Brussels’ answer to a looming fertilizer crisis is to make more use of cow dung.
Grocery price spikes are on the horizon amid the unending war in Iran and the rising cost of fertilizer. Yet the European Commission’s plan to shore up Europe’s supply, due out Tuesday, centers around a long-term regulatory push to recycle more manure and farm waste into fertilizer.
It’s not the quick fix some were hoping for.
Farmers “expected bold action,” said MEP Veronika Vrecionová, who helms the European Parliament’s agriculture committee. “Roadmaps don’t pay the bills. Farmers need action, not intentions.”
Farm lobbies are pushing the same line. “European farmers cannot wait for another long-term roadmap while production costs continue to rise and European fertilizer capacity keeps disappearing,” said José María Castilla of ASAJA, Spain’s largest farmers’ organization. “The current crisis is not only about prices, it is about strategic autonomy, food security and the survival of European agriculture.”
Europe makes most of its own fertilizer from imported gas. When the Strait of Hormuz closed at the end of February, gas prices jumped, and global fertilizer markets tightened, pushing prices roughly 70 percent above 2024 levels.
The EU’s long-held ambition to wean Europe off gas-based fertilizers suddenly looked prescient when the strait closed. Producers, farmers and retailers were watching to see whether Brussels could move fast in a crisis.
However, according to recent drafts obtained by POLITICO, the plan offers little to help farmers struggling with this fall’s cost spike or to shield shoppers from the price time bomb coming next year.
Instead, Brussels is leaning on long-term measures and tools that take years to deliver. That’s partly because the fastest levers — suspending tariffs on Russian and Belarusian imports or pausing the EU’s tax on carbon-intensive imports — were too politically toxic to use.
CBAM gamble
One of the fastest ways to help farmers would also have helped Vladimir Putin: Suspending tariffs and extra duties on fertilizer imports from Russia and Belarus, which would serve as a key source of revenue in funding Russia’s war against Ukraine. Drafts show the Commission instead defending those tariffs, in place since June 2025, in the plan itself, framing them as necessary to reduce strategic dependence on Russia.
The other fast tool would have been to hit the brakes on the carbon border tax (CBAM) on fertilizers imported from countries with weaker climate rules. An April draft of the plan showed the Commission was seriously considering this as a way to make imported products cheaper for farmers — temporarily fulfilling a major wish for farm lobbies like Copa-Cogeca. However, the move would have been a major step back from the Berlaymont’s climate ambitions, and other Commission departments intervened to quash the plan.
The latest drafts go dig in even deeper. Rather than simply preserving CBAM, the Commission now pledges to “improve the mechanism further,” working with the Parliament and member countries on anti-circumvention measures.
But fertilizer producers might nonetheless benefit from another climate exemption: If they expand production using cleaner alternatives, the plan signals the Commission could keep some of their free pollution permits beyond 2034 under the EU’s Emissions Trading System, the bloc’s carbon market. The decision is deferred to a separate review due in July.
Beyond fast tools
With the short-term levers off the table, the plan focuses on a regulatory pathway to reduce Europe’s dependence on fossil-derived fertilizers imported from abroad.
It does so by proposing changes to several existing rules, including the Nitrates Directive’s Renure provisions. These currently allow farmers in regions where water pollution is a concern to use nitrogen extracted from manure, enabling them to apply more than EU caps normally allow. They would be extended to cover digestates, the byproducts of biogas production, which create renewable gas by breaking down manure and other organic waste.
Herbert Dorfmann, an influential MEP on the AGRI Committee, said manure could be part of the solution — but not the only one.
“Manure can be a contribution, but it can never substitute the urea-based, the nitrogen-based fertilizers,” said Dorfmann, an Italian member of the center-right European People’s Party.
Green MEP Thomas Waitz of Austria argued the Commission isn’t going nearly far enough.
“How many more wake-up calls do we need? We keep talking about crises — energy, food, geopolitical — but we’re ignoring the root cause: our addiction to fossil-based fertilizers,” Waitz said.
Unmoved by events
Even without the war in Iran, the fertilizer action plan would likely look much the same.
Most of what’s in the plan was already being drafted before the war, as Brussels’ response to a fertilizer crisis in 2022 and the broader push to cut Europe’s reliance on imported gas. The war added a handful of emergency-flavored items at the edges, including state aid for affected farmers, the option to designate fertilizer as a crisis-relevant good, and a promised top-up to the EU’s emergency farm budget.
But even the top-up figure is blank, as the plan only says the amount will be “substantial.” A real number depends on a separate budget process due next month.
“What appears to be emerging is a plan with no budget figure, blocked CAP instruments, and the one measure that would have helped farmers buy cheaper – the CBAM slowdown – already sacrificed to internal Commission politics,” AGRI chair Vrecionová, of the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists, told POLITICO.
The political urgency is somewhat dampened by the fact that Brussels is rolling out a long-term plan for a problem that hasn’t yet hit the fields (or most Europeans’ grocery bills). The crop being sown now was paid for before the war.
Doriana Milenkova, a senior commodities analyst at Rabobank, said the Commission’s decision to draft a structural plan rather than emergency measures was defensible. Fertilizers for the current season were already secured before the war. Local producers hedged gas prices. Imports kept flowing.
“There is no fertilizer crisis in EU for this crop season as most of the fertilizers was sourced before the conflict,” Milenkova said.”Therefore, the European Commission did not take crisis measures but proceeded with the fertilizer action plan which was already in the pipelines.”
Yet, the Commission has been touting the plan as a viable solution in recent months.
“This situation is very serious. I am fully aware of it and very concerned. This matter has all my attention,” Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen wrote in a post on X last month.
“What I want to avoid at all costs is that farmers stop producing in the next harvesting cycle,”
The Commission declined to comment ahead of the plan’s adoption.