Nitrogen in Chinese Farming

In contrast to the United States, China has little room to reduce substantially its high dependence on nitrogen fertilizer. This dependence is overwhelmingly existential— to secure basic adequate nutrition for the conntry s more than 1.2 billion people— rather than a matter of economic choice or of a preferred diet as in the U.S. case. Origins of this recent dependence are closely connected with the most tragic period of China s modern history, and their recounting provides perhaps the most compelling illustration of the epochal difference made by the Haber-Bosch synthesis. 

This led both to a sharply higher demand for food and to enormous food waste. Given a very close fit between China s pre-1958 average per capita food supply (2,100-2,200 kcal/day) and demand (age- and sex-adjusted needs were about 2,200 kcal/day), the combination of such irrational decisions had a drastic effect on food availability by the spring of 1959 there was famine in Vt of China s provinces. Weather only exacerbated the suffering.  

Netherlands between 1963 and 1965. By 1965 synthetic fertilizers supplied more than V4 of all nitrogen. Then the more normal development was cut short again in 1966 with the launching of Mao s destructive time of ideological frenzy, political vendettas, and localized civil war that became known, most incongruously, as the Cultural Revolution. 

China s annual population growth during the second half of the twentieth century plotted as consecutive five-year averages. 

Moreover, it was obvious that even an unprecedented degree of population controls—at that time contemplated by the ruling gerontocracy and soon put into effect in the world s most drastic and personally intrusive program—would not prevent the total population from rising to at least 1 billion by the year 1980 and to 1.2 

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