Western Sahara, a sparsely populated slice of desert on Africa’s northwestern coast, doesn’t get much ink as a potential crisis point in the global food system. You’ve probably never heard of the long-standing independence movement in the Morocco-controlled territory-or that the area harbors vast stores of an element critical to contemporary agriculture.

Morocco, it is thought, holds up to 85 percent (PDF) of the globe’s known phosphate rock reserve-and a lot of it lies in Western Sahara. Morocco’s royal family thus controls what Jeremy Grantham, cofounder of the prominent Boston-based global investment firm Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., called the ‘most important quasi-monopoly in economic history.’
Our P use ‘must be drastically reduced in the next 20-40 years or we will begin to starve.’

Who cares about phosphorus? For starters, every living thing on Earth-including humans-since all the crops we eat depend on it to produce healthy cells. Until the mid-20th century, farmers maintained phosphorus levels in soil by composting plant waste or spreading phosphorus-rich manure. Then new mining and refining techniques gave rise to the modern phosphorus fertilizer industry-and farmers, particularly in the rich temperate zones of Europe and North America, quickly became hooked on quick, cheap, and easy phosphorus. […]