The geopolitical tremor in the Strait of Hormuz has sent fertiliser prices into the stratosphere. But amid the devastating loss of life and destruction already unfolding, farmers and families are also being forced to worry about the cost of the next harvest, a different kind of machinery is whirring into motion in Washington and Brussels: the lobbying machine. Now is the time to break free from their playbook and implement just solutions that feed people, not corporate pockets.

History shows that for big agribusiness, a global crisis is less of a disaster and more of a strategic opportunity. We are about to witness a masterclass in how to parlay “food security” fears into corporate welfare and the gutting of environmental protections.

But we know their playbook!

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It’s time to cut through corporate lies, cut agriculture emissions and shift towards sustainable agroecology.

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1. Weaponising “food security” 

Expect the term “food security” to be hollowed out and weaponised. Large-scale industrial players are already positioning themselves as the only thing standing between the public and empty shelves. In truth, it is this highly consolidated, chemical-dependent model of industrial farming that is making our global food system so fragile in the first place.

Their narrative is calculated: The world is in chaos, so the government must stop “burdening” agribusiness with regulations. They will attempt to use a temporary supply chain shock to permanently dismantle hard-won environmental standards.

2. The demand for deregulation

Their immediate targets are always environmental and community safeguards. Under the guise of “unleashing production,” lobbyists are likely to push for:

• Suspending rules to allow the spreading of animal manure, sacrificing groundwater safety and community health. 
• Stalling pesticide reduction laws with false claims that they threaten food security, despite scientists proving that long-term security is impossible without healthy soil and pollinators. 
• Forcing legal bypasses to destroy millions of hectares of land previously set aside for bees, birds and soil recovery. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this script. During the 2022 supply chain shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the same type of lobbyists leveraged geopolitical instability to wrangle these concessions out of the European Commission. History is repeating itself as the European farmers’ lobby (Copa-Cogeca) is seizing this crisis to demand even more environmental rollbacks.

We’re also seeing lobbyists coming out in force in the UK and the US where, in a letter to President Donald Trump, the American Farm Bureau Federation took a predictable “emergency” stance, stating:

“The current volatility requires an immediate suspension of regulatory hurdles… We cannot prioritise administrative red tape over the ability of American farmers to feed a world in crisis.”

What this statement obscures is how farming has shifted from locally-owned, resilient family businesses to massive industrial “factory” operations run by some of the world’s wealthiest corporations. The factory farming model is inherently fragile – as soon as one gear in the global supply chain snaps, the entire machine breaks down.

3. The great public-to-private wealth transfer

While big business demands less “interference” from the state in the form of rules, they are simultaneously demanding more “interference” in the form of cash. Agribusiness is archetypal of a system that socialises the risk and privatises the profit. 

When prices are low, they dominate the market; when input prices spike, they demand “bridge payments” to keep their fragile model afloat.

Meanwhile the rest of us pay the price. The cost of cleaning up polluted drinking water, for example, generally isn’t paid by Big Ag. It’s paid by everyday families, through taxes and rates.

The predictable outcome?

• Taxpayers ultimately foot the bill for emergency fertiliser subsidies, effectively bailing out the super rich Big Ag executives.
• Farmers remain trapped in a cycle of chemical addiction, lining the pockets of fertiliser giants like Nutrien and The Mosaic Company. During the 2022 crisis, these two companies saw their profits reach staggering record highs while farmers struggled to break even.
• Agribusinesses announce record windfall profits, fuelled by the very volatility they claimed would ruin them. In 2022, Cargill reportedly raked in a record US $165 billion in revenue – a 23% increase, during a global food crisis.
  

Real food security comes from your local farmer

If we want true independence, we have to stop propping up chemical-addicted industrial farming. Local, ecological farming is the only real path to food sovereignty. By working with nature to fix nutrients in the soil naturally, farmers can break the cycle of dependence.

This does four amazing things at once:

• Saves money: Farmers slash their costs, protecting your food prices.
• Cleans our water: It stops toxic chemical run-off from polluting our rivers and drinking water.
• Protects wildlife: It restores space for bees, birds, and biodiversity.
• Fights climate change: It cuts the massive emissions of the industrial food system.

Real food security isn’t something we can buy from a chemical factory in another country. It doesn’t come from trading off clean drinking water for more polluting production. And it certainly doesn’t come from handing over more cash to the already-wealthy.

Here’s what should happen instead

Short Term: Stop bailing out the corporate middleman. If emergency funds are deployed, they should go directly to regular people to offset food costs, rather than into the bank accounts of chemical suppliers and millionaire shareholders.

Long Term: Fund the transition, not the status quo. Food security is grown from the ground up through healthy soil and local resilience.

