The numbers that have dominated coverage of the US-Iran war are easy to understand. Oil above $100 a barrel, Brent crude peaking at $126, pump prices surging, and economies rattled. These are tangible, immediate, and politically explosive. They make headlines because people feel them at the forecourt within days.
But there is another number that has received far less attention, and it may prove far more consequential: one third.
About one-third of global seaborne trade in fertilizers typically passes through the Strait of Hormuz. And since the US and Israel launched operation ‘Epic Fury’ on 28 February 2026, new data from maritime tracking agencies and the Asian Development Bank reveal a catastrophic 98% drop in fertilizer exports through the strait during March 2026.
You almost certainly didn’t see that figure trending.
The chokepoint nobody was watching
The Strait of Hormuz is around 21 miles wide at its narrowest point. Its two unidirectional sea lanes facilitate the transit of roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day, representing about 20–25% of global seaborne oil trade. That statistic, understandably, is what policymakers and markets have fixated on. But the strait is not just an energy corridor, it is an agricultural lifeline.
The Arabian Gulf is one of the world’s most important fertilizer hubs. It accounts for roughly a third of globally traded urea — the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertilizer — and a significant share of ammonia exports, both of which are foundational to modern food production. These aren’t abstract commodities; they are the chemical backbone of the global food system.
Fertilizer production is highly sensitive to energy markets. Natural gas is the primary input and can account for the majority of production costs for nitrogen fertilizers, meaning disruptions to energy supply quickly ripple into fertilizer availability and pricing. In recent years, geopolitical shocks have repeatedly triggered export restrictions from major producers such as Russia and China, tightening global supply and increasing volatility in already fragile markets.
This is not an energy crisis with agricultural side effects. It is an agricultural crisis being obscured by an energy one.
Timing is everything — and the timing is terrible
What makes this particularly alarming is when it is happening, Spring planting season across the Northern Hemisphere. The window when farmers apply the first rounds of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer to prepare soil for the crops that will feed much of the world through 2026 and into 2027.
Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen quickly, restarting production, shipping, and distribution for fertilizers and their inputs would not be instantaneous. Delays of even a few weeks can have outsized consequences during planting season. Farmers facing uncertainty or higher input costs may reduce fertilizer use, plant less fertilizer-intensive crops, or cut acreage altogether — decisions that can lower yields months down the line.
The implications extend well beyond individual farms. Reduced fertilizer application can translate into lower crop output, tightening global food supplies and putting upward pressure on prices. International organisations have already warned that disruptions to fertilizer markets pose a meaningful risk to global food security, particularly in regions that are heavily dependent on imports.
These are not projections about the distant future. The planting decisions being made — or not made — right now will determine what is on shelves in 12 months’ time.
A system built without buffers
What the Hormuz crisis has exposed is something that anyone working in food systems, sustainability, or supply chain resilience has known for years: our global food infrastructure has optimised relentlessly for efficiency and almost never for resilience.
Because fertilizer lacks the strategic infrastructure built around oil and gas, it receives far less coordinated protection. G7 countries maintain large strategic petroleum reserves and have established mechanisms to stabilize energy markets in a crisis. There is no equivalent global system for fertilizer — no coordinated stockpiles, no formal emergency release mechanism, and no institution with the mandate to manage supply shocks in nitrogen or phosphate markets.
Governments do intervene — through subsidies, export controls, and bilateral agreements — but these responses are fragmented and often reactive.
What this should change
A ceasefire framework is now tentatively in place. The strait may reopen, prices may drop, and the headlines might eventually move on. But the structural vulnerabilities exposed by this crisis will remain, and the next shock — whether another conflict, a climate event, or a pandemic — will exploit them just as ruthlessly.
What this moment demands is not just relief policy. It demands a fundamental rethinking of how we produce food, where we source its inputs, and how much risk we have quietly embedded into a system most people never think about until the supermarket shelves are empty.
That means taking fertilizer security as seriously as energy security. It means investing in soil health, regenerative agriculture, and nutrient recycling so that the nitrogen dependency of industrial farming gradually decreases. It means rewarding farmers for building resilience into their land rather than squeezing maximum yield from minimum input.
This shift is already beginning — not at scale yet, but in pockets of innovation that point to what a more resilient system could look like.
Platforms like Agreena are channeling carbon finance into regenerative agriculture, helping farmers rebuild soil health while creating new revenue streams.
Others, like Agricarbon, are making soil carbon measurable and auditable at scale — a critical step toward valuing soil as infrastructure.
And startups such as NovFeed, a Tanzanian biotech startup founded in 2020 by microbiologist Diana Orembe, are rethinking inputs entirely, turning organic waste into high-protein feed and biofertilizers that reduce dependence on synthetic nitrogen.
These are promising signals of a more sustainable and resilient model — one that reduces dependence on fragile global inputs rather than doubling down on them.
Fuel may cool. Food won’t
Fuel prices will stabilise, but the food reckoning is just beginning. We need to be honest with ourselves: the cheap, abundant food of recent decades was not a natural state. It was a product of extraordinarily stable global systems — systems that are now, clearly, neither stable nor guaranteed.
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