The Most Daunting Crisis in the Strait of Hormuz Is Food, Not Oil

Iran’s Strait of Hormuz is one of the most important shipping chokepoints in the entire world, and for the first time ever, it is shut (almost) completely down. A smattering of Chinese and Indian tankers have slipped through, but Iran made it clear on day one that they plan to weaponize oil prices against the West in retaliation for Trump and Israel’s already aimless war. Oil prices, the most important price of anything in the entire financial world, have started swinging around like a shitcoin, wreaking havoc on markets and turning Cassandra-curious folks like me into full on bears. Rising oil prices are bad because they cause inflation if they are sustained, and inflation bleeds into every part of your life.

But there is one thing that’s more important than the cost of living: literal sustenance.

“If we were to, let’s just say tomorrow, stop using conventional fertilizer and we converted everything back to organic and we farmed every single acre of arable land out there, they say that the earth could really only support a population of about four billion people,” said Alexis Maxwell, senior analyst on Bloomberg Intelligence’s agriculture team. “So conventional fertilizer is, I think, the most important invention to the most number of people on this planet.” She said this on a recent must-listen episode of Odd Lots where she detailed the immense upheaval this war caused in the fertilizer market at the worst possible time. The second quarter of the year, which starts next month, is when the northern hemisphere begins their planting season, and now about 33% of the world’s seaborne fertilizers find themselves behind a blockade, which jacks up prices for existing fertilizer on the market.

Urea, the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertilizer, sees about 35% of its global seaborne trade pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Around 30% of ammonia trade passes through the Strait, and about 17% of phosphate fertilizer comes from Saudi Arabia and Israel, a trade which has been disrupted by this broader war. All of these nutrients are intrinsic to how the world fertilizes its crops. The reason why so much of the world’s fertilizer supply rests in the same region as the world’s energy supply is that nitrogen fertilizer plants are “often co-located with natural gas,” said Maxwell. “Most of them are really located in places with low-cost gas because this is a competitive commodity industry. So you’ll see these plants in places like Russia, the Middle East, the United States, and China.” 

Natural gas makes ammonia, which makes nitrogen fertilizer, while sulfur, a byproduct of the Gulf’s sour crude, makes sulfuric acid, which makes phosphoric acid, which makes DAP and MAP fertilizers that fuel vital crop production like corn around the world. When an energy shock hits, by the transitive property, it becomes a food shock. 

So not only does this mean higher prices due to oil inflation, it likely means higher food prices stacked on top of that too come the fall harvest that begins in September. This is coming at a time where American farmers have already been hampered drastically by Trump’s trade war, as China, America’s largest soybean purchaser, took their soybean purchases from over $12 billion down to $0 last year before Trump bailed farmers out with $11 billion and negotiated some relief with China. American farm bankruptcies rose 46% in 2025 in large part due to drastic increases in production costs from Trump’s trade war, and this will not help the “generational” downturn in the farm economy. Total farm debt in the United States is forecast to hit a record $624.7 billion this year, and depending on how long this war with Iran lasts, that estimate could wind up being low.

But like all crimes of Western imperialism, those hardest hit will likely be in the global south. America’s own energy revolution this century has insulated itself from outside shocks like this to a degree, and there is a little more flexibility to make up for the fall in supply within our borders because we can produce our own fertilizer (but not anywhere close enough to satisfy all our demand for it). People living in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the fertilizer they use is imported, are not so lucky. 

We have already seen an episode like this in 2022, when Russia created a global energy shock when they invaded Ukraine in their own imperial war of choice. Fertilizer prices in East Africa doubled between 2020 and 2022, and the World Food Program estimated that East African cereal production fell 16% year-on-year during that period, which had a net effect of adding six to seven million people to the food-insecure population.

Unlike oil, there are no strategic reserves of fertilizer, though these repeated episodes prove there should be. Earlier this week, crude oil rapidly spiked near $120, before falling after G7 countries announced they would tap their reserves to help ease this crisis, but that does not affect fertilizer the way that producing the same amount of oil would (oil has since risen again, demonstrating how the market is skeptical that these reserves can ameliorate such an unprecedented crisis). The sulfur created by Gulf sour crude does not come with releases of oil from things like the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and that mechanism is primarily about adding supply to the market so the mismatch to demand does not create a crisis.

Fertilizer is much more ingrained in the actual processes of making things, and so when there is no market to purchase a third of the seaborne fertilizer that the world trades, the mismatch in demand and supply creates more than just a price increase. Oil shocks are opaquer in how they affect your daily life, but being able to eat dinner tonight is a much more straightforward problem. History proves that Trump and Israel’s war in Iran will lead to increased levels of food insecurity in some of the most vulnerable regions in the world.

This is where agencies like USAID could step in to try to fill some of the void to deliver nutrition that this region cannot produce thanks to one of the worst-timed wars in human history, but Elon Musk’s gleeful murder spree through the federal budget last year ensured that his hands will only become more blood soaked with time. He already has hundreds of thousands of deaths on his hands, and should Trump and Israel’s war on Iran last much longer while Iran continues to block the Strait (they have mined it which will take months to clear once they pledge to reopen it), it will create more shocks in the global south while affecting the planting season in the northern hemisphere, adding to Musk’s murderous total.

The story of the last two years is that the global elite has declared themselves unbound by the longstanding rules of humanity, self-appointed demigods among men, and they have condemned millions of people to death in order to service their own unhinged greed and hubris, and this trend is only accelerating. If we are to ever to escape this hell constructed by the most powerful people alive, they must one day be punished proportionally for their crimes, or democracy is just a fairy tale we told ourselves while we have always been trapped the land of mad Kings.