What’s happening in the Middle East can seem very far away — at least until you stop for gas. Prices at the pump have jumped since Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the conflict, creating a gap in the energy supply chain that spans the world.
It’s a reminder that war has profound effects on all those who are connected to it. And we are all connected to it, somehow.
The longer the conflict in the Middle East continues the greater the likelihood that people around the globe will pay more for food. And those in the most vulnerable countries could face hunger.
The Persian Gulf is a dominant source of the world’s fertilizers, especially those that deliver nitrogen to soils — a source of nourishment for crops that amount to half the world’s food.
Fertilizer is produced in the region and shipped … everywhere. If the Strait of Hormuz remains strangled, prices for fertilizer will rise. And as a result, farmers may use less on their crops, if they can get any at all. The world will get less food, and it will cost more.
We saw this happen at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, when the world received a lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries provided the world with substantial quantities of wheat and other grains. Without them, bread shortages soon developed in West Africa and South Asia, among other places.
The Middle East won’t affect the harvesting of grain. But the effects of a fertilizer shortage, or more expensive fertilizer, may be even more intense. The volumes are greater this time around, potentially, than in the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — supply more than a third of the world’s urea, an important nitrogen fertilizer, and nearly a quarter of another one, ammonia.
And they all use the Strait of Hormuz to export their products.
Farmers in the Northern Hemisphere, who will soon need fertilizer to boost their spring crops. Where might they get it? China’s the most obvious alternative. But last year the Chinese government imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizer, in part to shield its farmers from just the sort of geopolitical chaos this war brought on.
Prices are already climbing. Over the past week, the price of urea sold in Egypt, a market that economists track closely, climbed more than 35 percent. If the trend continues, governments across the Global South could need to subsidize the cost of growing crops. And that could add to their debt burdens.
The long-term solution is not to be dependent on fertilizer that has to be trafficked through Strait of Hormuz. We have become hooked on these imports.
Those hooks are everywhere, once you start looking for them. War is hell on us all.
