EU Hunger Games: Why the EUSSR is sabotaging your table

While enlightened bureaucrats play politburo, Europe’s farmers and consumers are expected to absorb – or maybe fail to absorb – yet another blow. The latest debate over the 20th sanctions package is being sold to the public as a masterpiece of geopolitical resolve in support of Ukraine. In reality, it is a familiar, toxic cocktail of virtue signalling, market manipulation and disregard for the people who actually feed this continent. All while playing a very sinister game.

This is not about foreign policy. To begin with, it is about internal pathologies of a European Union that has lost its understanding of reality and mission. The drive for this latest round of sabotage predictably began in the Nordic capitals. Sweden and Finland, safe in their self-righteous bubbles. They are leading the charge to restrict agricultural supplies – fertilisers, to be exact – under the guise of “strategic pressure”. Yet Europe is heavily reliant on imported fertilisers, with Russia accounting for more than a quarter of total volumes. A forced interruption is pure self-harm.

Let us strip the rhetoric away. This is not some grand strategy, but the use of foreign affairs to affect internal markets under a moral cover. A complete ban or effective restriction would overnight alter the entire fertiliser market. Prices could almost double in the short-run. We saw this in 2022 when benchmark potash prices jumped more than 50 per cent in just a few months. But why on earth would EU bigwigs allow such a thing to happen and how could they justify it?

Having already exhausted the political limits of energy sanctions, and having watched the continent’s industrial base crumble as a result, Brussels is now targeting the dinner table. They know, however, that direct sanctions on food and fertilisers are politically impossible. They remember the havoc as tractors rolled into the streets of Paris and Brussels. They know that when the price of bread goes up, peace collapses. They saw bread inflation in the EU surge to 18 per cent in 2022, after fertiliser, pesticide and grain costs exploded.

So, they turn to indirect means. Rather than impose an explicit ban, Brussels is deploying technical measures: Administrative quotas, chemical restrictions, bureaucratic hurdles designed to choke supply without the fingerprints of outright sanctions. It is imposing policy by stealth. By simultaneously targeting natural gas and ammonia, which are essential for nitrogen fertilisers, the new set of regulations risks driving up the fertiliser bill by an estimated €4 billion. There is precedent. In 2022, when soaring gas prices destroyed European ammonia capacity, fertiliser costs almost tripled.

Higher agricultural input bills ultimately means higher prices for households already hit by inflation. This is perfectly understandable. With fertilisers accounting for almost 15 per cent of the cost for cereal producers across a host of EU countries, even marginal additional increases risk pushing farms beyond break-even. For many family farms operating on thin margins, such volatility alone could mean going out of business.

Even the infamous World Economic Forum has warned of such a food-price shock. The IMF estimates that a 10 per cent rise in fertiliser prices leads to roughly a 7 per cent increase in cereal prices in the following quarter. With fertiliser prices already about 20 per cent higher than in 2024, further sanctions risk sending food inflation through the roof. So much for our daily bread. This was taken into account when the EU was forced quietly to suspend the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) for inputs. Even euro-Mandarins understood that you cannot slap climate fanaticism, trade barriers and sanctions on the same sector and expect it to survive.

Speaking of Mandarins, restricting access to traditional suppliers like Russia also hands the keys of our food security to Beijing. China already controls a massive portion of the global phosphate market and has shown no hesitation in using export controls as a weapon. Brussels is effectively trading one vulnerability for a far more dangerous dependence on the Chinese Communist Party. Sanctions elsewhere have shown that broad trade embargoes often affect the party who imposes them worse than the target itself. As economies adapt and new markets emerge, political outcomes rarely follow the script.

We should be able to see it clearly by now. After years of sanctions, the geopolitical results are nil, if not negative. Yet the domestic costs are very real, very physical, very expensive. Higher production costs erode competitiveness: In 2022, EU sugar prices surged 50 per cent above 2021 levels, triggering a 34 per cent jump in imports and a 31 per cent collapse in exports. Fertiliser cost shocks will replicate this pattern across multiple sectors, weakening Europe’s trade position and destroying our rural production capacity. This in turn means dismantling our non-urban social tissue, which, as it happens, is the most conservative and resistant part of our nations.

Could it be this that they are aiming at? If the EU were serious about food security, it would stop treating the European farmer as collateral damage in a theatre of moral vanity, wouldn’t it? At a time of global trade uncertainty, Europe needs robust production capacity and resilient supply chains – not another experiment in protectionism that punishes its own citizens. Unless it is exactly a particular social group that must be punished – namely, the one that opposes the elites’ agenda and policies the hardest: Farmers. After all, who needs farmers when you can have Mercosur, solar panels and wind turbines?

So, Brussels, are you stupid or evil? You surely are aware that you cannot feed a continent with press releases and strategic narratives. You know that if you continue to treat agriculture as a pawn in your political games, the price will be paid. Quietly in the fields at first, bitterly on the shelves next and then finally very loudly at the ballot box. It is shocking that you can stand so apathetic to human suffering, while cynically playing hunger games, all while trying to eliminate internal social enemies before they get to overthrow you. Sounds very EUSSR-like indeed.