AS the global food crisis escalates, Caribbean leaders are exploring opportunities to produce more organic fertilisers.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicated recently that fertiliser prices over the past twelve months reflect record high costs of inputs such as natural gas. Most of the region’s fertilisers are imported from the United States or Ukraine.

As a result, the FAO has indicated there’s an urgent need to find a diplomatic solution to evacuate the grains and fertilisers currently blocked in Ukraine.

Caribbean leaders have so far started to explore internal substitutes, with the president of Suriname, Chandrikapersad “Chan” Santokhi, persuading Caricom to fast-track production of the abundant natural gas reserves from Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad to fulfil regional demand.

He said “If we will agree to design, as quickly as possible, a common strategy to speed up the exploitation of the gas, then as a region you can support the entire world, and particularly the Caribbean, region with fertilisers.”

In the meantime, Jamaica’s Agriculture Minister Pearnel Charles Jr has announced a sum of $50 million to be put towards strengthening the collaboration between local producers of organic fertilisers and the ministry.

He said using local materials has proven to promote higher yields of agricultural crops and healthier soil structure.

According to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade, Jamaica alone imported about US$9.16 million of fertilisers during 2020.

At the same time, other countries in the region have ramped up composting initiatives and training to encourage farmers to use local materials and farm waste to compost and reduce the reliance on chemical fertilisers.

The Caricom leaders believe that relinquishing the 100 per cent dependency on synthetic fertilisers and applications of pesticides, insecticides and [other] chemicals is crucial as prices continue to climb higher.

Meanwhile, researchers have found that pelagic sargassum can be used for energy and fertiliser production in the Caribbean.

Sargassum is a form of seaweed which has popped up more on Caribbean beaches, devastating the regional tourism product as the seaweed sometimes carries a foul odour when drying. But sargassum is widely regarded as a biofertiliser in agriculture.

In addition to that and to mitigate the current crisis, the FAO is recommending a series of short-term measures to address the shortage and high price of fertilisers. These include: prioritising fertiliser use for agricultural purposes and improving the efficiency of their use; keeping international trade of these inputs open; monitoring stocks, import volumes, and prices; and sharing this information through transparent platforms.

In the same vein, the FAO has stressed that development financing should provide clients with viable alternatives to inward-looking policies such as export bans or blanket subsidies of fertiliser imports.

According to the World Bank, fertiliser prices have risen nearly 30 per cent since the start of 2022, following last year’s 80 per cent surge.

With that said, the World Bank expects fertiliser prices to remain at historically high levels for as long as natural gas and coal prices remain elevated.