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agroecology
Could High Fertilizer Prices Change the Face of Farming?
The development of agroecological and regenerative approaches would see a food system that is not only less vulnerable to the supply chain shocks being felt today, but would be better for the environment, human health, and animals.
May 17, 2026
The global disruptions caused by the war in Iran have brought renewed focus to the vulnerability of global fossil fuel supply chains. But what has received less attention is how the war also highlights the vulnerability of industrial agriculture supply chains reliant on massive amounts of chemical fertilizers and other inputs. Like oil and gas, these frequently travel long distances through turbulent waters.
A big advantage of renewable energy technologies like solar is that sunlight doesn’t have to pass through the Straits of Hormuz. The same can be said for many of the inputs required for agroecological and regenerative farming systems. The development of these approaches would see a food system that is not only less vulnerable to the supply chain shocks being felt today, but would be better for the environment, human health, and animals. It would be healthier, kinder, and more resilient.
A global economic recession and possible food shortages are looming as the war in Iran grinds on. While the devastating impact of the current conflict on people, their families, and communities must be foremost in our minds, the shock waves from the crisis are having system-wide impacts on energy supplies, cost of living, and food prices. As the seasons turn and farmers prepare to plant their crops, they are facing a new pressure: a sudden and critical rise in fertilizer and fuel costs.
As the price of petrol and diesel have skyrocketed since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, so too have fertilizer costs due to shortages of urea and ammonia. A third of the world's key fertilizer chemicals pass through the Strait, and prices have risen steeply since the outbreak of war, with predictions that prices for nitrogen-based fertilizers like urea could roughly double if the war drags on. Alongside a rise in red diesel prices, agricultural profit margins are highly volatile.
The current war is heinous, but inadvertently it has created an inflexion point, a moment to rethink global distribution of goods, and our broken food system.
Farmers taking the financial hit will likely pass on the costs to the consumer, but this isn’t sustainable and undermines the financial, social, and environmental health of the global food system. What if we flip it? Could the Middle East War not only accelerate a shift to renewable energy but also reduce our dependency on fertilizer-hungry crops? Legumes such as beans and peas, which fix nitrogen in soils, root vegetables, soybeans, and hardy grains such as rye could be viable alternatives.
Since the Second World War, a burgeoning (and hugely profitable for a few) chemical industry has created food systems dependent on inputs such as fossil fuel-based fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. While delivering greater crop surplus, industrial farming has brought new problems: algal blooms, less wildlife and pollinators, monocultures, local air pollution, global climate change, and the loss of small-scale farming and farmers.
We’ve reached a tipping point; we overproduce food, a third of which is wasted, and too many people are eating too much of the wrong types of food. Noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes are becoming a much bigger health burden than infectious diseases. Meanwhile, entrenched inequalities mean that, despite a global food surplus, millions of people go hungry every day, and 2.6 billion people can’t afford a healthy diet. An insatiable demand for meat now means that there are over 76 billion farmed chicken, pigs, and cattle in production around the planet, driving a largely invisible burden of animal suffering.
The current war is heinous, but inadvertently it has created an inflexion point, a moment to rethink global distribution of goods, and our broken food system. Growing crops that don’t need so many fossil fuel-derived chemicals but still provide enough food to feed our populations, and sustainable farming for current and future generations, is where we should be heading. We need to transition away from industrial agriculture, to food systems built on fairness—to people, animals, and the planet—not one geared toward feeding animals to feed ourselves. It’s a stark reality that over one-third of land used to grow arable crops is used to grow crops for animal feed.
Animal farming industry groups have been calling for public money to weather supply shocks, which begs the question of how resilient are the industrial systems we currently rely on. The US government provided $1 billion in response to avian flu, for example, while the European Union directed €46.7 million to Italian farmers, plus another €15 million for weather and animal-disease-related impacts in parts of Europe, and Canada extended livestock tax relief linked to bovine TB and extreme weather. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is also calling for urgent action in the form of government funds to protect the countries heavily exposed to import disruptions.
It’s clear that the current industrial animal farming model is not resilient. It depends heavily on unstable supply chains exposed to geopolitical shocks, climate change, extreme weather events, and disease outbreaks, and is a deeply inefficient use of plant resources to feed the world. Yet public money keeps being used to stabilize food systems that are structurally fragile, rather than directed toward sustainable and humane agriculture.
The current crisis in the Middle East has once again spotlighted our dependence on fossil fuels for energy and for food production. The growing success of renewable energy technologies—wind, solar, electric vehicles, and heat pumps—provides a roadmap to achieving energy independence at local and national levels. This has been achieved through several decades of policy and fiscal support, such as feed-in tariffs, technological advances, and growing public support.
Changing how we produce food could advance rapidly on the coat tails of our energy revolution. Calls for a just transition in farming and food production are growing from independent, small-scale farmers to development organizations, from Indigenous people’s groups to animal welfare charities. This transition would pivot away from destructive, insecure industrial agriculture toward more equitable, humane, and sustainable forms of agriculture, such as agroecology.
