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One of the less obvious consequences of the Iran conflict could be a world shortage of fertiliser, with serious knock-on effects on planting schedules, crop yields and, eventually, food prices. For those who don’t spend much time around farms, it may come as a shock to discover that fertiliser, its price and availability, can have such a huge impact on the price of groceries around the world.
As Nima Shokri and Salome Shokri-Kuehni explain, with the strait of Hormuz effectively closed to shipping, the world’s fertiliser stocks will be diminishing fast. The essential elements to make fertiliser and to keep the world supplied with food pass daily through this vital shipping channel. And now they are stopped. While the world may be worrying about oil and gas prices, a fertiliser shock should definitely not be ignored.
George Eliot, one opf Britain’s literary greats, had to take a man’s name just to get published. In the run up to International Women’s Day this weekend, Roberta Garrett from the University of East London has tracked 200 years of women’s writing and the challenges female authors have had to meet and overcome.
History can throw out curve balls. It felt counterintuitive to find out that when millions died during the Black Death biodiversity fell. Only when the human population started to rise again, so did the number of plant species. Here’s why.
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