When bombs drop, we tend to focus on the immediate destruction—the flattened buildings, the casualties, the refugees. But the current US-Israeli war on Iran is unleashing a quieter, slower disaster that will eventually reach almost every dinner table on earth. By launching this offensive with zero regard for the global fallout, the US and Israel haven't just sparked a regional firestorm. They’ve choked off the world’s supply of fertiliser.
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Right now, the global agricultural supply chain is buckling. The poorest countries are staring down the barrel of famine, while wealthier nations are bracing for a massive spike in the cost of basic groceries. As Al Mayadeen News recently reported, citing the German-based Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), the conflict is driving a vicious surge in fertiliser prices, proving exactly how Western-led military escalation destroys the very foundations of global food production.
To grasp the scale of this mess, you have to look at where our farming chemicals actually come from. The Gulf region, specifically the waters around the Strait of Hormuz, is the absolute centre of the global fertiliser trade. This narrow chokepoint has been effectively shut down by the war.
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The Gulf pumps out nearly half of all traded urea—the workhorse nitrogen fertiliser used by farmers everywhere—alongside massive quantities of ammonia and sulphur. These aren't optional extras for modern farming; they are the fundamental building blocks. Nitrogen forces crops to grow and pushes yields higher, while phosphate builds strong roots.
The US-Israeli offensive has wrecked this system in two distinct ways.
First, there's the physical blockade. Ships loaded with fertiliser simply cannot leave the Gulf. The Fertilizer Institute has noted that dozens of vessels packed with vital agricultural supplies are just sitting in the water, going nowhere. Al Mayadeen highlighted that thousands of refrigerated shipping containers are currently trapped in the region, triggering severe shortages for agricultural exporters across South America and Asia.
Second, the war has caused the cost of natural gas to spike. Since natural gas is a crucial ingredient for making fertiliser, manufacturing plants around the world have been forced to either slash their output or shut their doors completely.
The timing is catastrophic. This supply shock has hit right in the middle of the spring planting season across the Northern Hemisphere. Farmers need to spread fertiliser right before or during planting. If it turns up a month late, the crops miss their vital growth window, and the harvest fails.
Unsurprisingly, panic has set in. Terrified of domestic shortages and angry voters, major producers like China, Russia, and Turkey have slammed the brakes on their own exports. China, which controls half of the world's fertiliser inventory, has severely tightened its export rules. They are pulling the ladder up, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.
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With nearly 45% of the world's traded nitrogen either cut off or at severe risk, prices have gone through the roof. Global urea prices jumped 60% in just a few weeks. Down in Australia, farmers are dealing with costs up to four times higher than what they paid before the pandemic.
Philipp Spinne, managing director of the German Raiffeisen Association, laid out the grim reality. He noted that mineral fertilizer prices have already climbed 30% to 40% since the start of the year. He warned that the market is rapidly approaching the panic levels seen at the start of the Ukraine war.
A situation similar to what happened in February 2022 is recurring,
Spinne said, pointing to the aggressive spike in nitrogen prices.
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The most brutal consequences of this US-Israeli military adventurism won't be felt in Washington or Tel Aviv. They will hit the developing world, where the threat isn't just inflation—it's starvation. Poorer nations across Asia and Africa rely heavily on Gulf fertiliser imports and simply don't have the cash to outbid wealthy Western countries for whatever supply is left.
Nations like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are looking at massive deficits, losing millions of tonnes of urea every single week. In Africa, the situation is desperate. For smallholder farmers, buying fertiliser at these inflated prices is impossible.
When farmers can't buy fertiliser, they use less of it, which guarantees lower crop yields and failed harvests. Even a brief delay in applying nutrients can wipe 4% off a maize harvest—a margin of error that subsistence communities simply do not have. The World Trade Organization has labelled the fertiliser shock the "number one alert today," issuing a blunt warning that people will die of hunger if these countries can't get the imports they need.
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While the Global South faces famine, wealthier nations are staring down a massive economic hit. Eric Byer, president of the Alliance for Chemical Distribution, didn't mince words:
We're now getting very close to the point where you're going to see the price of everything start going up.
American farmers are already feeling the squeeze. Three of the world's top ten producers of urea and anhydrous ammonia are based in West Asia, and US urea prices have spiked by roughly 50 percent since late February.
If this continues on, this will be an issue for all corn growers for the 2027 crop,
warned Krista Swanson, chief economist of the National Corn Growers Association.
In the UK, the crisis has brutally exposed how fragile food security really is. Right now, the UK is only 62% self-sufficient in food. It relies on imports to cover nearly 40% of what we eat. Worse still, its agricultural sector is hopelessly addicted to foreign inputs. The UK imports around 60% of its nitrogen fertiliser, having foolishly scaled back domestic manufacturing over the years.
This leaves British farming entirely at the mercy of global shocks. The war has already pushed the price of red diesel—the fuel that keeps farm machinery running—up by 60%. Meanwhile, fertiliser costs have surged by roughly £50 per tonne compared to early 2025. It’s a double blow for British farmers who were already operating on razor-thin margins.
We have to hammer home who is responsible for this. The US and Israel chose to launch a devastating war on Iran, completely ignoring how their geopolitical games would wreck the global food supply. Or did they know and not care? Or even worse, is this a desired outcome??
This war has laid bare a terrifying truth: the global food system is dangerously fragile. We cannot allow aggressive military actions by the US and Israel to dictate whether billions of people get to eat. Until we build resilient, local agricultural systems, we remain entirely vulnerable. And as long as this unjust war continues, the fertiliser crisis will only deepen, dragging the world further toward mass hunger. How do you think we can build more resilient food systems.