Rethinking food is not a nice to have, it’s essential if we are to strengthen the resilience of farmers, consumers, and nations, reducing exposure to geopolitical tensions, supply-chain disruptions, and future global shocks.
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Our Global Food System Is on the Brink of Collapse
The impact on fuel prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is the canary in the agrifood coal mine.
Apr 17, 2026
What does Big Ag have to do with the Strait of Hormuz? A lot, actually, when you consider that almost every so-called efficiency that industrial agriculture relies on to operate flows through this waterway. And now it is closed, threatening global food security.
And what is the primary source of the problem? Our reliance on fossil fuels.
What do fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics have in common?
First of all, each is a leg of the stool that makes up the rickety foundation of our global agrifood system.
Plastics are involved in every stage of our food and farming systems from soil to spoon: plastic polymers are used in some mulches, agrichemical containers are generally made of plastics, harvest crates and produce packages are often plastic, most processed foods are packaged in plastic or plastic-lined containers, and single-use plastics are still widely used in plates, bowls, cups, straws, napkins, and utensils.
In the 1960s, the world used between 60 and 70 million tonnes of fertilizer (synthetic nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, plus organic nitrogen) per year. But that usage has steadily risen ever since: in 2023 we used nearly 183 million tonnes of fertilizer. This rise can be attributed in part to the rising needs of a growing global population, but it is more indicative of our over-reliance on fertilizers as a way to combat the increasing effects of climate change. This season, farmers are already reporting untenable increases in fertilizer prices.
Big Ag has and will continue to rely on Big Oil to make Big Money as long as they can, but the United States’ and Israel’s unconstitutional war on Iran starkly illustrates just how fragile this house of cards is.
Pesticides are the other side of the agrichemical input coin. Fertilizers and pesticides go hand-in-hand, when it comes to global agrifood systems. The foundation of industrialized farming is monocropping (growing a single crop over and over on the same piece of land). The problem with monocropping is that it is extremely input intensive because monocropped land is more vulnerable to pest and disease pressure. And over time, this vulnerability increases, requiring more and more pesticides as tolerance builds. This creates a vicious cycle called the Pesticide Treadmill that is hard for farmers to escape without support.
But, critically, synthetic plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides are all derivatives of fossil fuels, mass quantities of which must be funneled through one waterway before becoming various inputs and components of our centralized, industrialized agrifood system. Rather than curbing our use of climate-harming fossil fuel-derived plastics, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, our agrifood systems use more and more each year, exacerbating the problem and further locking us into a fragile food system.
A Strait Chokepoint
According to the Congressional Research Service, over a quarter of the world’s supply of oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz, impacting farmers’ ability to get seeds in the ground and food to tables. Additionally, 20% of natural gas transits the Strait, which is a component of many agrichemical inputs. But, byproducts of oil and gas production also pass through the Strait, including helium which is used in semiconductor manufacturing (semiconductors like silicon are necessary for all modern technology), and urea, which is one of the most commonly used synthetic fertilizers. Over a third of the world’s urea must pass through the Strait.
In short, global agrifood systems rely intrinsically on fossil fuels and their byproducts to function, and when supply lines are disrupted, even briefly, the domino effects could be catastrophic. This article is not meant to be a metaphor, but an urgent warning and a window to our way out.
The most important—and maddening—thing to know is that our agrifood systems need not rely so heavily on fossil fuels and their byproducts to feed the world’s people.
Big Ag has and will continue to rely on Big Oil to make Big Money as long as they can, but the United States’ and Israel’s unconstitutional war on Iran starkly illustrates just how fragile this house of cards is. As countries around the world issue energy conservation mandates and brace for worsening inflation and supply chain instability, we should consider how agroecological farming practices could not only make our agrifood systems safer by reducing exposures of harmful pesticides and curb climate change, but also make the systems that feed us more resilient by decentralizing them, improving resilience to climate change-induced drought, floods, and pest pressures, and extricating them out from under the thumb of fossil fuel corporations.
Corporate greed has optimized humanity to the brink of mass starvation. But the principles of agroecology center food sovereignty (the opposite of corporate control), labor justice, and land stewardship.
Food systems grounded in agroecology are ones in which:
- All people have access to healthy, safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food.
- Farmers and agricultural workers work with the land to protect, restore, and sustain natural resources and ecosystems.
- Agriculture utilizes ecological management practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improving adaptation and resilience to climate change.
- Synthetic chemical inputs are reduced or eliminated whenever possible.
- The production, sharing, commerce, and consumption of food is built on an economy which prioritizes thriving communities, resilient local markets, and worker rights.
- Diverse cultures, identities, and knowledge systems are embraced along with equitable forms of social organization.
- Power in food and farming systems is redistributed; shifting away from transnational corporations so that the rights of food producers, farm workers, and agricultural communities are centered.
These principles are not far fetched; they’re economically viable solutions that are being practiced successfully around the world already. Systemic shifts toward global agrifood systems that prioritize the principles of agroecology could help us to solve the triple planetary crises of pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change.
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How Public Finance for Agriculture Can Improve Food Security, Health, and Climate
By supporting agroecology, multilateral development banks can stop fueling harm and start financing a just and sustainable food systems transition.
