The surprisingly small but increasing role of international agricultural trade on the European Union’s dependence on mineral phosphorus fertiliser
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phosphorus (P) is subject to global management challenges due to its importance to both food security and water quality. The European Union (EU) has promoted policies to limit fertiliser over-application and protect water quality for more than 20 years, helping to reduce European P use. Over this time period, the EU has, however, become more reliant on imported agricultural products. These imported products require fertiliser to be used in distant countries to grow crops that will ultimately feed European people and livestock. As such, these imports represent a displacement of European P demand, possibly allowing Europe to decrease its apparent P footprint by moving P use to locations outside the EU. We investigated the effect of EU imports on the European P fertiliser footprint to better understand whether the EU's decrease in fertiliser use over time resulted from P demand being 'outsourced' to other countries or whether it truly represented a decline in P demand. To do this, we quantified the 'virtual P flow' defined as the amount of mineral P fertiliser applied to agricultural soils in non-EU countries to support agricultural product imports to the EU. We found that the EU imported a virtual P flow of 0.55 Tg P/yr in 1995 that, surprisingly, decreased to 0.50 Tg P/yr in 2009. These results were contrary to our hypothesis that trade increases would be used to help the EU reduce its domestic P fertiliser use by outsourcing its P footprint abroad. Still, the contribution of virtual P flows to the total P footprint of the EU has increased by 40% from 1995 to 2009 due to a dramatic decrease in domestic P fertiliser use in Europe: in 1995, virtual P was equivalent to 32% of the P used as fertiliser domestically to support domestic consumption but jumped to 53% in 2009. Soybean and palm tree products from South America and South East Asia contributed most to the virtual P flow. These results demonstrate that, although policies in the EU have successfully decreased the domestic dependence on mineral P fertiliser, in order to continue to limit global potential mineral P supply depletion and consequences of P losses to waterways the EU may have to think about its trading partners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".