World fertilizer use

Potash demand and supply

Crop by crop

One of the most common ways of making comparisons of fertilizer use is to divide total consumption of fertilizer in a country or region by the hectares of arable land, or by the hectares of arable land and land in permanent crops. This may affect clear comparison between countries that have large areas of permanent crops such as oil palm, rubber, citrus, coffee, tea, etc. with those that do not. Statistics for countries that produce a large percentage of crops that are fertilized heavily, such as vegetables or sugarcane, do not indicate how the remaining crops are fertilized. This limitation was discussed in a paper presented at a working group held during the 66th annual conference of IFA by Gene Harris, of the International Fertilizer Development Center at Muscle Shoals, USA.

Although data on fertilizer use by crop has been collected and published in the USA for more than 30 years, such information has not been available on a worldwide basis until fairly recently. Since 1992, IFA, FAO and IFDC have collaborated in a number of surveys in order to gather the best available data and, over the past five years, fertilizer application rates, analysed by crop, have been collected for 92 countries. "Fertilizer use by crop" presents this data. No. 3 of "Fertilizer use by crop" was issued in 1996. The obvious difficulties in obtaining reliable information mean that the data should be used to reflect the general magnitude of usage by crop rather than an exact measurement. Nevertheless, the figures are interesting as the following analysis of those crops with the highest fertilizer application rates reveal.

The figures in brackets show the total consumption of the different crops. It also indicates that these 10 crops consume about 52% of the global NPK.

These figures were first presented by Kim Soh of IFA, in a paper on "Fertilizer use by crop, a global assessment", presented at the Agro-Economics Committee Meeting in Beijing in 1997.