Feeding the world is a big job and it requires something we seldom think about

over lunch. Fertilizer. It takes over 3.7 billion metric tons of food per year to feed the 8 billion people on the planet.

And growing that food requires enormous quantities of fertilizer.

It's something nobody notices when things are running smoothly, but recently, a combination

of the COVID pandemic and sanctions from the war in Ukraine have shown how dependent the world is on a few fertilizer producers.

When those producers fail to supply, problems mount quickly, especially for countries that are already

contending with hunger and food insecurity. My name is Gabriel Sierra and this is

why it matters. Today we're getting down and dirty with fertilizer.

There is no effective solution to the food crisis without reintegrating Ukraine's food production as well as the food

and fertilizer produced by Russia and Belarus into world markets despite the war. Global food insecurity has never been more urgent.

What was a wave of hunger is now a tsunami of hunger.

If I were to summarize it in one sentence, I would say without the use of

fertilizers we would not be able to produce enough food to feed the

population that we currently have in the world.

This is Laura Cross. She's the director of market intelligence at the

International Fertilizer Association, which represents the global fertilizer industry.

Most people usually don't have fertilizer in the forefront of their mind when they think about the way the world works and how different factors come together.

But actually fertilizers has a really significant impact on the food that is produced around the world and

ultimately how many people our planet can sustain.

What exactly is fertilizer?

The way that I would explain fertilizer to the everyday

person who isn't involved in agriculture market or isn't a farmer themselves is that

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