MICHAEL SNYDER/
If commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains paralyzed for months, we will witness a global food crisis on a scale that many experts would have once considered to be unthinkable. Over the past couple of weeks, there has been much written about how the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused the price of oil to rise, has caused the price of natural gas to soar to insane levels and has caused the average price of diesel in the United States to jump above five dollars a gallon. But I think that the bigger story is what the closure of the Strait of Hormuz could mean for global food supplies.
Normally, approximately one-third of all globally-traded nitrogen fertilizer and approximately one-half of all globally-traded sulfur passes through the Strait of Hormuz...
Another world crisis sparked by the war in Iran may also be in the offing. That's because the region's oil and gas production has made it one of the world's leading exporters of nitrogen fertilizers, which are indispensable to the global food system. To produce the chemicals used to grow much of the planet's crops, natural gas is broken down to extract hydrogen, which is combined with nitrogen to make ammonia, and then mixed with carbon dioxide to make urea. All told, nearly a third of the global trade for nitrogen fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, while almost half of the world's sulfur, essential in producing phosphate fertilizers, also travels through the corridor.
Reading that should chill you to the core.
But that is just part of the story.
Fertilizer producers in other countries will also be forced to shut down if they are not able to get the liquified natural gas that normally comes to them through the Strait of Hormuz...
Already, fertiliser plants in India and Pakistan are facing production declines given the disruption to natural gas supplies from the Middle East. Gulf countries targeted in the war supply nearly all of Pakistan's LNG imports, 72% of Bangladesh's and 53% of India's.
Even if deescalation occurs, the conflict has likely locked in a food price hike in the coming months. The longer the war continues, the greater the shock to food security as energy and fertiliser prices remain elevated.
What we are facing is truly a global problem.
A farmer in Virginia named John Boyd recently admitted to NBC News that local dealers are telling him that "we can't get the fertilizer" that he needs...
John Boyd Jr., a fourth-generation farmer in Virginia who grows soybeans, corn and wheat, said his fertilizer supplier recently warned him that shipments may not arrive as expected.
"The dealers are telling me we can't get the fertilizer," Boyd told NBC News in an interview this week. "Due to the war and the bombing through that area, the fertilizer isn't moving."
Fertilizer is essential to food production, he said, and it must be applied before crops are planted.
"If I don't apply fertilizer, that means I won't have the yields to make my crop," Boyd explained.
If one U.S. farmer can't grow enough, that isn't a big deal.
But if hundreds of thousands of U.S. farmers can't grow enough, that will be a full-blown national crisis.
Stacy Simunek, the president of the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, is warning that we really are facing a worst-case scenario...
The war in Iran has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping route not only for oil and gas, but also for fertilizers needed to produce the world's food.
"We cannot grow without it. There is absolutely no way you get around it," said Stacy Simunek, president, Oklahoma Farm Bureau.
If farmers do not grow our food, we do not eat.
The U.S. is actually in better shape than much of the rest of the world, because we produce much of the fertilizer that we use.
But as Simunek has very aptly observed, if this crisis in the Middle East results in a major global fertilizer shortage, there is no way that we are going to be able to feed the entire world...
"Who's going to feed us? Where are we going to get the food to eat? Where are we going to feed the world? This is critical," said Simunek.
Already, hundreds of millions of people around the world go to bed hungry every night.
So a very large disruption to global food production would push us very deep into nightmare territory.
Today, approximately half of the population of the world eats food that is grown using nitrogen fertilizer...
About 4 billion people on the planet eat food grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Roughly half of the global population, in other words, is alive because of these chemicals converted into nutrients for plants, said Lorenzo Rosa, who researches sustainable energy, water, and food systems at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.
Spring planting season in the northern hemisphere is rapidly approaching.
The fertilizer that would normally be traveling through the Strait of Hormuz now would get into the hands of farmers around the middle of April.
But that isn't going to happen, and that means that a lot of farmers around the world are simply not going to have the fertilizer that they need in 2026.
China produces more fertilizer than anyone else, and there was hope that they could help ease the potential global supply shock that we are facing, but instead they have chosen to implement very strict restrictions on fertilizer exports...
China is tightening controls on fertilizer exports as disruptions linked to the conflict in Iran ripple through global crop-nutrient markets and push prices higher. Authorities have asked exporters to halt outbound shipments of nitrogen-potassium fertilizer blends while reiterating existing restrictions on urea exports, according to people familiar with the matter. The steps appear aimed at protecting domestic supply and stabilizing prices as farmers prepare for the spring planting season, a period when demand typically peaks in the country's vast agricultural sector.
People familiar with the situation said the latest directives have effectively paused overseas shipments of most fertilizer types, including compound varieties that had still been moving abroad after China loosened some urea limits last year. One key exception is ammonium sulfate, which accounted for about half of the country's fertilizer shipments last year and remains unaffected for now.
The Chinese want to make sure that they have enough fertilizer for themselves.
A global scramble for what is available has begun, and nobody can blame the Chinese for putting themselves first.
But what is the rest of the world supposed to do?
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