It is well-known that the standard Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten construction cannot be used for on-shell amplitudes in effective field theories due to bad behavior for large shifts. We show how to solve this problem in the case of the SU(N) nonlinear sigma model, i.e., nonrenormalizable model with an infinite number of interaction vertices, using scaling properties of the semi-on-shell currents, and we present new on-shell recursion relations for all on-shell tree-level amplitudes in this theory.