Fertiliser use considered as a recurring cost of production must be paid for by the farmers through continuous increase in crop yields. It is apparent that not all farmers will be able to pay for the soaring fertiliser prices and bear the cost of credit to purchase it.

Many farmers meet their payments by selling their land or by having the loans written off or by going to jail and the lender forcing them to go in for distress sales. The pain for small farmers is excessive.

First, the thinking of policymakers has to be modified to accept the changes that are coming through in agriculture. The traditional capital investment is considered to be water reservoirs and other agriculture related infrastructure. The maintenance of canals is a recurrent cost that the farmer pays.

Why not develop the concept of capital investment for the maintenance of nitrogen and phosphate balance in the soils. These two fertilisers – nitrogen and phosphate are in actual fact the lifelines of farming. Is there an alternate way of providing these two macro fertilisers? Can they then be maintained in the soils which allows them to be used for many years. Replenishments that are easily lost cannot be maintained in the soils. That is what makes a case for alternate policy issues.

All three macro fertilisers behave differently when it comes to replenishment and to maintain certain levels as replenishment capital. It is possible to build nitrogen capital and phosphate capital reserves in the soils. Potassium is not possible, but nitrogen in inorganic systems is also not possible to maintain in the soils, so it must be in the organic system. It is then possible for the crops to pick this reserve nitrogen and phosphate and for this to be replenished.

The return from such capital is used for many years and is like an endowment fund provided it is with good management as the ‘principal’ can remain at a high level.

Capital nitrogen consists of the active slow pools of soil organic nitrogen.

Plant available nitrogen comes from several sources: the mineralisation of soil organic nitrogen pool, nitrogen fertilisers, and the decomposition of organic inputs such as plant biomass and animal manures.

Biological nitrogen fixation becomes an input when the leaves of nitrogen fixing species that have been added to the soil begin to decompose. New adventures in these decomposition procedures are the bio-generators and the EM technology that are now becoming important.

The hard facts have never been evaluated. For instance, the recovery by plants from inorganic fertiliser nitrogen in Pakistan is 27 per cent. Organic inputs have an important advantage over inorganic fertilisers since they build nutrient capital. Much of the organic fertiliser nitrogen utilised by the crops is incorporated into active pools of soil organic matter because these organic inputs also provide the carbon needed as energy for microbial immobilisation. Rapidly available carbon is often low in nutrients–depleted soils, and microorganisms need a carbon substrate to form soil organic matter.

Inorganic fertilisers do not contain such carbon sources. The circumstances of the small farmers are important and policies must fit the requirement of these small farmers or they will be swamped by the rising prices.

No one gains in such a situation; the system will suffer and affect the food production system. There are ways of replenishment of and capturing deep nitrates that are untapped in the subsoil nitrogen through better management practices.

Similar, but more difficult, is the exercise to be done for phosphate fertiliser. The difficult is not the science but the ability to foresee and to take long-term decisions. The fear created by the ungodly executives of the MNCs and their surrogates is astonishingly myopic and is indicative of the power to fragment decision making in the agriculture sector so that there are few beneficiaries.