The Next Global Food Crisis Has Already Begun: How Blocked Fertilizer Shipments and a Fading La Niña Are Locking In 2026 Harvest Losses

The Strait of Hormuz crisis has detonated one of the most severe shocks to global agricultural supply chains in a generation. With spring planting underway across the Northern Hemisphere and fertilizer inventories draining by the day, the food inflation of 2026–2027 is not a forecast—it is already being written in empty bags and dry fields.

Consider a smallholder in Bihar, India’s most agriculturally precarious state, preparing her Kharif fields in late spring. She has been waiting weeks for her urea allocation. The bags that arrived were fewer than ordered and cost nearly a third more than last season. She will plant anyway—she has no choice—but she will apply less fertilizer than the crop needs. Across South Asia, across the Sahel, across the river deltas of Bangladesh, millions of farmers are making exactly the same quiet, devastating calculation. The harvest they shortchange today is the food crisis of 2027.

The trigger is by now well-documented but insufficiently understood in its full systemic depth. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran. Within days, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed by more than 90 percent, as Iranian drone strikes on commercial shipping drove every major insurer to withdraw war-risk coverage. Without insurance, no captain runs a vessel worth hundreds of millions of dollars through a contested chokepoint for a cargo of fertilizer. The economics are brutally simple.

What has not been simple to convey to policymakers—or to a public still fixating on oil prices—is that the Hormuz closure is not merely an energy shock. As FAO Chief Economist Máximo Torero put it bluntly at a UN press briefing in late March: “This is not only an energy shock. It is a systematic shock affecting agrifood systems globally.” The distinction matters enormously, and it is one the world has not yet fully reckoned with.

The Fertilizer Chokepoint Nobody Planned For

Most people understand the Strait of Hormuz as an oil artery. What they do not understand is that it is equally a food artery.

Up to 30 percent of internationally traded fertilizers normally transit the Strait. The Gulf region—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Iran, and Bahrain—accounts for roughly a third of global urea exports and around 20 to 30 percent of ammonia exports. The region also produces nearly half of the world’s traded sulfur, a byproduct of oil and gas refining that is essential for converting phosphate rock into the water-soluble fertilizer plants can absorb. When the Gulf goes dark, it does not just switch off the lights. It pulls out the nutrients from under the world’s crops.

The numbers are already stark. Benchmark urea prices have surged approximately 30 percent in a single month, according to Carnegie Endowment analysts Noah Gordon and Lucy Corthell, who identified the cascading second-order effects even before markets had fully priced them in. At ports like New Orleans, urea is now trading above $600 per metric ton; diammonium phosphate and MAP have crossed $700 per metric ton. Fitch Ratings has raised its full-year 2026 ammonia and urea price expectations by around 25 percent. The World Bank’s commodity market data shows urea prices surging nearly 46 percent month-on-month between February and March—a shock comparable in speed, if not yet in magnitude, to the worst weeks of the 2022 Ukraine fertilizer crisis.

There is a cruel asymmetry in who bears this cost. The United States produces roughly three-quarters of the fertilizer it consumes and is partially insulated. But Brazil imports more than 80 percent of its fertilizers, relying heavily on Gulf-sourced nitrogen and phosphate. Ethiopia sources almost all of its nitrogen fertilizer through Gulf supply routes and is confronting acute shortages at its most critical planting juncture. India—the world’s second-largest agricultural economy and a country where smallholder farmers operate with razor-thin margins—faces reduced domestic nitrogen fertilizer output precisely as its Kharif season approaches. Bangladesh’s fertilizer plants have paused operations as LNG prices have spiked. Schools in Pakistan have closed as energy supply falters.

The interconnection that makes this crisis uniquely insidious is the natural gas link. Nitrogen fertilizers—urea, ammonium nitrate, UAN—are synthesized from ammonia, which requires enormous volumes of natural gas both as feedstock and energy. European gas prices have surged 50 to 75 percent since the conflict began. Egypt, a major nitrogen fertilizer producer that had partially compensated for Gulf supply losses during the 2022 Ukraine crisis, has now lost its pipeline gas imports from Israel and must compete on the now-devastated LNG spot market. The secondary circuit has blown. There is no obvious compensating supplier.

A Lingering Climate Hangover

The fertilizer shock does not arrive in isolation. It lands on agricultural systems already stressed by a protracted La Niña episode that, while weaker than the 2020–2022 triple-dip event, left distinctive fingerprints on key growing regions before its recent fade.

