The Strait We're In

Civil Eats published this explainer on how the war is already driving up food prices, and what to do about it.

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American farmers are in trouble. Spring planting is here, and the inputs they need—urea, phosphate, the nitrogen for corn, wheat, and soy—are mostly imported from the Persian Gulf. In fact, up to 30 percent of the global fertilizer trade passes through the Gulf.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins acknowledged this trouble on Friday, telling reporters the administration is pursuing “every potential avenue” to keep fertilizer prices down. “We are very close to having an announcement on some solutions on what that looks like,” she said.

“We are getting almost all of our urea, almost all of our phosphate, almost all of our nitrogen from other countries around the world,” she said last week, “and that has to stop.”

It may have to stop, but it can’t in time for this season’s planting. Unlike oil, there is no strategic reserve for nitrogen fertilizer. Domestic producers cannot rapidly replace millions of tons of supply.

Unlike some commodity shocks that take months to reach consumers, this one is already moving—through a transmission mechanism that is central to the way we eat today and, if the petrochemical industry has its way, one that we’ll be locked into for the rest of the century.

Fluctuations in food prices closely parallel those of oil prices, with agriculture heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

Oil, Soil, and the Straight We’re In

When the Strait of Hormuz closes, here’s what happens: Energy prices spike immediately. Fertilizer prices follow. Reduced harvests come a season later. Food price inflation—at the gas station, at the grocery store, at the diner—is brought to you not by fertilizer prices, but the price of oil.

Diesel costs more, so trucking costs more, so everything on every shelf costs more. Cooking fuel prices rise and restaurants pass it on to their consumers. (A thali meal platter in India is up 10 percent this week, Bloomberg reports.) Processing and packaging, which together account for 42 percent of fossil fuel use in the food supply chain, become more expensive before a single field is planted with a gram less fertilizer.

A working-class family in Iowa paying more at the pump and more at the checkout is not in the same position as a smallholder farmer in Kenya facing a 50 percent spike in urea prices, but they have more in common with one another than they do with Iowa-based hog-farming conglomerate. Working families around the world are set to lose, while a few well-placed corporations are set to make a killing.

We have already seen what happens when fertilizer supply is interrupted. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, fertilizer prices tripled from their 2020 baseline. The mechanism was twofold: Russia and Belarus together account for roughly 40 percent of global potash exports, and Russia is also among the world’s largest urea exporters; Western sanctions disrupted that supply.

Simultaneously, Russia restricted natural gas flows to Europe, shutting down European fertilizer plants that depend on cheap gas as feedstock. The price spike came from two directions at once. Brazil’s fertilizer import bill nearly doubled. The FAO Food Price Index hit an all-time high. Millions of people were pushed toward hunger—not because of a shortage of food, but because the inputs required to grow it became unaffordable.

Up to 30 percent of the global fertilizer trade passes through the Persian Gulf, so when the Strait of Hormuz closes, energy prices spike, with fertilizer prices to follow. (Getty Images)

While the narrative was one of shared sacrifice, the reality was a massive transfer of wealth. Farmers faced a 300 percent increase in fertilizer costs. Consumers faced the highest food inflation in 40 years. But the intermediaries—the “Big Four” meatpackers, the global grain giants, the fertilizer oligopoly—banked record-breaking sums.

A Biden-era White House analysis found that the net income of the four largest meat processors surged by 500 percent since the start of the pandemic. The world’s nine largest fertilizer companies nearly doubled their profits to $49 billion in 2022, according to an analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. For CF Industries, profits rose 212 percent in 2022 even as manufacturing costs increased by just 28 percent. This was market power using conflict as an alibi to profit.

The pattern repeated downstream. A 2024 Federal Trade Commission report found that food retail profit margins did not merely rise during the pandemic—they stayed elevated long after supply shocks subsided, with markups reaching 7 percent over total costs by 2023, casting doubt on claims that retail prices were simply tracking retailers’ own rising costs.

Research from the Economic Policy Institute, covered by Civil Eats, found that corporate profits accounted for 54 percent of food price increases between 2020 and 2021—compared to just 11 percent in the four decades prior.

It’s Going To Get Worse This Year

This isn’t likely to change. The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide at its narrowest. Through it passes roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil. It is also a critical chokepoint for fertilizer. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Iran are among the world’s largest exporters of urea, the white granules that farmers spread to make crops grow.

Urea, a type of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, is made from ammonia, and ammonia is made by superheating natural gas. Virtually all synthetic nitrogen fertilizer—99 percent of the world’s supply—is derived from fossil fuels, on which most of the planet is hooked at some point in the year.

If you look at annual fertilizer flows through the strait, January is the only quiet month. The rest of the year, at least one major importing country is in its peak procurement window. In February and March, it’s Australia and East Africa. From April through June, India, Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Brazil are all buying.

“Even if the strait opened up and the war ended tomorrow, it would take weeks to reboot the supply chain.”

July through September is Brazil’s peak—the world’s single largest fertilizer importer at $13.6 billion annually—alongside Argentina and Southern Africa. October and November bring India’s second planting season, plus Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Southern Africa again. Even December catches Bangladesh’s late procurement.

Eleven of 12 months carry a major import window. There is no quiet moment in which a disruption would be consequence-free.

