Abstract
Achieving food security will require closing yield gaps in many regions, including Pakistan. Although fertilizer subsidies have facilitated increased nitrogen (N) application rates, many staple cro ...
Highlights
Meeting the United Nations Second Sustainable Development Goal to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”1 will require increasing crop yields in many regions
We found that synthetic fertilizer use combined with low bio-supply recycling resulted in a substantial gap between nutrient supply and P and K crop needs, which would cost 3 billion USD to fill with synthetic fertilizers
Our results are in line with other studies showing that part of Pakistan’s yield gap is related to nutrient availability. 2010 synthetic N fertilizer purchases alone meet all N crop needs, which implies that bio-supply recycling would constitute overfertilizing crops for N in some areas
Summary
Meeting the United Nations Second Sustainable Development Goal to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture” will require increasing crop yields in many regions. Eleven percent of people currently suffer from undernourishment, and this figure could substantially increase given that population growth is mostly happening in regions where hunger is already prevalent (FAO, 2015). Closing global yield gaps through better nutrient and water management would go a long way to meet food security goals (Mueller et al, 2013), within a multi-pronged approach (e.g., reducing waste, changing diets, expanding agriculture; Godfray et al, 2010). Any approach to increase food security, including increasing yields, will have to account for constrained resource availability and increased ecosystem sensitivity to change, notably those associated with essential nutrients (Dawson and Hilton, 2011; Foley et al, 2011)
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