More than two months into the US-Israel war on Iran, the world appears to be veering towards another global food crisis. The conflict is driving up the costs of fuel, fertilizers, plastics and transport, resulting in higher food prices for communities from Manila to Quito. Now food production is at risk, with upwards of 20 percent of global fertilizer exports unable to move through the Strait of Hormuz and shipments of natural gas and sulphur, vital to fertilizer production elsewhere, blocked.

International agencies are particularly concerned about the implications for Africa, where hundreds of millions face food shortages and many countries are highly dependent on food imports. High-level officials at development banks are calling for urgent actions to secure more fertilizers for African countries to deal with the looming crisis.

This is not the first time. During the global food crisis of 2008, the same development banks and many African governments pushed through programs that handed vast areas of Africa's lands to agribusiness companies and subsidized chemical fertilizers for both small and big farmers. Some of these large-scale projects failed spectacularly, leaving a trail of destruction that communities have yet to recover from. Malawi, for example, spent so much on subsidizing fertilizers that it had to cut its budget for public infrastructure and education.

The dilemma for these fertilizer programs, time and again, is price. Fertilizers are not just expensive in Africa; they are more expensive than in most other places. The corporations and traders that control the fertilizer market make profit margins of 30-80 percent across the continent. When global prices rise, they jack their prices up even further and then keep them there as prices fall back elsewhere. Farmers, even at subsidized prices, struggle to meet their costs of production.

Africa's high dependence on fertilizer imports makes the situation worse, depleting scarce foreign reserves to pay an overseas fertilizer cartel. And when global supply shocks hit, like today, African countries may be unable to access any fertilizer from the international market. Billionaire Aliko Dangote runs Africa's largest urea fertilizer factory in Nigeria. It ships most of its urea to the US and Brazil, and what it sells domestically reflects international prices. In early March, just one week after the US and Israel began their assault on Iran, Dangote's company hiked its urea prices by 40 percent.

Building more fertilizer factories in Africa will also mean more toxic pollution for local communities. People living near the phosphate factories of Groupe Chimique Tunisien in Gabes, Tunisia, have been fighting for years to shut them down because of the damage to health, land, and water. Chemical fertilizers are one of the leading contributors to climate change, responsible for more global greenhouse gas emissions than air travel.

The author argues that rather than boosting African fertilizer production, governments should urgently redirect subsidies and policy initiatives to support agroecology. Traditional crops like cassava in West Africa, sorghum in the Sahel, and banana around the Great Lakes are produced without chemical inputs. Farmers' organizations across West and North Africa are advancing agroecological methods. Evidence shows that agroecology can increase food production on farms, strengthen farmer livelihoods, and provide multiple ecosystem benefits. Studies of 208 agricultural projects across 52 countries found yield increases of 50-100 percent for various food staples when environmentally sensitive techniques were applied.

Agroecology is the most appropriate way forward to bring sustainability back into food systems and aligns with the call from 60 governments gathered in Colombia last month to phase out fossil fuels. The author concludes that local food systems and the empowerment they offer should be prioritized over fossil fuel-based fertilizers that reinforce corporate control and climate dystopia.

Source: www.aljazeera.com