality. For example, they support good research and technology transfer but they also lobbygovernments and stack the arguments in their interest (e.g. against organic agr.). They have considerable wealth and resources unlike any other comparable players. An example is promoting the 4Rs while transitioning to urea (not an ‘R’) and then marketing ‘value added’urea products.Given fertilizer’s importance to humanity, which the industry attests, perhaps public bodies should have a greater role in the fertilizer discussion. One possible approach is a more balanced approach is to ensure that support for research on organic products including manure should match (or exceed it since it is much more complex) the resources put into fertilizer research. A special call for biobased fertilizers research and innovation projects is currently open in the EU, that will hopefully contribute to the Nutrient recovery and reuse from organic by products, including manure. This call is oriented under the circular economy concept package, which is valid for the sustainable crop fertilization.
  3. The Code might say something like every kg of fertilizer used should be considered in terms of need vs. impacts on both ends of the chain: i.e. depletion of resource and exhaustion into the environment. Hence the code should be ‘use less, reuse more’ as with other materials.
  4. There are ways to mitigate the need for fertilizers. Technology is helping (precision ag, diagnostics) but equally important is good management skills, and region specific knowledge. There is no question that much better yields are achieved by better managers with equivalent inputs. It is a matter of talent and education. We research efforts should shift from optimizing fertilizer use (as in 4R) to optimizing production with all tools, of which fertilizer is one.
  5. Fertilizer use must always be precisely monitored on farm level and beyond and records must be kept at all levels. Farms that use fertilizershould have field and farm budgets, in addition to BMPs. Accounting at farm level is often not done in regions with excess fertilizer use and consequent excess nutrients in the environment. So, more careful fertilization plans could be mandatory, or at least strongly advised.
  6. In most countries of the world, the only effective means to promote a careful use of nutrient use in agriculture is price. The price of fertiliser nutrients therefore needs to be adjusted so that it is sufficiently cheap that the cost is not a serious impediment to its use to alleviate nutrient deficiencies in food production but sufficiently expensive that it encourages efficient use of nutrients, including (via the shadow price) those in manure.
  7. Several submissions suggested including the benefits of fertilizer on food quality. Consider also possible negative effectson food quality. For example nitrate in leafy crops,cadmium from P fertilizer, food quality in context of total diet, e.g. high nitrate in food and water, and dilution of bioactive molecules from rapid stress-free growth. Also, special care needs to be taken, concerning the use or treated and untreated organic residues as fertilizers, due to potential risks for chemical and/or biological contamination of the marketable products.
  8. The UNECE TFRN Guidance Document on Reactive Nitrogen called Options for Ammonia Mitigation is a consensus compilation of many stakeholders (including farmers groups and European Fertilizer Association) across the UNECE and deals with conserving N with a focus on ammonia but taking the whole farm into account. The measures range from whole farm budgets and animal feeding to specific fertilizer and manure application technologies- all intended to improve management of reactive nitrogen. The TFRN believes that this document and the associateFramework Code on Ammonia Emissionscan inform the FAO in developing the CoCoFe.