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. 

What’s the problem?

Nitrogen is essential for all life on Earth – but industrial farming practices since the Green Revolution have unleashed a flood of synthetic fertilisers that has overwhelmed Earth’s natural nitrogen balance. We are now beyond the “safe operating space for humanity”, with devastating consequences for people’s health, biodiversity and the climate. Nitrogen pollution has well and truly Exhausted Earth but the companies causing it are targeting growth, putting us on a collision course with ecological breakdown.

This isn’t new. Scientists and policy makers have warned about nitrogen pollution for more than 50 years. The EAT–Lancet Commission’s 2025 report delivers the starkest warning yet: the nitrogen crisis is a food systems crisis and surplus nitrogen must be halved, meaning that agricultural nitrogen inputs need to be cut by more than one-third (42%) by 2050.

Yet instead of shrinking, nitrogen fertiliser output continues to rise. Production has surged by one-fifth (20%) since 2009, when the first planetary boundary assessment was published and scientists first warned that Earth’s nitrogen boundary had been breached.

This report exposes an industry that has long operated in the shadows but whose activities have set off a visible cascade of environmental, public health and social harms. Flying in the face of the science, it has increased output and deployed a full suite of underhand tactics to maintain business-as-usual and protect its profits.

Nitrogen fertiliser corporations do not feed the world, they fail it. For too long, they have put their profits before our Earth and our food.

It’s time for our political leaders to rein in, require redress from, and begin shrinking this industry before the window of opportunity closes.

Solutions

Tackling the nitrogen crisis means listening to peasant farmers, who already have the solutions – not to agribusiness lobbies who don’t – and redirecting public subsidies. It also means giving teeth to existing domestic and international initiatives to tackle the nitrogen crisis, enforcing them, and moving beyond ‘nutrient loss’ reduction targets.

Governments must set measurable, year-on-year reduction targets for nitrogen production, in line with the EAT–Lancet recommendations.

Our demands

• Drive the shift to the planetary health diet: The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, just and sustainable food systems is the most comprehensive and holistic scientific paper ever produced on the food system transformation. Political leaders must implement its recommendations without delay.
• Listen to farmers, not to agribusiness: As governments take action to enable the shift to the Planetary Health Diet and reduce the nitrogen surplus, it is imperative that they listen to farmers and not to corporate lobbyists.
• Redouble international cooperation for nitrogen reduction: Given the global consequences of the nitrogen surplus, which extend far beyond national borders, effective mechanisms for international cooperation to achieve nitrogen reduction must be developed.
• Make the nitrogen fertiliser corporations pay: Reducing nitrogen surplus requires reducing production of nitrogen fertilisers, in the context of an industry structured to grow and to maximise its profits. This will not happen unless political leaders show the necessary leadership to rein in, regulate and shrink the industry.