We cannot allow the greed of the agribusiness lobby to use this crisis as a mandate for deregulation. It is time to fund a model that serves our communities and our planet, not just the billionaires at the top of the food chain.

Stop Big Meat and Dairy

It’s time to cut through corporate lies, cut agriculture emissions and shift towards sustainable agroecology.

Sign now!

Amanda Larsson is the Food and Agriculture Global Campaign Lead at Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Brussels – Activists have projected a golden facade and the words “TRUMP TOWER” onto the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, mimicking one of President Trump’s skyscrapers, with a Greenpeace message urging EU leaders meeting today to stop capitulating to his demands. The Greenpeace Belgium activists are protesting the EU’s continued dependence on the US for oil and gas imports, the removal of protections for the environment, public health and privacy, and the lack of resistance to the US’s breaches of international law.

Greenpeace EU political campaigner Ariadna Rodrigo said: “Trump wants to dominate Europe, and so far most European politicians seem to let him have his way, so we’re helping them redecorate. Trump flouts international law, and instead of resisting him EU leaders are ripping up protections for our health and environment, and hooking Europe to US oil and gas, to please him and his billionaire friends. 

“When EU politicians say they want to ‘simplify rules for competitiveness’, what they mean is letting companies use more toxic chemicals in our clothes and food, or letting tech bros invade our privacy. Moving to 100% renewable energy and ecological agriculture would break our fossil fuel dependence, and Trump’s stranglehold, while shielding people’s bills from geopolitical turmoil. The EU must resist Trump’s agenda of chaos and cruelty, and start defending ordinary people instead of corporations and the super rich.”

The EU’s 27 heads of government are meeting to discuss Europe’s reaction to the US and Israeli attacks on Iran and the related increase in energy prices, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the next EU budget, as well as their own efforts to deregulate the EU’s protections for the environment, public health and digital privacy.

The US government and its corporate lobbyists have been putting pressure on the EU to dismantle some of its environmental and social protections, such as the EU’s anti-deforestation law, the methane regulation, and the digital tax.

EU leaders have mostly been hesitant to condemn, or been openly supportive of, President Trump’s recent threats and attacks on Venezuela, Cuba and Iran, despite concerns that these breach international law. Greenpeace is calling for all governments to uphold international law and to protect civilians, and for the EU to push for an immediate end to military hostilities and blockades of humanitarian aid.

As part of a proposed EU-US trade deal to lower tariffs on the trade of goods between the EU and US, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged that the EU would import $750 billion of US energy by the end of 2028, mostly oil and gas. By 2025, the US already provided 27% of EU gas imports, which could grow to 40% by 2030.

The European Parliament’s trade committee is scheduled to vote on the deal’s approval, which would then send it to the whole Parliament for a vote in its plenary session, possibly on 25-26 March. Greenpeace is warning that the EU’s dependence on fossil fuel imports, as well as accelerating the climate crisis, gives leverage to authoritarian governments over the EU, and puts European households at risk of volatile prices. Greenpeace is calling on Members of the European Parliament to reject the EU-US trade deal. 

ENDS

Photos and video from the activity available via to download the Greenpeace Media Library

Notes:

[1] Greenpeace EU media briefing on US pressure to deregulate EU rules protecting people and nature

Contacts:

Ariadna Rodrigo, Greenpeace EU political campaigner: +32 (0)479 99 69 22, ariadna.rodrigo@greenpeace.org 

Greenpeace EU press desk: +32 (0)2 274 1911, pressdesk.eu@greenpeace.org

The world has poured a record US$ 2.7 trillion into military spending in 2024, with global spending rising every year for the past decade.

From Ukraine to Sudan, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Venezuela, people are living through war, bombardment, occupation, militarisation or political violence, while the damage reaches far beyond the frontlines. Homes, hospitals, power grids, water systems, farmland and coastlines are all drawn into the same cycle of destruction, showing that conflict is not only a human tragedy but also an environmental one, with consequences for public health, ecosystems and climate that can last for decades.

Like all wars, the current war in the Middle East will leave a toxic legacy

War does not only kill people and destroy homes. It also damages the systems that make life possible, including water networks, sewage plants, farmland, ports, fuel depots and electricity infrastructure, often leaving polluted air, contaminated soil and unsafe water long after the fighting slows. Across recent conflicts, research points to the same pattern: fires, toxic debris, damaged sanitation, collapsing public health systems and ecosystems pushed beyond recovery.

This environmental harm is not incidental. It is one of the ways war reshapes daily life.

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In Iran, within days of the first US-Israel strikes, energy itself became a direct battleground as attacks and counter attacks targeted fossil fuel infrastructure. The Strait of Hormuz became a flashpoint with dozens of tankers carrying billions of litres of oil trapped in the Persian Gulf. Greenpeace Germany warned that a single oil spill in the Gulf could damage this fragile marine habitat beyond repair with devastating consequences for people, animals, and plants in the region, adding to the terrible human toll this illegal war has already taken on local communities.

