Industrial agriculture continues to wreak havoc on soil, air, water, and communities around the world. This ever-growing industry already contributes to one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. It funnels the power to control the production and distribution of food into a few corporate hands, especially affecting vulnerable populations in the Global South. ASEED has identified synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, or fossil fertilizers, as a crucial point of attack to shift away from the current, destructive, and fossil-fuel intensive food system. Fossil fertilizers are a key component of the industrial agricultural model that:
- contributes to 20% of emissions in this sector,
- is entirely dependent on fossil gas for production,
- depletes the soil,
- hinders carbon sequestration,
- harms local biodiversity,
- traps farmers into dependence on continuous chemical input.
European fossil fertilizer companies are the largest corporate buyers of gas in Europe, and as such hold immense power over how our energy system will develop over the next decades. This industry spends a staggering amount of money on corporate lobbying (Norwegian Yara International spent €11.8bn from 2011 – 2019), and they are truly the “The Exxons of agriculture”—yet are largely unknown and go under the radar of social movements and civil society. While the multi-crises of increasing food and energy prices continue to spread economic uncertainty for marginalized groups, fossil fertilizer companies are more than doubling their profit margins. Hand in hand, the fertilizer and gas industry are lobbying governments to respond to these crises by deepening Europe’s addiction to imported fossil fuels and the geopolitical volatility they bring. 3-5 percent of the entire production of European fossil gas is used to produce fossil fertilizers.
We at ASEED believe this is the perfect moment to increasingly focus our campaign on fostering collective action and gathering power from below to instigate meaningful change. We see confronting the use and expansion of fossil fertilizers as a crucial arena to break the power of the industrial agricultural sector, take away its social license, shake investor confidence, and open the space for more decentralized and democratic food systems.
Fortunately, the real solutions are already all around us! Food sovereignty, agroecology, and peasant agriculture are all approaches that feed the planet and cool the earth. While large-scale agricultural production uses 70% of the global agricultural resources to produce only 30% of the total food supply, peasant-based food systems provide 70% of our food while using only 30% of agricultural resources. Agroecological farms that produce local and seasonal food:
- promote biodiversity and soil health,
- use fewer water resources,
- are resilient towards the shocks of a changing climate,
- offer the possibility to capture carbon in the living soil,
- and provide dignified compensation to farmers.