Grant Funding: British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, March 2022.

Grant Funding: British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, March 2022.

I was lucky to be awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, worth £9,600, which will support a research project titled 'Fertile Futures: Phosphate, Farming and Food between France and Morocco, 1921-2008'

This project reframes the history of food production and consumption through an entangled history of France and Morocco in the period spanning the colonial to the contemporary era. At its core will be the role of phosphorous, a vital plant nutrient in agro-chemical fertiliser. Mined in the form of rock phosphate in North Africa and substantially exported to the colonial power, France, phosphorous was key to the global transformation of food production in the twentieth century. Today, radically unsustainable agro-chemical food systems feed much of humanity. By examining archival sources from former French Protectorate Morocco, alongside French and international sources, I will show that the emergence of agro-chemical farming in France, Europe and globally depended on the commodification of the North African sub-soil. This started well before the era of the Cold War ‘Green Revolution’ with which the genesis of today’s food production system has conventionally been associated.

» British Academy Grant page