The Hormuz Food Shock: How a War Over Oil Is Becoming a Crisis for Farmers and Food Prices
When people think about what the Strait of Hormuz blockage means, they think about oil. They should also be thinking about food.
Up to 30 percent of globally traded fertilizers transit the strait every year — roughly 16 million tonnes of nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur products annually. The Gulf region supplies an estimated 30 to 35 percent of global urea exports and 20 to 30 percent of global ammonia exports. Iran alone accounts for roughly 30 percent of global urea trade passing through Hormuz-constrained corridors. Qatar's QAFCO complex, before Iranian strikes in March damaged it, represented 14 percent of global urea trade on its own.
Since February 28, most of that supply has simply stopped.
The Price Numbers Are Stark
FAO Chief Economist Máximo Torero described what followed as "one of the most severe shocks to global commodity flows in recent years." He wasn't overstating. Urea prices in the Middle East climbed between 75 and 108 percent above pre-conflict levels through the spring. In Egypt — a bellwether market for nitrogen fertilizers — urea prices jumped from $400 to $490 per tonne before the war to around $700 by late March, and climbed further to above $850 per tonne in April. The World Bank's fertilizer price index rose more than 12 percent in the first quarter of 2026, reaching its highest level since October 2022.
U.S. importers saw urea prices at the Port of New Orleans rise more than 25 percent since the end of February. The American Farm Bureau Federation wrote to President Trump alongside 53 other agricultural groups calling for "much-needed market relief for America's farmers." As planting season was in full swing across much of the U.S., the closure of the Strait sent fuel and fertilizer prices skyrocketing simultaneously — a dual cost shock unlike anything since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Why Fertilizer Is Different From Oil
Oil shocks are managed partly through strategic reserves. The IEA coordinated the release of 400 million barrels from member country emergency stocks in March alone. There is no equivalent mechanism for fertilizers. No country maintains strategic fertilizer stockpiles at anything close to the scale of petroleum reserves. When supply disappears, it disappears.
The Carnegie Endowment put the structural problem plainly: if a ship captain brave enough to transit the strait under fire has a choice between carrying oil and carrying fertilizer, they will choose oil. Oil is worth more per cubic metre of hold space. The consequence is that fertilizer falls to the back of the queue even in partial-reopening scenarios.
The supply chain mathematics are particularly brutal for phosphate fertilizers. Gulf countries produce around 20 percent of global phosphate fertilizers and roughly a quarter of global sulfur — the feedstock for sulfuric acid, which is needed to convert phosphate rock into a form plants can actually absorb. DAP (diammonium phosphate) prices rose more than 10 percent in April as sulfur prices doubled from January levels. China's simultaneous move to tighten its own fertilizer exports compounded the pressure.
Who Gets Hit Hardest
Torero's FAO analysis identified the countries most immediately at risk: Bangladesh, currently in its critical Boro rice season; Sri Lanka in the middle of the Maha rice harvest; India facing reduced domestic fertilizer production ahead of the Kharif planting season; and Egypt, heavily dependent on wheat imports. Brazil — which imports 80 to 90 percent of the fertilizers used in its massive agricultural sector — is deeply exposed despite being an energy exporter.
Professor Farah Naja of the University of Sharjah, whose research group published one of the first peer-reviewed analyses of the crisis, offered a framing that has been widely cited: "The Strait of Hormuz is a food chokepoint, not just an energy chokepoint. When that channel is disrupted, the shockwaves don't stay in the Gulf."
The World Food Programme warned that prolonged conflict could push up to 45 million additional people into acute hunger by mid-2026 — a figure built on the assumption that farmers unable to afford or access fertilizer will reduce application rates, shift to less productive crops, or in some cases simply not plant. FAO projects that cereal producers could face income losses of up to 5 percent in 2026 with impacts rippling through 2030.
The Bigger Pattern
What the Hormuz fertilizer crisis reveals is how comprehensively modern industrial agriculture has been globalised — and how few redundancies it has built in. A fertilizer supply chain that runs from Qatari gas fields through a 21-mile strait to fields in Brazil, Bangladesh, and Indiana is not resilient. It is efficient. Those are not the same thing.
The World Economic Forum and the FAO are now both calling for governments to invest in strategic fertilizer reserves, accelerate alternative production technologies including green ammonia, and treat agricultural input supply as a matter of national security rather than a purely commercial logistics question. Yara International, one of the world's largest fertilizer producers, has been making the same argument for years — largely without success. Perhaps this crisis will be the forcing event that changes that calculation.
For the 2026 harvest cycle, the damage is already substantially done. The question now is what the 2027 crop looks like — and whether enough of the fertilizer supply chain has been rerouted through land corridors and alternative suppliers to keep yields from falling below what global food stocks can absorb.
What Needs to Happen
The World Economic Forum and FAO have been unusually aligned in their policy prescriptions. The immediate priorities are securing alternative trade corridors for fertilizer shipments, protecting humanitarian food flows through financial buffers that offset rising logistics costs, and providing emergency credit access to farmers who cannot afford inputs at current price levels. The medium-term priorities are investment in sustainable agriculture practices that reduce fertilizer intensity, diversification of fertilizer production geographically, and the establishment of strategic fertilizer reserves that governments can draw on in the next crisis.
None of this is simple or cheap. Strategic fertilizer reserves are expensive to build and maintain. Alternative fertilizer production — green ammonia from renewable electricity, for example — is not yet cost-competitive with conventional natural gas-based production at scale. The structural reforms that would make the food system more resilient to the next Hormuz crisis are decade-long projects, not quarterly plans.
But the arguments for not doing them — primarily that the cost is hard to justify when markets are functioning normally — have been comprehensively demolished by events. The cost of resilience looks very different from inside a crisis than it does from outside one. That is the lesson of 2026 for global food security governance, and it is one that will take years to fully absorb but that this crisis has made impossible to ignore.