Iran has blocked nearly one-third of the world’s agricultural inputs via the Strait of Hormuz. Critical ingredients needed to grow food–from fertilizer feedstocks to industrial chemicals–have been prevented from moving through one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints at precisely the worst possible moment: the heart of the global planting season. The disruption has persisted for so long that even if the Strait fully reopened tomorrow, much of the damage has already occurred — it has not yet harmed Americans.
Crops that farmers never planted this year–or were planted with inadequate fertilizer–cannot simply be recovered later. Agriculture does not operate on political timelines. It operates on biological processes. Once a planting season is lost, the consequences are measured in months, sometimes years.
President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump work the rope line at the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Why Americans Haven’t Felt the Pain (Yet)
For the moment, the crisis remains largely invisible to most consumers.
The United States and many other countries are still relying on inventories built up during previous growing cycles. Grain elevators remain stocked. Grocery store shelves remain full. Food processors continue working through reserves accumulated before the war. Those inventories have created the illusion that the global food system is weathering the crisis without serious disruption.
But that illusion will not last.
As those reserves are gradually depleted over the coming months, this year’s diminished harvest will begin replacing them. If farmers harvested less because they lacked sufficient fertilizer–or because fertilizer prices became prohibitively expensive–then the global food supply inevitably contracted.
At the same time, demand does not disappear. The result is a textbook supply shock. Consumers will first notice it through steadily rising grocery bills. Eventually, depending upon how long the disruption lasts, certain products may become difficult to find altogether.
Modern Agriculture Runs on Natural Gas
The reason is straightforward. Fertilizers are the building blocks, and fertilizers depend on energy.
Nitrogen fertilizer relies upon natural gas. The Haber-Bosch process, which produces ammonia, consumes enormous quantities of natural gas as both an energy source and a chemical feedstock. Without affordable natural gas, ammonia production becomes dramatically more expensive. Ammonia gets converted into urea and other nitrogen fertilizers that farmers apply to fields around the world.
Every major grain-producing nation depends upon these products to maximize crop yields.
President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks on the economy at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York on Friday, May 22, 2026.(Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
The Strait of Hormuz has long served as one of the world’s most important export routes for natural gas. Qatar, among the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG), ships virtually all of its LNG through the Strait.
Those exports are not merely used to heat homes or generate electricity. They also underpin fertilizer production across multiple continents. When shipments are interrupted, fertilizer manufacturers feel the squeeze quickly.
The Fertilizer Crisis Is Becoming a Food Crisis
The blockade has also disrupted shipments of sulfur, another indispensable agricultural commodity.
Sulfur is a critical ingredient in the manufacture of phosphate fertilizers, which help crops develop healthy roots and improve overall yields. Phosphate, nitrogen, and potash form the three pillars of modern commercial agriculture.
Remove one of those pillars, and crop productivity inevitably declines. Remove multiple pillars simultaneously–as the Hormuz blockade has done–and the entire agricultural system collapses.
Farmers respond in only a handful of ways (because, again, this is not a policy issue; this is a biological process: the program of growing food for billions of humans worldwide).
Farmers can either pay dramatically higher prices for limited fertilizer supplies. They can reduce fertilizer application rates and accept lower yields. Or farmers can leave acreage unplanted altogether because producing a crop no longer makes sense. None of those choices produces abundant harvests.
The Inflation Pipeline Has Already Started
The effects are already becoming visible throughout global commodity markets.
Nitrogen-based products such as urea have experienced dramatic price increases since the Iran War began and the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed. Every additional increase in fertilizer costs raises the break-even point for farmers. Eventually, those higher costs are passed through every stage of the food supply chain–from grain elevators and livestock producers to food manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and finally consumers standing in supermarket checkout lines.
And let’s not even get into how the increasing price of diesel fuel alone has–and will–impact the cost of food (because most agricultural products go to market via large trucks that run on diesel fuel).
The World Bank expects fertilizer prices to remain roughly 30 percent above historical norms. That figure alone should concern policymakers. Fertilizer is not a discretionary purchase for farmers.
It is as essential to modern agriculture as diesel fuel is to trucking or electricity is to manufacturing. When fertilizer prices spike, farmers cannot simply absorb those costs indefinitely.
Either consumers ultimately pay more, or production declines.
In many cases, both occur simultaneously.
The Gray Rhino Is Charging
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that prolonged disruptions to fertilizer supplies could trigger cascading shocks throughout the global food system. Developing countries are particularly vulnerable because farmers often lack the financial resources needed to absorb higher input costs. Lower production abroad reduces export availability, further tightening global markets and placing additional upward pressure on food prices everywhere–including in the United States.
Here’s why food crises rarely arrive without warning.
Michele Wucker would call this a “gray rhino event.” That’s quite dissimilar from a “black swan event” made famous by Nassim Taleb. Whereas a black swan event is something totally out of the ordinary–an event that not even contingency planners could prepare for–the gray rhino is an event we all know is coming, but refuse to acknowledge, assuming that we have time to get out of the way.
What you’re witnessing right now with the Iran War, specifically the way in which the war has blocked the flow of these essential goods, is Wucker’s apt “gray rhino event” playing out. We’ve told ourselves it’s coming and we have time to get out of the way. But we waited too long. And are now being stampeded.
Why It’s Already Too Late to Prevent Disruptions
Food crises begin quietly, like Wucker’s stampede. Months before supermarket shelves ever appear emptier than normal. They begin with fertilizer shipments failing to arrive at ports. Then farmers delay purchases because of higher prices. We’ve gone beyond this phase of the process, by the way. Planting decisions change due to uncertainty. By the time consumers recognize that a crisis has emerged, it is too late to change course. Shortages abound.
At this rate, it doesn’t really matter if Trump manages to secure a total reopening of the Strait or not. At least some serious disruptions are now unavoidable in the coming year.
The Coming Migration Crisis
Here’s where things get really scary, too.
The United States will certainly experience shortages, price increases, and overall hardships. But the rest of the world–notably places like Latin America, Africa, and South Asia–will be especially harmed by the coming shortages. Some degree of famine is likely to hit those distant places from America. Yet Americans will experience second- and third-order effects.
In places like sub-Saharan Africa and in certain parts of Latin America, the people will refuse to stay put and starve to death. Instead, they will congeal into a human wave and move north toward countries and regions perceived to offer greater opportunity and food availability. The coming global famine resulting from the Iran War will therefore create renewed mass migration flows into the Global North. These migration waves of hungry masses of foreigners will utterly destabilize whatever order remains of the local systems. This process is what my colleague, Michael Yon, refers to as “human osmotic pressure.”
From that point, global chaos abounds. All because of the Iran War and the blockading of critical agricultural inputs via the Strait of Hormuz. Talk about unintended consequences.
About the Author:
Brandon J. Weichert is Senior National Security Editor. He also manages The Weichert Brief on Substack. Weichert also hosts “National Security Talk” on Rumble. He is the author of four bestselling national security books, the most recent of which is A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine (Encounter Books). Follow him via Twitter/X @WeTheBrandon.
