More than two months into the US-Israel war on Iran, it appears we are veering towards another global food crisis. The conflict is driving up the costs of fuel, fertilisers, plastics and transport, resulting in higher food prices for communities from Manila to Quito. And now food production is at risk, with upwards of 20 percent of global fertiliser exports unable to move through the Straight of Hormuz and shipments of natural gas and sulphur, vital to the production of fertilisers elsewhere, blocked.International agencies are particularly concerned about the implications for Africa, where hundreds of millions face food shortages and where many countries are highly dependent on food imports. Now, some high-level officials at development banks are calling for urgent actions to secure more fertilisers for African countries in order to deal with the looming crisis.We have been here before. During the global food crisis of 2008, the same development banks and many African governments pushed through a wave of programmes that handed vast areas of Africa’s lands to agribusiness companies and subsidised chemical fertilisers, 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. But so, too, did subsidised fertiliser schemes. In many cases, they were unable to significantly increase fertiliser use per farmer o …