In Gaza, Greenpeace MENA analysis has highlighted severe damage to water, sanitation, cropland and fisheries, alongside estimates that the first 120 days of the war generated more than half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide. That combination of bombardment, infrastructure collapse and pollution makes a place harder to inhabit, less healthy and less resilient to climate breakdown.

Sudan offers another stark example: research from the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) shows how war is driving deforestation, agricultural decline, industrial pollution, and the collapse of health and sanitation systems, undermining people’s access to food, water and energy.

War also carries a climate cost beyond the battlefield. Researchers cited by the CEOBS estimate that militaries account for around 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while conflict adds more through fires, fuel use, reconstruction and the loss of resilient public infrastructure. The environmental cost of war is therefore both immediate and cumulative, destroying ecosystems today and weakening societies’ ability to cope with heat, drought, floods and crop loss tomorrow.

History shows the damage lasts for decades

This is not new. During the Vietnam war, US forces sprayed almost 80 million litres of herbicides, including Agent Orange, affecting roughly 2.9 million hectares of land and leaving dioxin in soils, water and food chains for decades. In Iraq, UNEP and later field investigations warned of long-term environmental and health risks linked to depleted uranium contamination and other toxic remnants of war. These older conflicts matter because they show that the environmental damage of war does not end with a ceasefire.

The lesson running from Vietnam and Iraq to Gaza and Ukraine is simple. War contaminates the conditions for life itself. It degrades land, water, air and health in ways that can shape people’s lives for generations, especially where the fighting meshes with chemicals, oil, radiation risks and damaged public infrastructure.

Ukraine maps the environmental cost of war

Ukraine has made this damage unusually visible. Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, together with the Ukrainian organisation Ecoaction, launched an environmental damage map built from almost 900 collected cases, with 30 of the most serious verified by satellite imagery to show how Russia’s illegal invasion has damaged land, habitats, water and air. Documenting this destruction is essential not only for accountability, but also for planning reconstruction and nature restoration in parallel.

The map matters because it shows the breadth of environmental damage that modern war causes. Missile strikes trigger wildfires, industrial sites leak toxins, shelling pollutes soil and water, and mined or occupied land becomes dangerous to farm, restore or even enter. This points to a larger argument about how war-affected countries can build back better in ways that restore nature and reduce dependence on the same vulnerable energy systems that war keeps targeting

Ukraine also shows how war magnifies and weaponises the environmental risk of  nuclear infrastructure. Greenpeace Ukraine and Greenpeace Central & Eastern Europe have repeatedly warned that the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (Europe’s largest nuclear power plant) has created an ongoing nuclear safety and security crisis. There is no credible nuclear safety, security or legal basis for restarting reactors at Zaporizhzhia while the site remains under Russian military and Rosatom control, and it has warned that any restart would sharply increase the risk of a nuclear disaster.

That warning reaches beyond Ukraine. Nuclear plants are designed for stable operating conditions, not occupation, militarisation and repeated threats to cooling, staffing and external power supply. The example of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant shows how war can turn critical infrastructure into a potential regional environmental catastrophe, with consequences that would not stop at any front line.

The environmental damage caused by war is not only a consequence of conflict.  It is also shaped by the fossil-based energy systems that power modern economies.

Oil and gas fuel war and intensify its environmental impact

Oil and gas are not just caught up in war. They often sit near its centre. Oil and gas revenues bankroll war machines, while control of pipelines, ports, tankers and shipping chokepoints helps drive geopolitical confrontation in the first place. When the global economy depends on centralised, combustible resources, attacks on depots, refineries, tankers or shipping routes do more than disrupt trade. They threaten marine ecosystems, public health and economic stability at the same time.

This dynamic helps explain why conflicts around fossil fuel infrastructure so often become ecological emergencies. During the 1991 Gulf war, burning Kuwaiti oil wells blackened skies and polluted land and water on a massive scale. More recently, Greenpeace Germany warned that the US-Israel war on Iran, and the retaliatory strikes that followed across the Gulf, left more than 85 large oil tankers trapped in the Persian Gulf and sharply increased the risk of an oil spill. Local communities would pay that long-term price first, with any spill threatening livelihoods as well as fragile marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass meadows, for decades. The environmental threat is built into an energy system that concentrates risk in a handful of highly flammable, highly polluting sites.

Fossil fuels do not only worsen the damage once fighting begins. They can also shape the motives, incentives and power struggles that make conflict more likely in the first place. President Donald Trump’s illegal military action against Venezuela was tied to control of its oil industry, after he said the US would be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil sector. Venezuela holds the largest proven crude oil reserves in the world and warned that the crisis must not be exploited for short-term oil profiteering or extractive gain by foreign governments or corporations.

