Fertilizer shortages may worsen in 2023.Ottawa—The soaring cost of fertilizers will make food much more expensive in 2023 and leave millions facing the threat of famine, warns ZME Science, an online news service.It cited a study in Nature Food by Peter Alexander of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences that says the ongoing war in Ukraine threatens the end of cheap food around the world.“While almost everyone will feel the effects of that on their weekly shop, it's the poorest people in society, who may already struggle to afford enough healthy food, who will be hit hardest,” the study said. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has ramped up food insecurity through a surge in food prices and it could cause a devastating rise in fertilizer prices.“Fertilizer is at the core of the agricultural revolution we've been experiencing over the past decades; without affordable, cheap fertilizers, we wouldn't be able to feed vast regions of the world,” the study said. “Without fertilizer security, there is basically no food security — and the invasion threatens fertilizer security.”Russia and Ukraine are major fertilizer producers and since the invasion, the global fertilizer prices have surged. “But we may only be seeing the start of the problem.” The spillover from the war “will cascade into the future, and will send ripples throughout the world, making food more expensive and scarce.”The study found that spikes in energy and fertilizer prices could cause prices to increase by a whopping 74 per cent and be 81 per cent higher than 2021 levels.“This increase would be most accentuated in Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East, which depend more on agriculture and on fertilizer whose price is surging. This price increase is so great that an extra 1 million people will be thrown into hunger, and 100 million will be undernourished because of this change.“Increases in food prices seen over the past year were not only caused by disruptions to international trade in food commodities but more fundamentally by higher costs for agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer. These increases in costs such as fertilizers lead to higher food prices both directly by adding costs to farmers and indirectly by encouraging their use to be reduced, with consequences for crop yields. The reductions in agricultural production that results from lower fertilizer input further drive up food commodity prices, the study said.The problem won't be solved anytime soon, and Alexander suspects that farmers will start using more land to compensate for the loss, which means large-scale deforestation.In fact, simulations indicate that by 2030, the global agricultural land in use could increase by an area the size of Western Europe, which would have massive effects on carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, the study said.Even for the public in higher-income countries, high food price inflation is set to continue through 2023. For those in the less-developed parts of the world, the situation will be much worse.