The war that closed the Strait of Hormuz in late February did not stop at the waterline. Within weeks, it had reached the soil.
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Fertilizer prices jumped 20 to 30% in the first month of the conflict. Tanker traffic through Hormuz, which handles roughly one-third of globally traded fertilizers, collapsed by more than 90%. Farmers from India to East Africa are now making planting decisions for the coming season under conditions that did not exist 60 days ago.
War-risk insurance premiums for vessels near the Strait of Hormuz surged tenfold from pre-conflict levels within days of the fighting, according to Lloyd’s List. Before the conflict, a tanker valued at $120 million paid roughly $48,000 for Gulf coverage. The same vessel now faces up to $1.2 million for a single seven-day transit. The result is not just higher prices, but slower delivery times as cargoes are rerouted or delayed, tightening fertilizer availability just as farmers enter pre-planting purchase windows.
Fertilizer and modern food production
Fertilizer is one of the pillars of modern food production. When prices surge or supplies falter, food prices do not jump overnight, but they tend to show up six to nine months later at harvest. The world has seen this before. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 removed roughly 15% of global fertilizer supply and pushed food prices to their highest level in a generation.
Sri Lanka’s fertilizer ban the year before wrecked harvests and helped topple a government. Now the Hormuz closure has cut off a third of globally traded fertilizer at the start of the Northern Hemisphere planting season, with no strategic reserve and no fast substitute.
On April 8, 2026, Pakistan announced a ceasefire between the United States, Iran, and their allies, with the Strait of Hormuz set to reopen under Iranian military management for an initial two-week period. Agricultural economists warn the reprieve may come too late to fully shield the 2026 planting season. Shipping insurers price coverage on risk, not diplomatic statements, Food and Agriculture Organization Chief Economist Maximo Torero said. “This logistics bottleneck has no viable workaround in the short term,” he said. Many farmers have already adjusted their 2026 planting decisions.
“The war in West Asia is already being felt far beyond the region,” Dr. Himanshu Pathak, director general of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, told The Media Line. “It is reflected in rising fertilizer prices in rural India and in the shifting planting decisions of farmers across Africa and well beyond.”
The cost of the Iran war for farmers
“Farmers are facing more expensive fertilizers alongside rising fuel costs affecting the entire agricultural value chain, including irrigation and transport,” Torero said at a UN press briefing on March 26.
The heads of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group, and the World Food Programme on April 8 issued a rare joint statement from Washington. “The Middle East war has already triggered one of the largest disruptions to global energy markets in modern history,” they said. “Sharp increases in oil, gas, and fertilizer prices, together with transport bottlenecks, will inevitably lead to rising food prices and food insecurity.” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told Reuters the same day that “all roads now lead to higher prices,” while JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned that the conflict could spur “stickier inflation.”
Turkey entered the crisis with food inflation already running at 33% annually. The shock made it worse. Gübretaş, the country’s main state fertilizer producer, reported that daily farmer demand doubled almost immediately after the West Asia conflict began, as private distributors slowed or halted sales. The government cut urea import tariffs within days. For a country that sourced nearly 40% of its urea from Oman and the Gulf in 2025, the disruption was immediate. Turkey’s position matters because it is both a large agricultural producer and a country already under inflationary strain, meaning the fertilizer shock is hitting a system with little room for error.
India’s Kharif season, the monsoon planting cycle sown in June and July and harvested in October, is now running straight into that disruption. The country imports roughly 90% of its fertilizer raw materials. Potash arrives almost entirely from abroad.
“Higher costs reduce margins, while uncertainty around supply affects planting decisions,” said Pathak, describing conditions already visible across Indian farm belts. The institute is working with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research on short-, medium-, and long-term strategies to manage the shock.
India moved quickly. The government front-loaded imports, diversified supply routes through Russia and Morocco via the Cape of Good Hope, and raised domestic urea production by 23% through emergency gas procurement. By mid-March, fertilizer stocks were at record levels: urea was up, diammonium phosphate had more than doubled, and nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium volumes were at an all-time high. India is not expected to run short of fertilizer for Kharif 2026.
But that cushion comes at a price. The danger has shifted from outright shortage to the cost of guaranteeing supply. Every extra ton now costs more to procure and more to subsidize. Potash stocks, the category most exposed to disrupted supply routes, have dipped. India’s fertilizer subsidy bill, already about $50 billion a year, is set to rise further as import costs climb.
Ashok Gulati, distinguished professor at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, has been documenting the limits of that model for months. With fertilizer subsidies already exceeding the full budget of India’s agriculture ministry, and with plants absorbing only 35 to 40% of applied urea while the rest escapes as greenhouse gases or contaminates groundwater, the crisis is reinforcing his argument that the subsidy system was already nearing its limit before Hormuz closed.