Dec 03, 2025
Agriculture is essential to human life. How we feed ourselves matters for nutrition, health, climate, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Nearly 928 million people are employed in farming globally, and food systems are responsible for one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions and most new deforestation.
Multilateral development banks (MDBs), like the World Bank Group (WBG), play a critical role. The WBG has committed to double its agricultural financing to $9 billion a year by 2030. In October it launched AgriConnect, an initiative seeking to transform small-scale farming into an engine of sustainable growth, jobs, and food security.
However, while some MDB investments support equitable and sustainable transformation, too many still fuel environmental destruction and inequity. The World Bank’s private sector arm, IFC, recently invested $47 million in a multi-story pig factory farm in China, for example.
A new report from the University of Vermont Institute for Agroecology analyses MDB agricultural investments and sets out a road map for how banks can support, rather than hinder, sustainable farming. The research finds that the World Bank and other public-sector lenders can drive systemic change by supporting governments with policy reforms, rural extension services, and enabling environments. For example, a $70 million Inter-American Development Bank project in Paraíba, Brazil is promoting inclusive, low-carbon agriculture, and strengthening family farmers and traditional communities through technical assistance and climate-resilient infrastructure.
MDBs’ private sector operations must reform their lending criteria and stop financing destructive projects.
MDBs are better placed than other financial institutions to take long-term, lower-return investments aligned with climate and food security goals. Agroecological farming, a holistic, community-based approach to food systems that applies ecological and social food sovereignty concepts, along with long-term productivity, provides a channel for public sector arms of MDBs to support needed agricultural transformation. MDBs and other public banks therefore, should seek to become the enablers of agroecology. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) are already leading efforts in this direction.
MDB Private Sector Operations: Profit-Driven Harms
In contrast to the IFAD and AFD models, the University of Vermont's Institute for Agroecology’s report found that the majority of private-focused MDBs prioritize “bankable” projects—typically large-scale, industrial, profit-driven agribusiness. This model steers money toward factory farms that use human-edible food as feed, pollute nearby communities, raise the risks of zoonotic disease and antimicrobial resistance, and engage in animal cruelty. In 2023, a report by Stop Financing Factory Farming found that public finance institutions invested US$2.27 billion in factory farming, 68% of the total investment in animal agriculture projects that year.
As evidenced by multiple complaints from impacted communities, these investments undermine poverty reduction, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Paris Agreement climate goals. MDBs’ private sector operations must reform their lending criteria and stop financing destructive projects.
The opportunity: Public Sector Banks Can Pave the Way for Private-Sector Transformation
Rich country governments currently subsidize agriculture, mostly industrial, at a level of $842 billion per year. According to the IMF, only a quarter is dedicated to support for public goods in the sector. Shifting this support to incentivize investments in agroecology is crucial to sustain the agricultural transformation that public banks themselves have called for.
Public banks have the opportunity to join a growing number of organisations already advancing an ecological approach to meet the SDGs and wider social, cultural, and economic, and environmental objectives. To do so, they must shift from treating agroecology as merely a niche solution and instead invest in it as a priority means for achieving food systems transformation.
Agroecology puts an end to costly and harmful practices, replacing animal cruelty with humane, safe, and fair standards.
By taking this approach, public banks can better support just transitions in food systems, something that is already beginning to take shape. Earlier this year, for example, the World Bank backed an $800 million loan to the Colombian government to advance a greener and more resilient economic transformation.
The private-sector arms of MDBs, such as IFC and IDB Invest, also have a role to play in aligning with the transition. Most importantly, they can support governments with policy advice and financing criteria that break from entrenched models and exclude industrial animal agriculture from eligibility for finance.
While MDBs have taken steps to make agricultural production and rural incomes less vulnerable to climate change, they have yet to commit to agroecological farming as the most effective pathway. In contrast, IFAD is already demonstrating what this can look like, driving agroecological transitions through private-sector incentives in Ethiopia, Peru, and Vietnam. Similarly, AFD is applying agroecology to support family farming in Ethiopia, Haiti, Madagascar, Malawi, and Sierra Leone.
Agroecology as the Future of Sustainable Farming—and Public Agricultural Finance?
If MDBs are looking to advance the SDGs and solve the polycrisis (climate, biodiversity, pandemic risk, and food security), one of the most effective ways in which this can be done is for the public sector to mobilize policy support and significant capital investment into agroecology. Meanwhile, MDB private sector arms can enable this transition by providing policy advice and finance for interventions that break from entrenched models.
Agroecology puts an end to costly and harmful practices, replacing animal cruelty with humane, safe, and fair standards. But it's not just about farming practices. It also helps transform food systems, building resilient, reparative, low-emission economies and improves livelihoods in line with the 2030 SDGs.
By supporting agroecology, MDBs can stop fueling harm and start financing a just and sustainable food systems transition. If they are serious about the SDGs, food security, and climate goals, the road map is clear—MDBs’ public sector operations must enable, their private sector operations must reform, and both must support a transition away from industrial agriculture toward a more just and sustainable food system.
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