Fertiliser: the forgotten history linking the agricultural commodity and empire in wartime |
Fertilisers are not just an agricultural input: they are a strategic resource hidden at the centre of geopolitical conflict. The US and Israel’s war on Iran and the related disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz are sending shockwaves through the global farming system. A large share of the world’s traded chemical fertilisers normally passed through this strategic chokepoint, alongside key feedstocks needed to produce fertilisers elsewhere, such as gas, ammonia and sulphur.
The rise in fertiliser prices will push up food costs across the globe. This may seem like a recent vulnerability.
In reality, fertilisers have been entangled with war and imperialism for more than a century. As shown by my recent research, fertilisers were one of the factors contributing to shape colonial expansion, economic policy and even military strategy in the first half of the 20th Century.
How fertilisers became strategic
Modern conventional agriculture depends heavily on external inputs of three key nutrients:
Already in the 19th century, the industrial revolution spreading across the Global North was pushing an increasing part of the workforce off the fields and into mines, factories, building sites and services. How to feed growing masses of people that were not producing their own food became a matter of great urgency. This created a race to secure fertiliser resources.
Since the 1840s, phosphorus and nitrogen-rich guano have been extracted from Peruvian islands for export to the Global North.
In the 1860s, Spain’s attempt to wrest such a treasure........