When people think about the economic fallout from the Strait of Hormuz crisis, they think about oil. And fair enough — crude prices have surged nearly 60% since February, petrol queues have appeared across Asia, and energy markets have been in chaos for months. But there’s a second supply chain being quietly shredded that most people aren’t watching, and its consequences will be felt not at the fuel pump but at the grocery store — and not in weeks, but in months. The product is fertilizer. And what’s happening to it right now is, in some ways, more alarming than the oil story.
This requires a short chemistry detour. Crops need nitrogen to grow. The most efficient way to deliver that nitrogen at scale is through synthetic fertilizers — primarily urea and ammonia — which are manufactured using natural gas as the main input. That’s the crucial link: natural gas prices go up, fertilizer production costs go up. And where does a significant chunk of the world’s natural gas come from? The Persian Gulf. About a third of the world’s internationally traded urea — the most widely used fertilizer on the planet — normally transits through the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest exporter of urea. Qatar, before it halted LNG production entirely in response to the war, was a major ammonia exporter. Iran itself is one of the biggest nitrogen fertilizer producers globally. All of that supply is now either stranded or severely disrupted.
Since the war began, urea prices have jumped by roughly 46% in a single month — from around $400–490 per metric ton to about $700. This isn’t an abstraction. Farmers order fertilizer in March and April to apply during spring planting season. The crops that get planted now are the ones that show up in supermarkets later in the year. When a farmer can’t afford to buy fertilizer at $700 a ton, or simply can’t get any at all because the supply chain is blocked, they have three options: pay more and pass the cost on through higher food prices, reduce how much fertilizer they apply and accept lower crop yields, or switch to a less fertilizer-intensive crop entirely. All three outcomes mean the same thing downstream — food becomes more expensive, and in some parts of the world, scarcer.
The FAO — the UN’s food and agriculture agency — has warned that prolonged disruption could escalate into a global food security crisis, with over 360 million people already facing acute food insecurity in 2026. Even in wealthy countries, the ripple effect is measurable: analysts estimate the disruption could add roughly 2 percentage points to food-at-home inflation in the United States alone. In India, where roughly three-quarters of ammonia imports come from the Gulf region, the pressure is severe — compounding the LPG shortages and fuel price spikes the country is already navigating simultaneously. For sub-Saharan Africa, where 80% of fertilizer is imported and smallholder farmers produce the majority of the region’s food, the situation is especially acute.
There’s a timing dimension that makes this particularly bad. Spring planting season in the Northern Hemisphere happens once a year. Farmers can’t reschedule it. If they can’t get the fertilizer they need in April, they can’t go back and apply it in August. The crop yield for that season is determined. Since fertilizer use follows a nonlinear yield response — meaning even a modest reduction in application leads to a disproportionately large drop in yield — the damage to harvests from this disruption could be much larger than the disruption’s size alone would suggest. As one fertilizer industry expert put it, “If agricultural yields were impacted by 5%, I don’t think we’ll be looking at starvation — but it would certainly cause food inflation.” That might sound reassuring, but for families in lower-income countries who already spend 50–60% of their income on food, a meaningful price rise isn’t a mild inconvenience. It’s a crisis.
What’s frustrating about this is that governments are not treating fertilizer with anywhere near the strategic urgency they apply to oil. Countries maintain strategic petroleum reserves — emergency oil stockpiles designed to buffer against exactly this kind of supply shock. No equivalent exists for fertilizer. A naval escort for an oil tanker gets serious geopolitical attention; a fertilizer cargo sitting stranded in the Gulf of Oman gets a paragraph in a trade report. And yet the downstream consequences of the fertilizer disruption — on crop yields, food prices, and food security for hundreds of millions of people — could prove more lasting than the oil price spike, simply because food is harder to substitute than energy. The Hormuz crisis has made one thing impossible to ignore: the modern global food system is built on a supply chain that runs through a 33-kilometre strait, depends on a fossil fuel to manufacture its most critical input, and has no backup plan. The oil shock will ease when the strait reopens. The harvest shortfall from this spring’s planting season will land on grocery shelves regardless of what happens in the ceasefire negotiations.
