Iran Conflicts Impact Global Food Security

Iran Conflicts Impact Global Food Security: The Fertilizer Shock

The US-Iran war has choked off a third of global fertilizer trade through the Strait of Hormuz — with a delayed hunger wave now hitting harvests from the Sahel to South Asia.

The bill for the February 28, 2026 US-Israeli strikes on Iran will not be paid at the pump — it will be paid at the dinner table, six to nine months later, mostly by people who have never heard of the Strait of Hormuz. That is the analytical consensus emerging from the World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Food Programme (WFP): a war framed as an oil crisis is, in structural terms, a fertilizer crisis — and its biggest beneficiary is not in the Gulf but in Moscow.

The chokepoint that matters is nitrogen, not crude

Roughly a third of global seaborne fertilizer trade — and up to 46% of urea, according to the Carnegie Endowment — normally transits Hormuz. The Council on Foreign Relations reported that tanker traffic collapsed by more than 95% by mid-March 2026, with export volumes falling to less than 5% of pre-conflict levels. Urea prices in the Middle East now sit 75% to 108% above pre-war levels; sulfur, LNG feedstock and phosphates have all seized simultaneously.

The oil story has a partial workaround. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline can bypass Hormuz for crude; strategic petroleum reserves exist. Fertilizer has neither. As the Carnegie Endowment noted in March, "G7 countries don't maintain strategic fertilizer reserves to match their oil stockpiles" — and the Saudi pipeline "is for oil, not ammonia products." That asymmetry is the load-bearing fact of this crisis.

The second-order effects have already cascaded through supposedly unrelated markets. The Carnegie Endowment reported that fertilizer firms in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have shut down production after losing Qatari LNG feedstock; Egypt, cut off from Israeli gas, is scrambling for expensive spot-market LNG. At the port of New Orleans, urea prices have risen more than 25% since the end of February — pushing the American Farm Bureau Federation to write directly to President Donald Trump warning of a "production shock" to US food security.

The number that reframes the crisis: 45 million

On March 17, 2026, the UN Secretary-General's office announced WFP analysis estimating that "almost 45 million more people could fall into acute food insecurity or worse (known as IPC3+) if the conflict" continued and oil stayed above $100 per barrel through June. By early June, the WFP said in analysis reported by Al Jazeera that this projection was "beginning to materialise" — with Somalia, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka the leading edge of the shock.

The World Bank's April 2026 Commodity Markets Outlook put concrete numbers on the transmission: fertilizer prices projected up 31% for 2026, driven by a 60% jump in urea. Fertilizer affordability, the Bank warned, will fall to "its worst level since 2022." In its June Global Economic Prospects, the Bank downgraded global growth to 2.5% — the weakest since COVID-19 — and inflation to 4.0%, with knock-on effects for food prices explicitly cited.

Yet the FAO Food Price Index tells an oddly calm story so far. The FAO's July 3 release put the June index at 130.3 — down 0.3% from May, with wheat prices actually easing 4.4% on "softer energy markets amid expectations of reduced tensions around the Strait of Hormuz." That apparent contradiction is the whole point. As FAO chief economist Máximo Torero warned UN News in April, "right now, we don't have a food crisis because we have food availability" — the buffer is existing stocks from a good 2025 harvest. The next harvest is where the bill comes due.

The lag: why the crisis is invisible, and coming

Agriculture runs on biological calendars, not diplomatic ones. Farmers order fertilizer in March; they apply it in April and May; they harvest in autumn; consumers see the price in supermarkets months later. The OECD's Aglink-Cosimo modelling confirms the "delayed and moderate" nature of the transmission, with the strongest impacts concentrated in countries dependent on imported fertilizers.

Yara chief executive Svein Tore Holsether framed the scale bluntly to the BBC on May 1: up to half a million tons of nitrogen fertilizer are not being produced globally right now, which he translated into "up to 10 billion meals that will not be produced every week." Not applying nitrogen would cut yields for some crops by as much as 50% in the first season. The consequences, he said, would land hardest in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

The geographic exposure is uneven and specific. Research by the Kiel Institute, cited by BBC Verify, estimates that a full Hormuz closure would push global wheat prices up 4.2% and fruit and vegetables up 5.2% — with the worst-hit importers being Zambia (+31%), Sri Lanka (+15%), Taiwan (+12%) and Pakistan (+11%). The Middle East Institute reports that in the Sahel, urea prices rose 46% month-on-month between February and March 2026, and that "more than 40 million" already face acute food insecurity across the region, with projections rising above that level during the June-August lean season.

The winner: Russia — and the historical parallel it invites

Every commodity shock has a beneficiary. This one has Moscow.

