 to frame itself as the “Crop Nutrition Company of the Future”. One that is “protecting the earth’s resources, food and environment”. Yara builds this brand and reputation partially through participating in a wide range of international alliances and development projects. It positions itself as an advisor to governments around the world, especially in the Global South, and actively tries to shape their agricultural policy decisions.
A snapshot of Yara’s EU Lobbying
According to Lobbyfacts, using information provided by Yara for the EU Transparency Register, in 2018 Yara spent at least €400,000 on lobbying the EU. A look at the historical data shows that altogether Yara has spent somewhere up to €11,849,995 on lobbying the EU since 2010.(i)
Yara lists four lobbying groups it works with. The figures relate to how much each organisation has spent on lobbying, not the amount Yara has paid them.
- Fertilizers Europe: up to €899,000 spent in 2018, 8 lobbyists registered, 20 meetings with the Commission.
- International Fertilizer Organisation: not registered on the database.
- Friends of Europe: up to €3,765,491 spent, 29 lobbyists, 30 meetings with the Commission.
- CEFIC (Association of the European Chemicals Industry): up to €12 million spent, 76 lobbyists and 81 meetings with the Commission.
The total lobby spending declared by Yara and these lobbying groups amounts to over €16 million a year, with a total of 113 lobbyists working for them and a total number of 131 meetings with the Commission.(iii)
This network helps Yara to repeat its messages through powerful channels. For instance, Fertilizers Europe holds the current presidency of the Agri-Food Chain Coalition, a lobbying coalition gathering together most of the agribusiness industries (fertilisers, pesticides, machinery, seeds, big farmers, commodity traders, food multinationals, supermarkets, etc.).
CEFIC, the lobby group for the European chemical industry, is a keen advocate of fracking in Europe and of importing fracked gas from the US. During the failed EU-US talks in 2013-2016 on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal, one of CEFIC’s key demands was to open the European market to US imports of shale gas. The European fertilizer industry has also been a major proponent of fracked gas in Europe.
Experts, Advisory Groups and Hired Guns
Yara sits in the EU’s Gas Coordination Group, on behalf of IFIEC Europe. This influential advisory group looks at the security of supply and provides its members with privileged access to upcoming plans for new infrastructure and other Commission proposals.
Fertilizer Europe, which Yara is a member of, is itself a member of a long list of expert groups, among them the influential Expert Group on Climate Change Policy and the High Level Expert Group on Energy-Intensive Industries.
Another way to increase influence in Brussels is to pay lobby consultancies to secure access to decision-makers and increase the outreach of your messages, and consultancy Logos Public Affairs lists Yara as a client.
Media power
A growing marketing strategy in the Brussels bubble is to sponsor media and pay for promoted content. Euractiv is a Europe-wide TV network which focuses on EU policy news. Yara sponsors a politics programme called “the Brief powered by Yara”, which carries sponsor messages promoting Yara’s ‘solutions’ for air pollution, for which ammonia emissions from the fertilizers industry are a huge problem. Euractiv also features promoted content by Yara.
Yara also exerts influence over agricultural journalism to promote synthetic fertilisers. For example, until 2016 it sponsored a Journalism Award in partnership with the Guild of Agricultural Journalists. It also created the IFAJ-Yara Award for Reporting on Sustainable World Agriculture, run by the The International Federation of Agricultural Journalists, a network of more than 5,000 people.
Future strategy
Yara’s last five years were all about expanding its network of plants and distribution centres. In the next five years the company hopes to cash in on all that investment. Who for? Shareholders of course! Yara’s annual report makes clear generating “satisfactory returns for shareholders” is a “top priority”.
Shareholders haven’t done badly from the company recently – its accounts show Yara has paid out almost $2 billion to them in the last five years. But payouts have been declining in line with profits (just $240 million was paid out in 2018, compared to $517 million in the bumper year of 2016).
How to give the Norwegian state and its fellow shareholders the returns they expect? Grow and make more profit: “improving margins [i.e. profits] and growth are the two only ways of creating shareholder value”, according to the company’s annual report. Yara says it intends to pay out at least 40 per cent of its profits it makes over the next five years to shareholders.
