A near-final version of the European Commission’s fertilizer plan seen by POLITICO ahead of its planned debut on Tuesday shows it has slimmed down since a draft from late April.
The war in the Middle East, on top of years of pressure from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has driven nitrogen fertilizer prices roughly 70 percent above 2024 levels. The squeeze is likely to reach supermarket shelves in 2027.
The EU executive’s plan tries to bring down prices for farmers in the short term and reduce Europe’s dependence on imports over the medium term. The long term goal: push the sector toward greener alternatives that lean less on natural gas, which makes up most of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer. Much of it amounts to a pipeline of measures the Commission intends to pursue, with the actual decisions to be made later through separate proposals and reviews.
The biggest change in the latest 22-page draft, dated May 13, concerns Europe’s carbon border tax, known as CBAM, which charges importers of polluting goods the same carbon price EU producers pay inside the bloc.
