Russia’s Phosagro, one of the world’s biggest fertilizer producers, has signed a cooperation agreement in the field of sustainable soil management with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), RIA news agency reports.
“Our strategy is completely consistent with the goals and objectives of the FAO in terms of ensuring global food security and eliminating hunger, and we highly value the practical results of this project,” PhosAgro Group CEO Andrey Guryev said, taking part in a ceremony to sign the agreement on World Soil Day.
“Taking into account the project’s scale and significant potential, PhosAgro will play an important role in establishing a unified global scientific and information mechanism that promotes the advancement of technologies and knowledge in the field of sustainable land use and agriculture, thereby helping farmers, as well as anyone else involved in intensive farming practices, grow crops efficiently, while not contributing to the accumulation of pollutants in the soil,” he added.
According to FAO, soil pollution, including through heavy metals such as cadmium, nickel, and arsenic, is currently affecting food security throughout the world by limiting crop yields and decreasing product quality.
A third of the soil in the world is considered to be degraded, and the area continues to expand. Experts from the FAO have called on all governments to reduce soil pollution for the sake of the planet’s future security. In doing so, they claim that, given that the world’s population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, humanity will not be able to produce enough food to feed everyone at current rates of consumption and without healthy soils.
As part of the program, Phosagro pledged to expedite a solution to the problem of global food security both by providing farmers in more than 100 countries it serves with high-quality phosphate-based fertilizers that are low in potentially hazardous impurities.