As fertilizer prices rise and supplies tighten, farmers face a simple choice: use less, or pay more. The consequences will show up later, at harvest.
Africa’s Narrow Margin
In sub-Saharan Africa, the timeline is shorter and the room for error thinner.
“The link between reduced fertilizer use and yield loss is very direct and can be observed within a single season,” Professor Tilahun Amede, director of climate adaptation, sustainable agriculture, and resilience at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, told The Media Line from Nairobi. “Most African soils are already depleted. The effect will be especially pronounced in maize—the expected yield loss is between 40 and 50%.”
The International Rescue Committee has calculated that June is the month when a food-security time bomb will begin to explode, as weak harvests caused by stalled fertilizer deliveries push millions toward extreme hunger. Transport costs for landlocked countries could rise 30 to 80%, Amede said. “The cost of importing food will rise significantly, particularly for North African countries that depend on wheat imports,” he added.
Since 1964, India’s Technical and Economic Cooperation program has trained African agricultural professionals in irrigation, soil management, and crop production, making African countries its biggest beneficiaries over six decades of South-South cooperation. The Green Revolution methods that transformed Indian yields were adapted and passed on to African partners through the same channel. Now both regions are being hit at once, and India’s ability to extend that partnership is narrowing just as Africa needs it most.
The story is not only about shortage, but about how countries try to reduce exposure to imported inputs. That is where Israel’s agricultural technology enters the picture.
For six decades, Israeli agricultural technology has been presented as an answer to farming under scarcity. The story begins in the Negev in 1959, when engineer Simcha Blass developed the first modern drip irrigation system after noticing that a single leaking pipe coupling was feeding a tree that seemed to have no other water source. The insight—that water delivered slowly and directly to the root can outperform broadcast watering—became the foundation of Israeli precision agriculture. Netafim, the company Blass and Kibbutz Hatzerim established in 1965, now operates in 110 countries. Haifa Group, founded a year later, extended the same logic from water to nutrients, developing controlled-release fertilizers and artificial-intelligence-assisted tools designed to help farmers apply less without sacrificing yield.
“Until October 7, there was a conception that we could rely on cheap imports,” said Natan Feldman, vice president for marketing and innovation at Haifa Group. “The war proved that Israel is an island economy.” Farmers across the region are making input decisions now, before large-scale deployment of those solutions is possible.
Prof. Iddo Kan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose modeling underpins Israel’s National Food Security Plan 2050, told The Media Line that precision agriculture can reduce import exposure, but not eliminate it. Israel’s plan documents 91% grain import dependency. “Food self-sufficiency is often viewed as a symbol of national resilience,” Kan said. “But our findings show that pursuing full autarky would demand vast public subsidies, reduce farm diversity, and severely impact the economic welfare of producers and consumers alike.”
His research places Israel in a category many of its own citizens rarely acknowledge: alongside Japan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates among the world’s most food-import-dependent developed economies. Fewer than 10 countries supply all of their own food. Israel is not one of them. Nor are its Abraham Accords partners.
The paradox runs through the Gulf states themselves. Saudi Arabia and Qatar together control roughly a fifth of global nitrogen fertilizer exports through SABIC Agri-Nutrients and Qatar Fertilizer Company, both of which declared force majeure as export terminals went silent and storage hit capacity. An Iranian strike two days ago set fire to SABIC’s complex in Jubail, the industrial heart of Saudi petrochemical production. Before the war, SABIC was in active talks to supply Indian procurement agencies and African agricultural development banks on long-term contracts. Those negotiations are now frozen. The Gulf states that produce the world’s fertilizer cannot feed themselves—and now they cannot export either.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor was designed to build exactly the kind of interdependence in water, energy, and food that could help buffer members against supply shocks. The Hormuz crisis has now shown that the corridor’s core infrastructure is still not operational. Gidon Bromberg of EcoPeace Middle East told The Media Line that the crisis strengthens the case for the corridor as a food-security architecture, but Saudi Arabia has conditioned the inclusion of Haifa port on real movement toward Palestinian statehood. “To what extent Israel will benefit seems to depend on responding to the very clear Saudi conditionality,” he said. In other words, the very infrastructure meant to soften regional shocks is still too incomplete, and too politically constrained, to do the job.
“Protecting upcoming cropping seasons requires coordinated measures to ensure fertilizer availability and manage price spikes,” Pathak said. Agricultural economists argue that the crisis makes structural change unavoidable: diversification toward pulses, oilseeds, and millets; precision nutrient management based on soil data; and dryland crops such as sorghum that can serve food, feed, and energy systems at the same time.
“The global food system was built on open trade and stable corridors,” said Krishna Kumar, founder and chief executive officer of CropIn. “That assumption is being tested like never before.” The science exists. The question is whether it can be deployed at the speed and scale the crisis now demands.