Through the first quarter of 2026, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center confirmed La Niña persisted, albeit in a weakened state, with its atmospheric circulation patterns carrying through into the early Northern Hemisphere spring with a characteristic lag. For South America, the pattern reinforced dryness risk across parts of Argentina’s eastern corn belt and southern Brazil’s second-crop maize, precisely the safrinha crop that accounts for the bulk of Brazil’s annual maize production. Forecasters including Dr. Michael Cordonnier maintained cautious uncertainty on Argentine soybean estimates through January, noting that the La Niña-driven dryness risk, while not catastrophic, remained live.

Drought in parts of the U.S. central and southern Plains, which lingered from a dry late 2025 and which La Niña conditions reinforced into early 2026, has stressed the hard red winter wheat crop. The FAO’s March 2026 Cereal Price Index noted international wheat prices rising 4.3 percent in a single month, supported by “deteriorating crop condition ratings in the United States amid drought concerns and expectations of reduced plantings in Australia in response to anticipated higher fertilizer costs.” That phrase—”reduced plantings in response to higher fertilizer costs”—deserves more attention than it has received. It is a direct supply-side feedback loop: the Hormuz crisis is now reshaping what farmers in the Southern Hemisphere will choose to plant in the second half of 2026.

La Niña’s precise contribution is not the dominant story here, and it would be analytically dishonest to inflate it. Meteorologists and agricultural scientists broadly concur that the current episode has been relatively mild compared to its predecessors, and the transition to ENSO-neutral and possibly El Niño conditions through mid-2026 should bring relief to South American and some East African growing areas. But two important caveats apply. First, the timing of that transition matters acutely: a lagged atmospheric response means La Niña’s influence lingers into the Northern Hemisphere planting window even after Pacific Ocean temperatures have normalized, exactly as the USDA’s ENSO advisory for spring 2026 warned. Second, and more consequently, a late-developing El Niño carries its own risks for the western Pacific Rim—drought in parts of Australia, Southeast Asia, and southern Africa—arriving precisely as the fertilizer shock is biting hardest into 2026–27 crop cycles.

The climate and geopolitical shocks are not additive. They are multiplicative. A farmer who cannot afford fertilizer is far more vulnerable to a drought stress event than a well-nourished crop. The margin for error has narrowed catastrophically.

Why This Crisis Is Different From 2022

It has become fashionable to invoke the 2022 Ukraine shock as the reference point for the current crisis. The comparison is instructive but dangerous if it breeds complacency.

In 2022, the primary disruption was to grain exports: Russia and Ukraine together accounted for roughly 29 percent of global wheat exports, and their simultaneous exit from global markets caused a supply panic that drove wheat prices up over 70 percent. Fertilizer prices also spiked sharply, but the shock was diffuse—the price transmission to food was visible within weeks because wheat itself was the missing commodity.

The 2026 Hormuz disruption follows a different and in some respects more treacherous logic. As analysts at the University of Illinois’s farmdoc daily noted, the Persian Gulf is not a major grain export region, so the Hormuz closure primarily increases fertilizer costs rather than directly removing grain from the market. Crop futures moved upward after the initial shock but modestly—corn and soybean futures rose only 3.6 to 8 percent in the first two weeks, compared to the 70 percent-plus wheat surge in 2022.

This relative calm in grain futures is precisely the danger. It suggests markets are pricing the current crisis as a cost shock to inputs rather than an immediate supply shock to outputs. They are correct—for now. But fertilizer is not a commodity that can be substituted overnight. A farmer who under-applies urea at planting cannot compensate at harvest. The yield reduction is baked in at the moment the bag stays on the shelf. And because fertilizer use follows a nonlinear yield response, even modest reductions—say, 10 to 15 percent fewer kilograms per hectare applied by cost-squeezed smallholders—can produce disproportionately large declines in output, particularly in regions where nutrient application is already far below agronomic optimum. This is the amplifier that the grain futures desks are not fully pricing.

If the disruption persists for three months or longer, FAO projects reduced yields for wheat, rice, and maize, crop substitution toward nitrogen-fixing legumes, and escalating competition between food crops and biofuel feedstocks as elevated oil prices stimulate ethanol and biodiesel demand. The 2022 food crisis peaked visibly and painfully within six months of the Ukraine invasion. The 2026 crisis will peak more quietly, and somewhat later—perhaps not until the 2026–27 harvest season—but with consequences no less severe for those at the bottom of the global income distribution.

The World Food Programme estimates that the conflict could push 45 million additional people into acute hunger by mid-2026. That is a figure that deserves to be read slowly.

The Architecture of Neglect

Every major food supply chain crisis—1973, 2008, 2011, 2022—has, in its aftermath, prompted confident declarations that the international community has learned its lesson and will build resilience. Every declaration has quietly dissolved under the pressure of competing budget priorities and market complacency during the long, calm years that follow.

