In the early 1970s when I first started teaching the 16-19 age range I worked at a comprehensive school in Whitby in Northern England and lived in a small fishing village called Staithes in Yorkshire. Staithes is where the British explorer Captain Cook worked as an apprentice to a grocer and where he is thought to have gained his love of the sea.  Although a few of the people living in the village still earned their livelihood by fishing, most worked in the newly opened potash mine at Boulby  a few miles north along the cliff top.

Potash used to refer to potassium carbonate, K₂CO₃, but now it refers to any minerals containing potassium and the Boulby potash mine produces mainly potassium chloride. The potassium was deposited millions of years ago by inland seas and the mine is very deep (1,200 – 1,500 m). In fact so deep that scientists from the Institute of Underground Sciences are using it to carry out research into ‘dark matter’ (the ‘missing’ mass of the universe). The main use of the potash obtained from the mine is as fertiliser.

Because of this background I was interested to read recently that BHP Bilton, one of the largest mining companies in the world has launched a US$40bn hostile bid to take over the Potash Corp of Canada. This would give them control of much of the world’s output of potash. The question is why? What will they gain from it?

World food prices have been increasing recently and it has been calculated that global food production will have to rise by 70% by the year 2050 to meet demand. Investing in commodities like wheat (it takes 8 kg of grain to produce just one kilogram of beef) is fickle due to drought or floods some years with times of plenty in other years. What BHP Bilton have realised is that there will be an inexorable increasing demand for fertilisers in the coming years. Farmers will not be able to increase the amount of arable land to meet the demand so they will need to resort to technology and use substantially more amounts of fertiliser to increase their yields. The company that controls the potash will be the company that makes the money.

Apart from the fact that there will be increasing demands for more genetically modified (GM) food to meet the demand (F.5.2) much of the above does not really impinge on the current IB programme. In the old IB Applied Chemistry course there was an option on ‘Agricultural Chemistry’ – maybe there is a need to bring this back. Food production includes pesticides, insecticides, plant growth regulators (synthetic plant hormones) etc. as well as fertilisers and in fact may well contain more solid chemistry in it than the current Option F on food. Something to think about?