Why the War on Iran Proves We Need Food Sovereignty

On June 5, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) released a dire report on the war on Iran and food insecurity. The war is driving over 45 million more people into acute food insecurity. Its release presents an opportunity to lift up a key point our social movement partners have made: stopping the war and addressing the roots of this food crisis go hand in hand.

Grassroots International continues to unequivocally condemn the US-Israeli military assault on Iran. In a period of rising right-wing nationalism and intersecting crises, anti-militarism has taken on renewed importance.

Over the three-plus months since it started, the US-Israeli war on Iran has exposed the devastating impacts militarism unleashes on the world—touching on each of the key issue areas we and our movement partners focus on.

Is ecological justice possible while oil fields burn or when just the first two weeks of this war emitted 5 million tons of CO2 – equal to 84 countries’ combined emissions over the same period?

Can we push for grassroots feminisms when US and Israeli bombs have buried young girls and boys and their teachers and parents underneath their collapsed schools?

Can we defend human rights without condemning a war rampant with violations of international law? A war waged allegedly for “democracy” while it undermines the very same in the US and Iran alike?

A world of social, economic, and ecological justice can only be won when we also confront militarism. That much should be clear.

But there’s one issue we accompany our partners’ work around that has a surprisingly deep relevance to the war in Iran: the struggle for food sovereignty.

Driving the threat of food insecurity is not simply the disruption to food imports or the loss of income from high fuel prices. Ensuring communities, not corporations, decide what is grown in their territories, how it is grown, and whom it feeds, takes on new urgency thanks to a key input in corporate agriculture’s production process: petrochemical fertilizers.

How, and from where, global industrial agriculture produces this essential part of the modern “Green Revolution” directly implicates the same region now in the throes of war. A “just transition” away from extractivism and climate disaster means breaking the world’s reliance on fossil fuels for producing our food, too.

Gulf States, Petrochemicals, and Dire Straits

The Persian Gulf states have long been known for their fossil fuel exports. But they also hold another important place in the global economy through their supply of petrochemical fertilizers and those fertilizers’ key inputs.

30 percent of the global fertilizer trade passes from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. When honed down to particular chemical-based fertilizers – nitrogen and phosphate ones specifically – the region becomes even more critical.

As of 2017, roughly half of the global population relied on synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizers for food. In 2023, the world used 111.6 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer, 40.9 million metric tons of phosphorus-based fertilizer, and 37.6 million metric tons of potassium-based fertilizers.

Natural gas and oil extraction are necessary for these fertilizers’ production. Hydrogen supplied by methane and nitrogen are converted to ammonia (e.g. ammonium nitrate), urea, and other nitrogen fertilizers. Sulfur, a by-product of gas and oil extraction, is used in the sulfuric acid necessary for phosphate fertilizers.

The Gulf states were the single biggest regional exporter of nitrogen fertilizer inputs (urea and ammonia), and the second biggest regional exporter of two phosphate-based fertilizers. The region additionally provides nearly 50 percent of the world’s sulfur market.

Beyond how critical the region is for the production of these key inputs into the dominant corporate food system, there’s another problem. Amazon-style “just-in-time” production and distribution networks rule this section of agro-industry, making the industry additionally vulnerable.

The war has already had major impacts on food and fertilizer prices. Within the war’s first month, prices for urea and ammonia surged by 50 and 20 percent. And the result? 45 million more who are now under risk of starvation, as the WFP reports.

Feed the World, Cool the Planet, End the Wars

In response to the rising fertilizer costs, farmers are looking for relief – and alternatives to conventional fertilizers. US officials have made vague promises to help domestic farmers. The highly centralized fertilizer industry only has a few major players, making it possible for these corporations to artificially keep prices high and exploit crises like the war on Iran.

But to actually break up the power of these corporations, it’ll take more than loans to farmers or lawsuits from government regulators. As our ally the National Family Farm Coalition stresses, US farmers will need to join a global movement alongside fellow small farmers and peasants from around the world. They will need to make demands and also build a new system now, from the bottom up.

That’s precisely what our partners in La Via Campesina and peasant organizations from Haiti to Brazil to West Africa are doing. They’re organizing to teach and promote techniques grounded in agroecology, such as encouraging the use of effective fertilizers made from biological inputs, not fossil fuels.

They’re also making connections between the issues, including militarism and food crises. As a key document from the Third Nyéléni Global Forum for food sovereignty declares, “Armed conflicts, sanctions and pandemics provoke supply shocks and aggravate crises in global food systems.” Elsewhere it states, peasants and small farmers “will seek to build economies of peace, grounded in cooperation rather than competition.”

As one concrete example, people in Vieques, Puerto Rico have long resisted the US military using their home as an arms testing and disposal site. La Colmena Cimarrona is using land reclaimed from the US Navy to foster a local, solidarity-based food system.

Before and throughout the war on Iran, the global movement La Via Campesina has condemned Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in its fast-motion genocide against Palestine.

Ultimately, the movement for food sovereignty and agroecology is fundamentally a political struggle around who gets to decide the world’s priorities and agenda. Will the rich and powerful continue to dominate our world, declare their wars, and devastate our food systems? Or will the global working majority join with movements of food producers to feed our world, cool our planet, and end war for good?

If all the destruction and death from the war on Iran shows us anything, it’s that stopping war and feeding the world go hand in hand.