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By Etelle Higonnet
While the world fixates on oil tankers trapped behind the Strait of Hormuz and the geopolitical theater of the U.S.–Iran war, a quieter, far more dangerous crisis is unfolding — one that threatens the foundation of global food security.
Everyone is talking about the oil shock. Almost no one is talking about the fertilizer shock, including in the coffee space.
That silence is reckless.
Most of our world’s fertilizer is made with natural gas, largely produced (surprise, surprise) by the Middle East and Russia. Moreover, nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer moves through the Strait of Hormuz. With shipping disrupted, and fertilizer plants from India to Slovakia shutting down, the global food system is suddenly exposed as the fragile, fertilizer‑dependent vulnerability it has always been. Fertilizer prices are climbing fast and projected to jump by 31% according to the World Bank. Farmers from Australia to Brazil are planting less. Countries across Asia are bracing for shortages. The WTO is warning of destabilized food supplies.
And for coffee farmers, it’s not just their food that's at risk – it’s their coffee too. Their livelihood.
This is not a distant threat. It is happening now.
And it reveals a truth we’ve ignored for too long: our food system’s addiction to chemical fertilizer is a dangerous weakness.
The coffee industry is a poster child for that chemical fertilizer addiction.
The – undoubtedly stupid and probably illegal – war waged by Trump in Iran has killed thousands of people already and resulted in immense suffering, mass displacement of over a million people, and profound trauma for many more. Most people already grasp this. Few have processed that its most destructive impact on humans may be a spectacular deepening of hunger, crop failure, and poverty for millions of farmers in the global south. Including coffee farmers.
But a beautiful solution for resilience is in our grasp. If renewables and EVs are the escape hatch from fossil fuels, then compost and biochar are the escape hatches from fertilizer.
The coffee industry should obviously fast track quitting its dependency on fossil fuels and shift as quickly as possible to renewables and electrification of drying and roasting. But it should do more than that. It should double down on solutions to the chemical fertilizer shortage too.
Unlike solar panels or EV factories, compost and biochar don’t require billion‑dollar investments, rare minerals, or a decade of infrastructure build‑out. They can be low‑tech, low‑cost, and locally producible everywhere. They are the most democratic input in agriculture — and the only ones that can be scaled immediately, by anyone, anywhere.
We don’t need to wait for governments to build wildly expensive, high-tech fertilizer plants. We don’t need to wait for corporations to innovate. We don’t need to wait for sanctions to lift or shipping lanes to reopen.
We can start today.
The fertilizer crisis is not just a supply chain problem. It is a wake‑up call.
For decades, the global food system has been built on a single brittle assumption: that cheap synthetic fertilizer will always be available. But fertilizer is made from fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are made from geopolitics. When the Middle East shakes, the world’s food supply trembles, and already impoverished farmers whose livelihoods depend on crops like coffee stare into the abyss of becoming insolvent.
This is the second synthetic fertilizer shock in four years. The first came after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now the Iran conflict is triggering another. How many warnings do we need before we admit the system is broken?
Compost is not a cute sustainability project. Biochar is not a “nice to have”. Regenerative agroecology is not a weird pipedream. They are a strategic necessity. This should be recognized as such by every coffee company (and indeed, every agricultural company and ministry).
Compost and biochar rebuild soil fertility without fossil fuels. They reduce dependence on volatile global markets. They keeps nutrients local. Cut methane emissions from landfills. Strengthen climate resilience. Compost and biochar are the only fertilizers that cannot be sanctioned, blockaded, or weaponized.
And yet, despite all this, compost remains an afterthought in national agricultural policy and in most of the coffee industry’s approach to sustainability — a side project, a feel‑good initiative, a line item. Biochar remains a completely niche marginal curiosity for most coffee companies, not a core strategy. That era must end. We need a Global Emergency Compost/Biochar Revolution. Not next year. Not after the war ends. Not after fertilizer prices stabilize. Now. Governments should mandate municipal composting and fund regional compost hubs. Cities should divert food waste from landfills into local agriculture. Farmers should be paid and trained to transition from fertilizer to compost and/or biochar. Schools, supermarkets, and restaurants should be required to separate food waste. International institutions should treat compost as a strategic resource, not a hobby.
And the coffee industry should do its part — or even race to lead the way, with trainings and investments and collaborations with farmer groups and producer governments. To be clear, right now the coffee industry is largely headed in the exact wrong direction. Fossil fuel-based synthetic fertilizer is currently a primary source of greenhouse gas emissions in coffee production, often accounting for a third to three quarters of the total carbon footprint of a coffee farm. The industry relies heavily on synthetic inputs, with some intensive coffee systems in South America applying synthetic fertilizer at rates comparable to high-demand crops like corn.
Changing this is not about going “back to the land” in a muumuu-wearing hippy-dippy commune of eco-anarchists. It’s about building an agricultural system that can survive the 21st century.
The Iran–Hormuz crisis has exposed the truth: our food supply is one geopolitical shock away from collapse.
We cannot wish our way out of fertilizer dependence. We cannot pray our way out of soil degradation. But we can compost and biochar our way to resilience.
The world is scrambling to secure oil alternatives (without much help from the coffee industry, it seems). It must show the same urgency for fertilizer alternatives. Without that, there is no viable agriculture. No food. No stability.
This is our moment. This is humanity's wake‑up call. This is the chance to build a food system —and a coffee system — that isn’t held hostage by war, fossil fuels, or fragile supply chains.
A global compost and biochar revolution won’t make headlines like Trump’s bombs or tankers burning in the Strait of Hormuz. But it will feed the world and keep coffee farmers afloat, long after the oil shocks fade.
And that is a real emergency we should be talking about.