War, Fuel, Fertiliser, and the Food System: Who Bears the Cost of Empire?

A reflection by Tammi Jonas, AFSA Focal Point for Farmers

 

I’m writing this from Jonai Farms & Meatsmiths, on unceded Djaara Country, where the pigs are rooting through the paddock and the still autumn morning is warming. It’s easy to feel far from the Strait of Hormuz. But the illegal US-Israeli war against Iran has arrived at every farm gate in the world, and we’d be fools to pretend otherwise.

Around one-fifth of the world’s oil supply normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So does around one-third of global fertiliser trade, including half of the world’s urea, the nitrogen-based fertiliser on which industrial farming depends. Block that chokepoint, and you don’t just spike the price at the bowser — you doubly spike the cost of producing food.

Both fuel and synthetic fertiliser prices have soared globally. Here in Australia, the government has declared a national fuel crisis. Diesel has climbed to more than $3 a litre nationally — up more than 40 per cent since late February. Entire towns have run dry. This is not only distant geopolitics. It’s the bowser price on the way to the abattoir.

We did not end up here by accident. This is the designed outcome of a food system built to serve capital, not communities.

This is also, unmistakably, imperialism at work.

The Squeeze Is Not New — It’s Just Worse

Small-scale farmers were already under pressure before the first missile was fired. Most of us who sell directly don’t suffer the price volatility that hammers commodity farmers — but we’re not insulated either. The extraction happens through fuel and feed costs: the diesel to run the tractor and deliver the goods, and, for those of us raising pigs and poultry, the industrial grain many are forced to rely on. Those input costs eat directly into what we make.

The latest crisis comes as we are already suffering the no-longer ‘unprecedented’ fires and floods of climate change, abattoir closures that have gutted small-scale livestock producers, near-impossible land access for young farmers, and the systematic dismantling of the infrastructure to support genuinely local food. We did not end up here by accident. This is the designed outcome of a food system built to serve capital, not communities.

This is also, unmistakably, imperialism at work. Decisions made by powerful states — with powerful corporate interests behind them — have cascading consequences for every farmer on earth, but especially for those least responsible for them. The ripple effects have already led to renewed concerns about global food security, similar to the Arab Spring or post-pandemic inflation cycles. Also by imperial design, the poorer countries of the world are often more exposed to these crises, with some African nations that import a lot of grain among the most affected. India, which imports nitrogen fertilisers as well as natural gas to produce them domestically, also faces high exposure to the shortages. And it is not only food systems impacted — last week, thousands of garment workers in India were sent home when the factories ran out of gas to operate. As ever, the world’s most exploited workers were first to pay.

Corporate Capitalism’s Favourite Game: Socialise the Risk, Privatise the Profit

Watch what happens next, because we have seen this playbook before. For big agribusiness, a global crisis is less of a disaster and more of a strategic opportunity. ‘Food security’ is already being hollowed out and weaponised — large-scale industrial players are positioning themselves as the only thing standing between the public and empty shelves. In truth, it is this highly consolidated, chemical-dependent model that made our food system so fragile in the first place.

Agribusiness socialises the risk and privatises the profit. When prices are low, they dominate the market; when input prices spike, they demand public money to keep their fragile model afloat. And when crises hit, agribusiness and big retailers make higher profits — corporations have leveraged prior supply shocks to dramatically increase their margins, a phenomenon economists have dubbed ‘greedflation.’ The average farmer, meanwhile, gets less than 15 cents of the consumer dollar.

Individual consumer choices will not dismantle structural capitalism. But collective action might.

What Food Sovereignty Actually Means Right Now

The industrial agriculture model is inherently fragile — as soon as one gear in the global supply chain snaps, the entire machine breaks down. This is not a bug. It is a feature of a system designed to concentrate power and extract profit, keeping farmers dependent on inputs they don’t control, markets that most don’t determine, and infrastructure they don’t own.

Here at Jonai Farms, we don’t use urea, just old-fashioned urine and manure. Our pigs and cattle build soil fertility through rotational grazing, and we compost surplus yields on the farm, as farmers did before the Haber-Bosch process made them dependent on fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser. 

Food sovereignty — the right of peoples to define their own food systems, to grow food in ways that are ethical, ecologically sound and socially just, to not be held hostage to the Strait of Hormuz or the profit margins of Cargill or Nutrien — is not a romantic fantasy. It is a material, political project.

But let me be clear: small-scale agroecology-oriented farmers are not immune to this crisis. We may not be reliant on synthetic nitrogen — that particular chokepoint belongs to the industrial model — but we are reliant on diesel. Our tractors run on it. The utes we drive to farmers’ markets or to deliver to our CSA members run on it. The utes we use to take our animals to the abattoir run on it. Diesel at well over $3 a litre hits every part of our operations. 

We can run our older utes on waste vegie oil from local cafes, solarise our operations, and streamline our production models to drive less and never run an empty load in either direction. We also won’t charge ourselves another margin on top of the one we have to pay at the bowser.

And we’re building more. The Meat Collective at Jonai — our community micro-abattoir, years in the making — will mean local farmers can process animals close to where they’re raised, rather than trucking them hundreds of kilometres each way on diesel we don’t have and can’t afford. That’s not just an animal welfare argument or an emissions argument, though, of course, it is both. It’s a fuel security argument. Localised food systems simply use less fuel. We’re not alone — micro-abattoir projects are emerging across Australia, and Victoria is moving fastest, off the back of the 2025 regulatory reforms that helped make small-scale processing viable again. The infrastructure of a genuinely local food system is being built, farm by farm, community by community. This crisis is a reminder of exactly why that work matters.

Food sovereignty — the right of peoples to define their own food systems, to grow food in ways that are ethical, ecologically sound and socially just, to not be held hostage to the Strait of Hormuz or the profit margins of Cargill or Nutrien — is not a romantic fantasy. It is a material, political project.

The crisis is not an argument for more industrial agriculture. The crisis is the industrial system. The answer is to build something different: locally embedded, ecologically grounded, democratically governed food systems that don’t collapse every time an empire decides to go to war.

Individual consumer choices will not dismantle structural capitalism. But collective action might. Join a democratic organisation — the Agroecology & Food Sovereignty Alliance, or your local equivalent. If you can, buy from farmers building the alternative, and pay them what their food is worth, which, at $3.30-a-litre diesel, is more than it was last month. Agitate for land reform, for a fuel security policy that prioritises food producers supplying domestic markets, and for the long-overdue transition away from fossil-fuel dependency.

And when someone tells you this crisis proves we need to bail out industrial agriculture, ask them who profits and who pays. The answer, as always, will tell you everything.