The global food system is currently dysfunctional and unsustainable due to the dominance of multinational corporations that encourage unhealthy patterns of production and consumption, generate enormous waste, and cause massive greenhouse gas emissions. Small-scale farmers in many countries are deprived of a secure and viable livelihood, and food access remains fundamentally unequal.
Addressing these issues is a complex undertaking that may involve trade-offs between short-term solutions and long-term strategies for sustainable production and distribution. The global fertilizer shortage and soaring prices exemplify this challenge.
Fertilizer prices have soared in the past two years due to the rising cost of natural gas and economic sanctions on major exporters like Russia. However, corporations exploited this crisis to increase their profit margins by more than double, from roughly 20% to 36% of sales. As a result, small farmers around the world have to pay three times as much as they did a few years ago to fertilize their crops. This has forced them to reduce their fertilizer usage, which is affecting yields and threatening domestic food security.
Governments worldwide have responded with measures such as farmer subsidies and efforts to encourage domestic fertilizer production. However, chemical fertilizers are highly associated with ecological problems, including 2.4% of all greenhouse-gas emissions, soil degradation, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss.
As such, governments must avoid knee-jerk reactions that undermine ecological sustainability. Instead, policymakers must subsidize alternative agroecological technologies, emphasizing crop rotation, natural fertilizers, and pesticides to reduce dependence on chemical fertilizers, maintain high yields, and attenuate environmental damage.
Private investment and foreign aid should shift towards agroecological farming, which could significantly boost productivity and soil quality, as well as being scaled up if necessary. Independent evaluations of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) suggest that, despite external funding and private foundations’ support, the organization falls far from achieving its goals of doubling yields and incomes in smallholder rural areas.
To steer toward a more sustainable, equitable and resilient path, the global food system must transform several areas of food production, particularly highly oligopolistic markets for agricultural inputs and crops. By reducing our reliance on chemical fertilizers, we could turn the current food crisis into a genuine opportunity for promoting agroecological development.
In summary, the dire state of the global food system demands transformative and comprehensive interventions to make equitable and sustainable food production accessible to marginalized groups. Policymakers must prioritize sustainable agroecological farming practices that are affordable and efficient for smallholder farmers, reduce environmental damage, and maintain high yields.
