China's fertilizer consumption peaked a decade ago

Since the 1960s, China’s population has more than doubled. Despite having more than twice as many mouths to feed, the amount of food it produces per person has increased dramatically.

Better seeds, irrigation, pest management, and improved farming techniques have all helped increase the country’s agricultural productivity.

But the addition of nutrients through fertilizers has also made a huge difference. The chart shows the rapid uptake of fertilizers in China from the 1960s through the early 2000s.

While fertilizers can play a crucial role in feeding more people and using less land, they also have negative environmental impacts.

Excess nutrients run off into rivers and pollute coastlines, and fertilizers can emit nitrogen oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. Using fertilizers more efficiently helps grow food while cutting pollution.

China has made important progress on this in the last decade. As you can see in the chart, its fertilizer use peaked in 2014 and has fallen since then. At the same time, the country’s agricultural production has continued to increase.

In 2015, China launched its “Zero-Growth Action Plan for Fertilizer”, and its government policies have played an essential role in this turnaround.

Subsidies previously made fertilizers very cheap in China, which encouraged farmers to overuse them. Cutting these subsidies while offering incentives for agricultural machinery, precision technologies, farmer education, and larger farms (which tend to use less fertilizer per hectare) has made China’s farming sector much more efficient.