This book explores the potential of biofertilizers as a natural and eco-friendly alternative for promoting sustainable soil fertility management among smallholder farmers in Africa. It highlights current research trends on biofertilizers that can be adopted by resource-poor farmers, equipping stakeholders with knowledge to unlock relevant sustainable farming practices.

Fodder at a glance🪖 Unpacking wartime food security and fertiliser narratives 🏜️ The limits of UAE’s push for food security🪐  Exploring food self-sufficiency across alternative dietary futures 🌿 Seeing animals, choosing plants: Evidence from a cafeteria🌽 Beyond yields: Smallholders’ realities matter for biodiversityEditor's noteAs the war in Iran enters its fourth week, fertilizer supply chain disruptions and food security implications have dominated headlines in the food space. We keep hearing the same statistics and chokepoints; the Straits of Hormuz closure has blocked 35 percent of the world’s urea, the most widely used form of synthetic fertiliser and it has caused the price of natural gas, a key input into synthetic fertiliser, to double. Media outlets issued warnings of “food crisis”, “food shortages” and “global hunger”.  There are certainly very real impacts of fertiliser shortages, but it’s interesting there’s been little to no scrutiny of whether agriculture should be so dependent on synthetic fertiliser, given it’s made with natural gas, responsible for 2.5 percent of global emissions, pollutes waterways and underpins a model of agriculture widely understood to be unsustainable, unjust and unhealthy. For more on the connections between our food and fossil fuels, check out our podcast series, Fuel to Fork.    As I read more about the unfolding consequences of the war for food production, I saw that the CEO of Yara, one of the largest global synthetic fertiliser companies, appears time and time again in the media. He comments not only on fertiliser supply chain disruptions, but also raises its potential impacts on global hunger. “What I’m worried about is like we saw in 2021, that it’s the most vulnerable that pay the higher price. We saw what that meant, hunger and famine in many parts of the world,” Sven Tore Holsether told the Financial Times on March 5th. He has also appeared in the Guardian and Bloomberg.  Holsether isn't wrong. High fertilizer prices do translate to higher food prices, and that hits the most vulnerable hardest. But, intentionally or not, he was positioning synthetic fertiliser as a proxy for food security and the key tool for combatting hunger.  It struck me that I was seeing - in real time - how food security narratives are created and reinforced. At TABLE, we believe that the food stories we tell are the futures we eat – that narratives shape the solutions, priorities and policies on the future of food.  But who gets to define the problem, and what and whose voices get left out of the conversation? I’m going to unpack the current discourse with three renowned experts: Raj Patel, a member of IPES-Food and research professor at the University of Texas, Sigrid Wertheim-Heck, associate professor at Wageningen University and strategic director of TABLE, Patty Fong, Food and Agriculture director of ClimateWorks Foundation.  

This report by Foodrise, argues that fertiliser companies are villains of the nitrogen crisis who are making billions while devastating public health, biodiversity and climate. It suggests the industry should be more tightly regulated and made to pay for excess nitrogen fertiliser production.