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agroecology
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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At COP30, I’ll Speak for the Bees
The plight of Peru's native bees shines a light on the interconnecting challenges in food production and nature, deforestation, monoculture, and agrochemicals.
Nov 17, 2025
When I travel to Belém for COP30, I won’t be following the intricacies of climate negotiations or tracking the high-level plenaries. I’m going to use my time there to talk about native bees. And how paying attention to them opens up a world of interconnections between our food, climate, and biodiversity, and why agrochemicals are at the heart of their decline.
I'm a Quechua-speaking descendant of InKawasi, a community in the northern Andes of Lambayeque, Peru. I am a chemical engineer, ecopreneur, keeper of native bees, and environmental activist, and over my lifetime, I’ve seen my mountain ecosystem collapse, and with it our native bees.
Bees are far more than cute and charismatic; they are keystone species, pivotal in food production and ecology, especially as three-quarters of the world’s crops depend on pollinators like bees. When bees suffer, so do we. This sums up the importance of the Quechua saying, "Sumak Kawsay," which means "a plentiful life, in harmony with nature," and that’s why I’ve named my honey enterprise after it.
Where I live, our native bees are stingless and produce much smaller quantities of honey, which has been long used and valued by Indigenous communities for its medicinal properties.
As much as we need local, bottom-up initiatives, our governments and decision-makers must implement policies to address the negative impact of agrochemicals and their contribution to the climate crisis, loss of species and biodiversity, and adverse health effects.
This honey has been a powerful force in my own life. When I felt I had lost my path after studying engineering, an Indigenous healer fed me a spoonful of stingless bee honey at a ceremony. It was in that moment that I knew I had to work on restoring these bees and my mountain. I soon learned the fate of both is intrinsically connected.
Unlike the honeybees that came from Europe, these are especially adapted to pollinate endemic trees, plants, and crops. Without them, the extinction of our native species hangs in the balance—and farmers’ crops suffer.
But farming itself is driving their drastic decline: Forests have been cut down to make way for coffee, cassava, corn, and sugar monocultures—toppling the ancient, hollow grandfather trees in which they make their hives. Where there are fewer trees, there is less water, and my mountain has become desolate. As natural biodiversity that regulates pests disappears, farmers began to use pesticides to kill weeds and increase yields, damaging insect and plant life even more, including our native bees.
Research by the Center for Biological Diversity found that 40% of global pollinators are highly threatened due to intensive farming and pesticide use. In Latin America, 25% fewer bee species were reported in 2015 compared with 1990. This is a vicious cycle happening all over the world, especially in the Amazon, where COP30 is taking place.
Seven years since my realization, my enterprise works to protect native bees, restore their habitats, protect forests, and empower women. We’ve set up a honey social enterprise and pollination school, the "Women Guardians of the Native Bees" program, launched this year to empower 60 Quechua and peasant women through stingless beekeeping, encouraging local farmers and women to protect bees, collect their honey, and recognize the crucial role of pollinators in food production and nature restoration. The focus on bees is about much more than just the honey; it’s a gateway to a wider understanding of the natural world and the cycle of restoration, renewal, and preservation.
I run workshops with local farmers and communities to raise awareness about the dangers of pesticides and encourage learning of agroecological approaches to tackle pests instead of toxic chemicals. This is ancestral knowledge; our parents and grandparents have it, but we’ve lost it with the introduction of industrially produced agrochemicals. Instead, it’s about observing nature and re-instilling a curiosity about how beings interact—what pesticides do to habitats and ecology, and how introducing native species can have domino effects.
We teach them how to create habitats and nests for bees and how to collect their honey, treasured for its lower sugar content and medicinal properties. This bit is crucial. We buy their honey at a fair price if they commit to agroecological practices. These producers and farms now form the "La Ruta de la Miel de Abeja" (The Bee Honey Route) that we’ve built with local women who take tourists to connect with bees, nature, and communities.
The snowball effect is immense; it encourages farmers to stop using pesticides and restore the habitat for bees, generates income for women, and funds our mountain restoration. We have now planted more than 2,000 native trees and are preserving three species of stingless bees. We have a long way to go, but it is the rebirth of our mountain ecosystem.
It also proves that Sumak Kawsay—living in harmony with nature—is possible.
So when I am at COP30 in Belém, this is the message I will carry. I’ll do what I know best: use bees as a way to shine a light on the interconnecting challenges in food production and nature, deforestation, monoculture, and agrochemicals. We have Indigenous solutions available, like our pollination schools and honey cooperatives, but we need more resources to scale them up and empower farmers.
But as much as we need local, bottom-up initiatives, our governments and decision-makers must implement policies to address the negative impact of agrochemicals and their contribution to the climate crisis, loss of species and biodiversity, and adverse health effects. We need resources and support for food producers, farm workers, and communities to break the stranglehold of agrochemicals and shift to agroecology. It must be a Just Transition that provides us with the social and economic mechanisms to adapt to this change.
While I am at COP30, I will say enough is enough. We need to phase out toxic agrochemicals and restore the balance between people, food, climate, and nature.
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