The Hormuz crisis has exposed four specific architectural failures that go beyond this particular conflict.

The strategic reserve asymmetry. G7 countries do not maintain strategic fertilizer reserves to match their oil stockpiles. This is not an oversight—it reflects a deliberate political economy in which energy security has powerful industrial lobbies and food security has smallholder farmers who are voiceless in international forums. Saudi Arabia built a pipeline to enable Red Sea exports of oil when the Hormuz chokepoint is threatened. There is no equivalent pipeline for ammonia, and there are no globally coordinated ammonia stockpiles. The food system has been treated, implicitly, as a residual claim on energy infrastructure rather than as independent strategic infrastructure of its own.

The insurance failure. War-risk insurance premiums surged from 0.25 percent to as high as 10 percent of vessel value, resetting weekly, within days of the Hormuz disruption. Even if the conflict ends tomorrow—and the Security Council vote on Bahrain’s proposal to mandate open passage remains deadlocked as of this writing—the insurance industry will require months of incident-free sailing before normalizing premiums. One industry expert estimated that even a rapid diplomatic resolution would take months before maritime trade returns to normal shipping capacity. The planting season does not wait for insurers.

The China paradox. Even before the Iran war, China had been restricting fertilizer exports to protect its own farmers. China’s self-sufficiency in fertilizers was supposed to make it a buffer; instead, its export restrictions amplify global scarcity. Beijing needs Brazil to grow soybeans to feed Chinese livestock. Brazil needs Gulf urea to grow those soybeans. The Gulf is blocked. The interdependence is total and the safety valve does not exist.

The just-in-time delusion. The 2022 Ukraine shock was supposed to cure the world of just-in-time supply chain management in strategic commodities. It manifestly did not. Fertilizer inventories globally were at comfortable but not exceptional levels when the Hormuz disruption hit; the 40 to 60 day supply buffer that most import-dependent countries held has been eroding since early March. Countries like Ethiopia, which sources essentially all of its nitrogen fertilizer via Gulf supply routes, had no meaningful buffer at all.

What Must Change

The immediate priority, as the International Crisis Group’s Comfort Ero has argued, is a humanitarian transit deal through the Strait of Hormuz that allows food and fertilizer shipments to pass regardless of the military situation. Iran’s partial concessions—allowing vessels from China, Russia, India, Iraq, Pakistan, and several Southeast Asian nations to transit, and agreeing to a UN request for humanitarian and fertilizer shipments—are welcome but fragile and selective. What is needed is a robust, institutionally anchored mechanism analogous to the Black Sea Grain Initiative of 2022, covering all flag states and backed by a credible monitoring framework. The UN task force announced in early April is a starting point, not a solution.

Beyond the immediate crisis, three structural shifts deserve serious international investment.

Fertilizer diplomacy must become food diplomacy. The G7, G20, and major multilateral lenders need to treat fertilizer supply chains with the same strategic seriousness they apply to oil and semiconductor supply chains. This means coordinated strategic reserves, early-warning systems linked to ENSO forecasts, and pre-negotiated alternative routing agreements before the next chokepoint fails—not after.

Green ammonia deserves urgent acceleration, not because it is cheap, but because geography-based vulnerability demands it. The FAO’s long-term recommendation for green ammonia is not a climate fantasy—it is a food security hedge. Distributed production of nitrogen fertilizers, decoupled from Gulf gas fields, is the structural answer to geographic concentration risk. Every dollar invested in green ammonia production in Africa, South Asia, or Latin America is a dollar of insurance against the next Hormuz closure.

Smallholder resilience cannot be an afterthought. The farmer in Bihar who is applying less urea to her Kharif field right now will not generate a headline. She will not appear in a futures market report. But she—and the 300 million smallholders like her across Asia and Africa—is where the food crisis actually lives. Emergency credit facilities, targeted subsidy deployment, and climate-smart agronomic support that reduces fertilizer dependency through precision application and nitrogen-fixing cover crops are not soft development investments. They are the front line of food price stability for the entire world.

The FAO Food Price Index reached 128.5 points in March 2026, its second consecutive monthly increase, driven by energy-related pressures now bleeding into every agricultural commodity group. It remains below the terrifying peak of March 2022. But the gap is closing, and it is closing for structural reasons—reasons that will not reverse when a ceasefire is eventually signed and the drones stop flying over the Strait.

The food crisis of 2026–2027 will not announce itself with a single dramatic headline. It will arrive, as it always does for the world’s poorest, in the slow accumulation of empty shelves, skipped meals, and fields that yielded less than they should have—because the bag of urea arrived too late, cost too much, or never arrived at all. We have been warned. The question is whether the warning will be heard before the harvest, or only after it.