The countries most exposed are the ones where food already accounts for the largest share of household spending. Sub-Saharan Africa imports over 90 percent of its fertilizer, mostly from outside the continent. Fewer than a quarter of smallholder farmers have access to formal credit, so they cannot stockpile ahead of a disruption.

These are also the countries most devastated by the collapse of USAID and the collapse of World Food Programme funding from Western donors—the institutions of which I’m a critic, but which would nonetheless offer a short-term buffer for exactly these shocks.

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Even if the strait opened up and the war ended tomorrow, it would take weeks to reboot the supply chain. Behind this, though, is a more pernicious long-term trend, one that will make us more, not less, vulnerable to fossil-fueled disruptions in the food system.

It’s Going To Get Worse Next Year

Fuel to Fork, a report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (I am one of its panelists), lays out the full architecture. Food systems consume at least 15 percent of total global fossil fuel use—a figure that exceeds the steel industry. Roughly 40 percent of all petrochemicals produced worldwide end up in food systems, primarily as synthetic fertilizers on farms and as plastic in food and beverage packaging.

As the clean energy transition reduces fossil fuel demand in transport and power, the oil and gas industry is increasingly turning to petrochemicals—particularly fertilizers and food-grade plastics—as its growth frontier. Petrochemicals are on track to become the single-largest driver of oil demand growth, accounting for nearly half of all growth by 2050. The food system is where Big Oil plans to park its future.

This will worsen the feedback loop. When fossil fuel prices spike, fertilizer and food prices spike in tandem. The corporations that profit from the system—both fossil fuel companies and the agrochemical giants that depend on them—have every incentive to maintain it. And as the 2022 profiteering numbers make plain, they do.

The False Fixes

Industry’s preferred responses—greenwashed alternatives, especially—deserve our skepticism.

“Green” ammonia is produced using hydrogen generated via electrolysis powered by renewable electricity, combined with nitrogen from the air—in principle, a zero-carbon process. “Blue” ammonia uses conventional natural gas production but pairs it with carbon capture and storage, reducing emissions without eliminating fossil fuel use. Both are real technologies.

Neither is remotely at scale: less than one percent of global ammonia is currently produced through either pathway. Of all ammonia projects planned in the United States, 95 percent are based on conventional fossil fuels.

“The corporations that profit from the system—both fossil fuel companies and the agrochemical giants that depend on them—have every incentive to maintain it.”

Converting to green ammonia would require 24 times more electricity than current production—roughly five percent of global electricity—along with 30 times more land and 50 times more water. And even if you cleaned up production entirely, 60 percent of fertilizer-related greenhouse gas emissions occur after the fertilizer is applied to fields, primarily as nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The production fix doesn’t touch the application problem.

Precision agriculture and AI-driven farming are similarly oversold. A USDA field study found that autosteered tractors can actually increase fuel use. Algorithms that calibrate fertilizer applications are typically optimized for yield per hectare, not for reducing total fertilizer volumes. The data centers that power AI farm platforms are going to double their energy demands by 2030.

What Actually Works—and What It Costs

The genuinely transformative alternatives are less glamorous, already proven, and available now—at a cost far lower than that of the war itself, which is running at roughly $1 billion per day for the U.S. military alone, with hundreds of millions more daily imposed on the rest of the world through higher food and energy prices.

Agroecological farming reduces and ultimately eliminates the need for synthetic fertilizers by working with biological nitrogen fixation, composting, crop rotation, intercropping, and the careful integration of livestock. India’s Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming program is transitioning six million farmers.

France has committed to reducing pesticide use by 50 percent. Cuba rebuilt its food system around agroecology after losing access to Soviet petrochemical imports in the 1990s—a historical precedent that should concentrate minds right now.

“Redirecting even a fraction toward agroecological transition, renewable energy on farms, and local food infrastructure would reshape the landscape.”

Rebuilding local food supply chains reduces dependency on the long-distance shipping routes that pass through chokepoints. Reducing ultra-processed food consumption has the dual benefit of cutting the most energy-intensive segment of the food chain and improving public health. (Ultra-processed foods use two to ten times more energy in production than whole foods.)

Redirecting subsidies is the policy lever that makes everything else possible. Fossil fuel subsidies have surged past $1 trillion annually globally, while nearly 90 percent of the $540 billion in annual agricultural support goes to chemical-intensive commodity crop production. Redirecting even a fraction toward agroecological transition, renewable energy on farms, and local food infrastructure would reshape the landscape. It bears repeating: the most direct way to stop hunger is to stop the war.

The suffering in Iran and the Gulf is real and immediate, as are its effects worldwide. Every day that the conflict persists is a day of choked petrochemical flows through the Straight of Hormuz, with cascading effects on food prices, from São Paulo to Nairobi to Dhaka—and on grocery bills and gas prices from Des Moines to Detroit.

The American working class and the African smallholder are not, finally, on opposite sides of this crisis. They are both downstream of a food system that was built around a substance that is running out and now controlled by a handful of states and corporations.

Yet this architecture can be changed—not through green ammonia projects in the planning phase, or algorithms optimized for yield, but through the proven, scalable practices that millions of farmers are using right now. The question is whether we will scale them before the next chokepoint closes.