Foggia: Across the wheat plains of Puglia, the price of a bag of nitrogen fertiliser has shaped this season more than the weather has. The European Commission has reached the same conclusion, and its new fertiliser plan signals that officials now treat the cost of growing food as a matter of security rather than a farmyard complaint.

The Commission adopted its Fertiliser Action Plan in May, aiming to ease the immediate squeeze on farmers while cutting the bloc’s long dependence on imported nutrients and the gas that goes into making them. Manufacturers price nitrogen fertiliser off natural gas, so every spike in energy markets lands twice on European farms, once at the fuel pump and again at the fertiliser depot.

Officials expect food prices to keep climbing through 2026. The Commission’s short-term outlook puts agricultural input costs on an upward path and forecasts consumer food inflation running well above the headline rate, a gap that hits low-income households hardest. Farmers, caught between higher costs and retail prices they do not set, have spent two years protesting across European capitals.

The plan leans on several levers at once. It pushes for more domestic and recycled nutrient production, encourages precision techniques that put less fertiliser on each hectare, and promises to watch import flows so that dumped or subsidised product does not distort the market. The Commission has also kept its food-security machinery busy, and the expert group that runs the bloc’s crisis-preparedness mechanism met again in June to war-game supply shocks before they arrive.

Money follows the message. The Commission will spend a record sum in 2026 co-financing promotion of European agri-food products at home and abroad, part of a wider push to keep the sector competitive as it faces cheaper imports and tighter environmental rules. The details sit in the Commission’s food-security work, which frames stable supply as a strategic goal rather than a market afterthought.

Critics on the farming side argue the plan arrives late and travels light. Growers wanted direct relief this spring, not a framework that pays off over years. Environmental groups make the opposite case, warning that subsidising cheaper fertiliser risks locking in the overuse that pollutes rivers and drives the ammonia emissions already pushing several member states off their clean-air targets.

The Commission’s answer is that resilience and restraint can share a plan. Using less fertiliser more precisely, it argues, cuts both the bill and the pollution, while home-grown and recycled nutrients blunt the next energy shock. Whether farmers in Foggia and beyond feel that logic in their accounts before the 2027 harvest will decide if the strategy reads as foresight or paperwork.