Russia — together with Belarus — accounts for around 40% of global potash exports, 23% of ammonia and 14% of urea, according to Carnegie. Crucially, none of that transits Hormuz. As Carnegie's analysis put it, "Moscow doesn't need a ceasefire, a military escort, or a diplomatic breakthrough to ramp up its deliveries. All it needs is orders, and it is getting more and more of these." Importers in Nigeria and Ghana are pre-purchasing 2027 supply from Russian producers now.

The parallel is 2022, but inverted. In the Ukraine war's first year, sanctions and Black Sea blockades removed Russian and Ukrainian grain and fertilizer from global markets, and the West scrambled to fill the gap. In 2026, the pattern is reversed: Gulf supply is offline, and Russia is the residual supplier the Global South must call. The Real Instituto Elcano argues this converts market share into "political capital" — an "indispensability" that will outlast any US-Iran deal. Russia is "the only actor with an across-the-board presence in the main types of fertilizer."

The Trump administration has quietly acknowledged this. The CSIS assessment notes that Washington de-sanctioned Russian oil exports within weeks of the war's outbreak and that Russia is "benefitting from disruptions to fertilizer and gas markets." The second beneficiary is Iran itself: it is reportedly permitting ships bound for aligned countries — including China and India — to transit the strait, converting maritime chokepoint control into diplomatic leverage. One Indian shipbroker cited by CSIS described it as Iran "forcing countries to choose between Western alignment and energy stability."

The losers: Sahel, South Asia, and the aid architecture

Poor countries face a "double squeeze." Physical fertilizer is scarcer; fiscal space to subsidize it is smaller. The Middle East Institute documents Sahelian importers absorbing higher trade-finance costs at exactly the moment planting decisions become irreversible in rain-fed systems.

The aid architecture is degraded. In June UN reporting, WFP flagged that higher operational costs will mean 1.5 million fewer people served in 2026 than planned; a six-month conflict extension would strip assistance from more than 9 million people. The Carnegie Endowment noted a compounding vulnerability: with USAID effectively shuttered, the emergency safety net that partially cushioned the 2022 shock is no longer available at anything like the same scale.

Alternative suppliers exist but are constrained. Morocco's OCP Group holds about 70% of known global phosphate reserves, but as the Middle East Institute points out, its production depends on sulfur that itself partly transits Hormuz — including a 10-year, 7.5-million-ton supply deal signed with Qatar in 2024. The choke feeds on itself.

The fragile ceasefire and what it does not fix

The June 17 memorandum of understanding brokered by Qatar and Pakistan — the full text of which was published by the BBC — commits both sides to a 60-day ceasefire, a 30-day US removal of its naval blockade, and Iranian de-mining and restoration of pre-war vessel traffic. Point 5 of the MoU is explicit that Iran will facilitate "safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days."

But implementation is patchy. As Al Jazeera reported on July 1, traffic has only "partially resumed," and tit-for-tat strikes continued in the two weeks after signing. On June 26, the BBC reported that the US struck Iran again after an attack on a cargo ship. The BBC's own reporting from Bandar Abbas found dozens of ships still awaiting Iranian permission to transit, with two container vessels seized in April, the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, still not released.

The mechanical problem for food security is that fertilizer plants cannot be turned back on with a phone call. As Carnegie warned, "even if the Iran war stops, restarting production and transport for fertilizers and their components could take weeks — at a crucial moment for planting." The Northern Hemisphere planting season has already passed. The damage to 2026 yields is largely locked in.

What to watch

• August 16, 2026 — expiration of the 60-day MoU ceasefire window; without a final deal or extension, US officials have not ruled out resumed strikes.
• The next FAO Food Price Index release, August 7, 2026 — the scheduled monthly release that will begin to reflect Northern Hemisphere harvest quality, the first hard read on whether the delayed-transmission theory is correct.
• US Congressional action on the CRS-flagged Jones Act waiver, which expired May 17, 2026, and whether it is renewed to relieve US fertilizer logistics.
• Russian export quota implementation — Moscow's 20-million-ton fertilizer export quota running from June 1 to November 30, 2026, per WTO News Harvest, will show how aggressively the Kremlin monetizes market share.

The Bottom Line

The Iran war's most durable global consequence is not the oil price spike — it is the transfer of leverage over global food security from Gulf producers to Russia, Morocco and a diminished set of alternative suppliers. The 45 million additional people the WFP projects into acute hunger will not appear in a single headline; they will appear as a diffuse shock through the 2026–27 harvest cycle, concentrated in the Sahel, South Asia and Horn of Africa. If the June 17 MoU holds, prices ease; if it breaks, the fertilizer market — which has no strategic reserves and no fast substitute — is the pressure point that turns a regional war into a global hunger event.