Banner and sign behind it reads: ‘Welkom bij Yara Sluiksil STOP AGRIBUSINESS: DISMANTLE, DECOLONISE, DEGROW. FOOD FOR PEOPLE NOT FOR PROFIT’
Last week, a coalition of international activists, including XR Zeeland, XR Zorgprofessionals (healthcare workers) and XR Landbouw (agriculture) blocked all access points to Yara’s chemical fertiliser production plant in Sluiskil. As the largest gas consumer in Europe, and one of the 10 largest companies in the Netherlands who receive subsidies from the Dutch government for their fossil fuel use, Yara is one of the biggest players in the toxic game of industrial agriculture.
ASEED has been campaigning against Yara for quite some time now, exposing the harmful impacts of toxic synthetic fertilisers, their exploitative neocolonial business practices, and their ongoing efforts to trap farmers in debt. We fully support these activists in their fight to hold Yara accountable for their actions, and stand behind their demands!
Those demands are as follows:
1.To the Dutch government: Stop Fossil Subsidies to the fertiliser industry now!
We demand that the Dutch government stops funding Yara’s fossil fuel use through subsidies, enabling Yara’s exploitative business practices and record profits.
Yara’s synthetic fertilisers are made from polluting fossil gas, known to be harmful to the planet and all living beings. Recent reports from Milieudefensie and Follow the Money found that Yara Netherlands, the biggest gas consumer in the Netherlands and Europe, received €1.2 billion in fossil subsidies between 2018 and 2022. Why are public funds being used to reward big polluting companies who are already making inconceivable profits? Further, Yara has €650 Million of unpaid taxes to the Dutch state, but still regularly receives tax breaks. Meanwhile Yara transfers billions to its wealthy shareholders. Not only is Yara a major polluter and contributor to the current climate crisis, they get financed and rewarded by the Dutch government to do so!
2. To the Dutch government: No More Corporate Exploitation – dignity, justice, and autonomy for farmers now!
We demand that the Dutch government reallocates tax breaks, subsidies, and Yara’s unjust profits to support farmers to transition away from fossil fertilisers and towards agroecology.
Yara’s business model is to trap farmers in dependency, debt, and despair. The use of their chemical fertilisers, while in the short term increases growth, depletes the soil and kills useful organisms, making sure that without using more and more of their chemicals, no crops will grow. The high financial costs of their synthetic fossil products, combined with soil depletion, ensure that farmers become dependent on Yara. This becomes most obvious in the Global South, where they give away fertilisers worth millions of dollars, knowing that the farmers will have to buy more in the future. In this way, they reproduce neocolonial structures of dependency and power.
During the 2020-2022 food prices inflation, while people had to choose between heating or eating, farmers struggled to buy fertilisers for their production. Somehow, in this period, Yara more than doubled its profits! Instead of supporting corporate control and exploitation, the Dutch government must financially support farmers to transition towards more resilient and agroecological farming models that are better for climate, for nature, for all of us. If money is lacking, we know where to find it: instead of funding Yara’s superprofits through subsidies, the money should be used to finance the agroecological transition, to enable research and practise.
3. To Yara: We don’t need your toxic products
We demand that Yara withdraw as a driving factor in industrial agriculture worldwide by phasing out their production and immediately stopping the marketing of synthetic fertilisers.
The use of synthetic fertilisers has a devastating impact on microbial life, nutrients, and overall soil quality. Once used on soil, the soil becomes depleted and relies on more synthetic inputs to continue producing food, making the soil itself dependant on Yara’s toxic chemicals. At the same time the runoff of their fertilisers pollutes ecosystems and contributes to the Nitrogen crisis. As if this was not enough, the production is even more dirty than the products use. Billions of cubic metres of fossil gas are used every year for Yara’s production. During production and application vast amounts of greenhouse gases are emitted. In 2022 just the production caused 2,7 Million tonnes of CO2. Decarbonising the production chain, using carbon capture and storage (CCS) or reducing fertiliser amounts with “precision farming” are false solutions! We have to move away from synthetic fertilisers. Our food must be free, independent from corporations, their profit interests and chemicals. Agroecological farms feed their communities without any synthetic fertiliser and other farms can phase out their use too. The only entity that is forever dependent on synthetic fertilisers is Yara. They will do whatever it takes to keep making profits.
