Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.

The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.

With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed ​into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.

Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile

On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.

At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia. 

We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.

Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.

Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.

Agroecology as an alternative

There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency. 

In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.

In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.

New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition

Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.

These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.

Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products

We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.

As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.

This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.

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Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems

Parts of the Southern and Northeastern U.S. faced tornado threats this week. Scientists are trying to parse out the climate links in changing tornado activity.

By Kiley Price

It’s been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States.

Are There Climate Fingerprints in Tornado Activity?

The UK will cut overseas climate spending by more than 10% to fund higher defence budgets, despite agreeing to a global pledge to triple climate finance for developing countries by 2035.

Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper told the British parliament on Thursday that the UK will “aim to spend around £6 billion ($8bn)” on international climate finance over the next three years, covering emissions reductions, adaptation and nature.

This amounts to around £2 billion ($2.66 billion) a year in the next three years, about 13% less than the £2.3 billion ($3.05 billion) a year pledged by the previous Conservative government for the period from 2021-22 to 2025-26.

The move places the UK alongside several other European countries that have recently cut aid budgets, despite a COP29 agreement to mobilise $300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035. In the United States, President Trump has gone further, cancelling most overseas aid programmes, with climate projects among the hardest hit.

The UK cuts were slammed by climate campaigners and some opposition politicians as “brutal”, a “betrayal” of the government’s election promises to be a climate leader, and a failure to recognise that development and climate spending protect the UK’s national security.

The UK will also aim to deliver an additional £6.7 billion ($8.9 billion) in “UK backed climate and nature investments” and to mobilise billions more in private finance, Cooper said. She added that those investments would include measures to help countries to recover when disasters hit, for example, as risk insurance in Jamaica enabled rapid payouts following Hurricane Melissa.

Jamaica set for post-Melissa payout but experts warn of limits to hurricane insurance

Cooper said that the cuts were a “hugely difficult decision” and “not ideological”. But, she added, they were necessary “to deliver the biggest increase in defence spending since the Cold War”.

She reiterated Labour’s commitment to restore development spending to 0.7% of gross national income “when fiscal circumstances allow”, but did not provide a timeline when pressed by an opposition member of parliament (MP). UK aid was reduced from 0.7% to 0.5% by the previous Conservative government in 2021, and is now set to fall further to 0.3%.

Cooper told the sparsely-attended parliament session that “allies such as Germany, France and Sweden have made similar choices” to cut aid to fund defence. The US has also cut almost all of its climate finance.

Cuts open to legal challenge?

These cuts come despite governments agreeing at the COP29 climate summit in 2024 to aim for $300 billion a year of climate finance by 2035, up from the $100 billion a year target for 2025.

Last year, the International Court of Justice advised that developed countries must provide climate finance “in a manner and at a level that allow for the achievement of” the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target temperature limit, language that campaigners say could underpin future legal challenges.

Reaction to Cooper’s announcement in parliament was mixed. Scottish National Party MP Chris Law called the aid cuts “the steepest, deepest and most brutal of any G7 country”, even “astonishingly” going further than the Trump administration.

Sarah Champion, an MP from Cooper’s Labour Party but who is not in government, said she had seen a yet-to-be-published equalities impact assessment. These assesments determine how different demographic groups – like women and disabled people – will be affected.

“When that comes into the public domain, we’ll then have the information that we can maybe have an informed debate on”, she said, adding that pitching defence against international development was a “false dichotomy”.

“If you ask any military person, they will tell you the best line of prevention and first defence is our development money,” she added.

Liberal Democrat and Green MPs echoed the argument, describing climate change as a central threat to global and UK security.

Conservative Party development spokesperson Wendy Morton questioned why Cooper had labelled climate change be a priority given “the country faces serious fiscal constraints”.

“Should not our first priority be economic resilience and national security, including global health security?”, she asked.

MPs from Reform UK, which is leading the national polls, did not speak in parliament. But, in November, they proposed cutting the aid budget by about 90% to £1 billion ($1.3bn) a year.

Campaigners slam “betrayal”

Climate campaigners were critical of the government’s cuts. Hannah Bond and Taahra Ghazi, co-CEOs of ActionAid UK, said cuts to climate finance were “a huge betrayal for women and girls on the frontline of the climate crisis”.

Catherine Pettengell, head of Climate Action Network UK, said that “the government promised the UK public in its manifesto to be a climate leader and create a world free from poverty on a liveable planet – but today’s announcements leave those promises entirely unfilled”.

Gareth Redmond-King of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit argued the decision runs counter to warnings from security and food system experts.

He added that climate finance is an investment in the UK’s national security given that “we import two-fifths of our food from overseas, and worsening climate change impacts hitting farmers at home and abroad are leading to shortages and higher prices on our supermarket shelves”.

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UK cuts support for climate action abroad to fund military instead