In a presentation to investors at London’s Tate Modern Museum in July, company bigwigs outlined Yara’s plans. Chief among them is selling more of its expensive fertiliser brands.
Specifically, the company outlined plans to sell over 100 million units of its YaraVita fertiliser by 2025, compared to 40 million in 2018. Unlike most other fertilisers, YaraVita – produced in Yara’s Sumare plant in Brazil and Pocklington plant in the UK – is designed to be sprayed directly onto leaves, “developed to target the leaf or fruit, to work fast and to effectively overcome crop deficiencies”. According to Yara it will be particularly good for farmers growing “commodity crops” to be traded.
Yara also plans to bolster its work with food companies – essentially to get access to these companies’ farmers or other suppliers. It hopes to grow “crop solution” sales through food companies from 300,000 tonnes to two million tonnes by 2025.
But Yara’s main priority may be expanding in India. It bought the major Babrala Urea plant from Tata Chemicals in 2018. Yara has big plans for the country, which it told investors was “an area that represents a big untapped potential for our solutions, especially the YaraVita range of products.”
The company also looked forward to deregulation of the Indian fertiliser market, noting “the market growth potential for premium products would increase significantly” if that were to happen.
Yara’s major shareholder will no doubt help ease Yara’s way. When Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi was re-elected in May this year, his Norwegian counterpart Erna Solberg sent him her “warmest congratulations” and looked forward to “further developing our cooperation in our many fields of common interest”.
Yara in Africa: Neocolonialsm and the ‘fight against hunger’
Longer-term, Yara is looking to Africa. Yara boss Svein Tore Holsether said in 2017:
“Africa is going to be our largest market at some point. I am just looking at the fundamentals — land availability, climate, water — tick all the boxes on that. I do believe the fundamentals are in place.”
Yara has stimulated fertiliser sales across the continent through skilfully wrapping itself in a humanitarian mantle. It created the Yara Foundation in 2005 to “support the fight against hunger in Africa”. In 2016, the first of three annual African Green Revolution Conferences took place in Oslo. The conferences built momentum for a more structured partnership, whereby there is now an annual African Green Revolution Forum co-sponsored by Yara, as well as agencies such as UKAID and companies like Syngenta.
Yara is also part of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, which is a “co-operation framework” that launched at the 2012 G8 Summit in the US. It aims to “accelerate responsible investment in African agriculture and lift 50 million people out of poverty by 2022”. The alliance brings together African governments, private sector companies and donor partners, including the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation.
The approach of all of these initiatives is to move people away from subsistence and smallholder agriculture into capitalist production growing for commodity markets. One through which farmers become dependent on commercial inputs such as synthetic fertilisers, patented hybrid and genetically modified seeds, herbicides and pesticides. The monocultural models reduce farmer resilience and biodiversity and put power in the hands of food corporations.
Earlier this decade, Yara pioneered the concept of “African Agricultural Growth Corridors,” a framework for the development of infrastructure to support intensive agriculture across Africa, especially Mozambique and Tanzania. The corridors were criticised as ways to allow corporations to grab land away from small farmers, ushering in intensive monoculture and synthetic fertiliser use.
Beyond fertiliser sales, Yara has an increasing number of production plants across Africa and it is planning to build a gas-fired fertiliser plant in Mozambique, in partnership with Shell and GL Africa Energy.
While Modi is Yara’s current favourite despot, it has form with others. In 2005, Yara created the African Green Revolution Yara Prize and gave it, along with NOK 1 million, to Ethiopia’s President Meles Zenawi. This was the year after Zenawi’s security forces had detained over 4,000 opponents to the regime, with frequent evidence of detention, torture and harassment. Three months later Yara was awarded NOK 12.5 million in Ethiopian contracts.
Mining Impacts
Yara’s impact will continue to be felt elsewhere. In Quebec, Canada, for example, the Arnaud Mine is a $750 million phosphate mine