4. To Yara: Stop Greenwashing – Tell the Truth!
We demand that Yara tells the truth about who really feeds the world, what their products do and what they are really made of!
Yara claims to ‘feed the world responsibly’, but do they? In reality, they fuel food insecurity and lock in industrial agriculture as the main way of food production. With their fertilisers, Yara makes our food systems and farmers depend on unpredictable resources like fossil gas, and on geopolitically unstable countries like Russia. Ironically, in 2022-2023, Yara made record profits on the back of food insecurity. Most of the world’s population is fed by small-scale and subsistence farmers not by mega corporations like Yara.
More than that, Yara’s new favourite advertisement campaigns on ‘clean’ or ‘green’ fertilisers obscure the harsh truth – that ammonia simply cannot be produced in just and sustainable ways. Today, their fertilisers are almost exclusively produced from gas. The proportion of so-called ‘clean’ ammonia to Yara’s overall production is overstated and miniscule, hidden behind millions of euros every year in lobbying work in the EU and significant greenwashing efforts. Yara advertises projects of green hydrogen or carbon capture and storage, pretending this will get rid of all negative impacts. The opposite is the truth. These do nothing but shift the costs of production to other regions of the world, destructs the environment in new ways and exploits communities in the Global South.
The activists at Yara Sluiskil also held a speech to expose Yara’s filthy business and to present these four demands. You can download the speech below (English and Dutch):
This action at Yara Sluiskil is not even the first action against agribusiness and corporate-controlled industrial agriculture this month! Two weeks before this action, 1400 Code Rood/Rouge activists stopped production at Cargill in Gent for 24 hours, and closed decoy target ADM Antwerp.
Code Rood/Rouge also recognises the crucial contributions of farmers to sustainable and just food systems, something we at ASEED strongly believe in: “Farming has always been more than food production. Farmers have been caring for this complex relationship between land, biodiversity, climate, and human communities for ages. They have passed on this knowledge from generation to generation. And yet, over the past 70 years, intoxicated by the promise of industrialization and by the synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, GMOs, and fossil-dependent technology that made it all possible, governments and corporations have systematically sought to erase farmers from the picture.”
From each end of the industrial food chain, from harmful, fossil fuel based-synthetic inputs on the ground, to profit-grabbing food processing and production, Yara, Cargill and everyone in between profits from the exploitation of soil, farmers and consumers. We demand change!
Main Sources:
CIEL (2022): Fossils, Fertilizers, and False Solutions: How Laundering Fossil Fuels in Agrochemicals Puts the Climate and the Planet at Risk. https://www.ciel.org/reports/fossil-fertilizers/
Follow the money (2024): Lots of subsidies, little in tax: Fertiliser giant Yara faces huge bill in the Netherlandshttps://www.ftm.eu/articles/yara-owes-1-billion-dollars-in-taxes?share=vl8B%2Fy%2F6hPdJNPdl1tBxQ6dEm2YhGOaOkPbdkdvtdJKfkFUfIEpRSaNIO3mNJPo%3D
SOMO, Oil Change International en Milieudefensie (2023): Current Study: big polluters get 37.5 billion in fossil subsidies. https://milieudefensie.nl/actueel/rechtvaardig-afbouwen-van-fossiele-subsidies.pdf
Les Amis de la terre (2023): Fossil fuels on our plates. https://www.amisdelaterre.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/fossil-fuels-on-our-plates-english-web-vdef.pdf
Corporate Europe Observatory (2023): Big Toxics and their lobby fire power. https://corporateeurope.org/en/big-toxics-firepower
Yara Precision Farming https://www.yara.nl/globalassets/country-websites/campaign-assets/nbs-campaign/sub-pages/profit-page/crop-performance/pure-nutrient-fact-3-precision-farming.pdf
Code Rood/Rouge https://code-rouge.be/en/about-us/cr4-narrative/