A world organised around oil and gas makes communities and ecosystems expendable in the pursuit of strategic control and profit. That is why the environmental consequences of war cannot be separated from the political economy of fossil fuel extraction itself.

Yemen’s FSO Safer became one of the clearest examples of that intersection between fossil fuels, humanitarian crisis and conflict. The abandoned tanker, carrying roughly 1.1 million barrels of oil, threatened a major Red Sea spill for years while war blocked proper maintenance and response. That immediate catastrophe has now been averted because a UN-led operation removed the oil and transferred it to safer long-term storage. But the Safer crisis showed how a single neglected piece of fossil fuel infrastructure in a war zone can endanger fisheries, food deliveries, coastal livelihoods and marine biodiversity across an entire region.

Renewables are a security imperative

There is no sunlight stuck in the Strait of Hormuz, no wind held hostage by a tanker route. Distributed renewables are harder to bomb or blockade than giant oil fields, pipelines and centralised thermal plants because they remove single points of failure from the energy system. A decentralised network of rooftop solar, batteries, local grids and efficiency measures can help keep hospitals, schools and homes functioning even when national infrastructure is attacked or fuel imports are disrupted.

That is why the energy transition should also be understood as a security and resilience strategy. Countries generating power from their own sun and wind are less vulnerable to shipping disruptions, fuel price shocks and political blackmail tied to oil and gas imports. Local renewables cannot stop a war, but they can reduce the leverage of fossil fuel cartels, keep essential services running and lower the environmental damage that comes from defending centralised, combustible infrastructure.

War and conflict do not only kill people. They also poison water, damage soil, foul the air and destroy the systems that make everyday life possible. Naming that devastation matters, because peace is not only the absence of bombs but the possibility of living on safe, healthy and habitable land, something now recognised in the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. 

Moving away from fossil fuels can help make that future more possible by reducing both environmental harm and the dangerous dependencies that so often intensify conflict.

Greenpeace International strongly condemns the ongoing and escalating invasion of Lebanon by Israeli forces, and calls for an immediate and unconditional cessation of hostilities by all parties to prevent further loss of life and avert an irreversible environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.

Since the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon came into effect in November 2024, reports indicate that Israel has violated its terms over 15,000 times.[1] This was conducted through both air and land attacks, undermining the diplomatic framework intended to protect civilians. 

On top of the death toll caused by the US-Israel attack on Iran and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the humanitarian toll of this recent escalation in Lebanon is horrific. Official reports cite around one million people displaced, with more than 900 killed, including over 100 children, and more than 2,200 injured to date.[2][3] The large-scale forced displacement of over one million people, combined with illegal mass evacuation orders that fail to ensure adequate protection for civilians, violates international humanitarian law.[4]

Greenpeace Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has expressed deep concern about the threats from Israeli officials of Gaza-level destruction in Lebanon.[5] Similar patterns are already emerging, including strikes on medical facilities and personnel, the targeting of academic and civilian infrastructure, threats to UNESCO world heritage sites and widespread environmental destruction.[6] The documented use of white phosphorus over civilian areas in southern Lebanon violates international bans on the indiscriminate use of incendiary weapons in populated zones.[7] 

Greenpeace MENA warns that this massive scale of forced displacement and explicit threat of widespread destruction goes beyond military strategy and may amount to war crimes, endangering the fundamental fabric of Lebanese society.[8] 

As scorched earth tactics and prohibited weapons devastate residential heartlands, the international community must break its silence to demand the protection of all civilian lives, an immediate ceasefire, and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the entirety of Lebanese territory.

ENDS

Notes:

[1] MSF update: Southern Lebanon – where is the ceasefire?

[2] IOM: Nearly One Million Displaced in Lebanon 

[3] Republic of Lebanon Ministry of Heath, daily report 17/03/2026: Death toll rises to 912

[4] OHCHR: Amid protection crisis in Lebanon, UN experts warn bombing civilians to force displacement is unlawful

[5] Escalation of hostilities in Lebanon, as of 16 March 2026 – ReliefWeb

[6] Destruction like Gaza or civil war? Netanyahu’s warning adds to questions over Israel’s goals in Lebanon – NBC

[7] Human Rights Watch: Israel unlawfully using white phosphorus over residential areas in southern Lebanon
[8] Situation in Lebanon | OHCHR 

Contact:

Hiam Mardini, Communications and Media Manager, Greenpeace MENA, +961 71 553 232,  hmardini@greenpeace.org 

Greenpeace International Press Desk, +31 (0)20 718 2470 (available 24 hours), pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org