Fertilizer Industry Warns Iran War Threatens Supply Underpinning 10 Billion Weekly Meals

Two months into the U.S.-Israeli air war against Iran, the global food system is confronting a crisis that has nothing to do with bombs or missiles — and everything to do with the narrow waterway through which nearly a third of the world's fertilizer shipments once flowed.

Since the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shut down commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in late February 2026, tanker traffic through the 21-mile-wide passage has collapsed by roughly 95% [1]. An estimated 3 to 4 million tonnes of fertilizer trade per month has stalled [2], and urea — the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer on Earth — has surged from approximately $465 per metric ton to more than $700, a roughly 50% increase in two months [3].

Svein Tore Holsether, CEO of Yara International, the world's largest crop nutrition company, told CNBC in late March that the disruption puts "20 billion meals a week" at risk [4]. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has warned of a "global agrifoods catastrophe" if the strait remains closed past June [5]. And the World Food Programme estimates 45 million additional people could face acute hunger [5].

But how much of this alarm reflects genuine threat — and how much reflects an industry that stands to profit from the panic?

The Geography of Dependency

The Persian Gulf's role in global fertilizer markets is outsized. According to the International Fertilizer Association and IFPRI, Gulf-region countries account for 49% of global urea exports, 45% of sulfur exports, 29% of ammonia exports, and 20% of phosphate exports [6][7]. Iran alone produced 6.5 to 7 million tonnes of urea annually before the war, exporting 4.5 to 5.5 million tonnes — making it the largest or third-largest urea exporter in the Gulf, depending on the data source [8].

Source: IFPRI / IFA

Data as of Apr 30, 2026CSV

This concentration matters because nitrogen fertilizers, of which urea is the most common, are manufactured from natural gas. Iran's abundant, low-cost gas reserves gave its petrochemical plants a structural cost advantage that made its urea exports competitively priced across Asia, Africa, and Latin America [8].

The Hormuz closure does not only block Iranian exports. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman — which together export roughly 36% of the world's urea — all depend on the same strait to reach global markets [6]. The disruption thus affects far more fertilizer than Iran's share alone.

Tracing the Supply Chain: From Gas Wells to Grain Fields

The path from Iranian natural gas to a plate of food involves several steps. Natural gas (methane) feeds ammonia synthesis plants, which produce the building block for all nitrogen fertilizers. Ammonia is then converted to urea, ammonium nitrate, or UAN (urea-ammonium nitrate solutions), which are shipped to importing countries, sold to farmers, and applied to crops — primarily wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans [7].

Countries with the highest exposure include Brazil, which imports roughly 85% of its fertilizer, with nearly half transiting the Strait of Hormuz [1]. Brazil produces nearly 60% of global soybean exports and is a major corn and sugar exporter, meaning a fertilizer shortage there ripples through animal feed and food-oil markets worldwide [1].

Sub-Saharan Africa imports approximately 90% of its consumed fertilizer, yet applies just 22 kilograms per hectare — compared to a global average of 146 kilograms [9]. The FAO estimates that even a 10% reduction in fertilizer availability could reduce maize, rice, and wheat production in the region by up to 25% [10].

Source: FAO / FEWS NET

Data as of Apr 30, 2026CSV

India sources an estimated 20% of its fertilizer imports from the Gulf, and Pakistan depends on Qatari and Emirati LNG for both energy and fertilizer feedstock [9]. Countries like Bangladesh and Sudan source more than half their fertilizer from the Gulf [11].

The "Billions of Meals" Claim: What Does It Mean?

Holsether's "20 billion meals a week" figure — and the related headline claim of "10 billion meals" — deserves scrutiny. The calculation rests on a widely cited estimate that synthetic nitrogen fertilizers underpin roughly half of global food production [4]. With the world consuming approximately 8.2 billion people's worth of food, half of that translates to food for about 4 billion people — or, divided into three meals a day, roughly 12 to 20 billion meals per week, depending on assumptions about waste and distribution.

The underlying science is credible: a landmark study published in Nature Geoscience estimated that Haber-Bosch process nitrogen (the industrial process that converts atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia) supports approximately 48% of the global population's food supply. But the leap from "synthetic nitrogen supports half of food production globally" to "the Hormuz closure threatens 20 billion meals weekly" conflates total nitrogen dependency with the fraction that actually transits this specific chokepoint. The Gulf supplies roughly half of global urea exports, not half of global nitrogen fertilizer production. Major producers including China, the United States, Russia, and Indonesia manufacture nitrogen fertilizers domestically from their own gas supplies.

The figure functions more as a measure of total systemic dependency on industrial nitrogen than as a precise estimate of meals at risk from the current disruption.

Price Context: Bad, but Not 2022

Current fertilizer prices, while elevated, remain below the peaks reached during the 2022 Ukraine-Russia crisis. Urea hit $1,000 per metric ton in April 2022; the current price of roughly $700 represents the highest level since that spike but remains 30% below the peak [12]. DAP (diammonium phosphate) and MAP (monoammonium phosphate), key phosphate fertilizers, are trading above $700 per metric ton, up from around $583 in January 2025 [12].

Source: American Farm Bureau Federation / IFPRI

Data as of Apr 30, 2026CSV

During the 2022 crisis, warnings of imminent global famine proved overstated — food prices rose sharply but global production dipped only modestly, in part because farmers drew down soil nutrient reserves and shifted to less input-intensive crops [13]. That experience offers a partial template: short-term price shocks do not translate immediately into crop failures. However, agricultural economists emphasize that soil nutrient reserves deplete over successive seasons, meaning a second major disruption arriving only four years after the first could compound rather than replicate the earlier outcome [7].

The BLS Consumer Price Index for food stood at 346.8 in March 2026, up 2.7% year over year — elevated but not yet reflecting the full pass-through of fertilizer costs, which the WFP estimates will peak approximately four months after the onset of the disruption [11].

Source: BLS / Bureau of Labor Statistics

Data as of Mar 1, 2026CSV

Who Profits From the Crisis

The financial incentives surrounding the industry's alarm-sounding warrant attention. Yara International's expected earnings growth for 2026 has been revised upward by 25% in the past 60 days, with analysts projecting 33.5% earnings growth for the year [14]. Nutrien, the world's largest potash producer, reported $2.3 billion in net earnings and is positioned to capitalize on the price surge through its low-cost Canadian production [14]. North American producers are, according to market analysts, "the primary beneficiaries of regional price disparities" created by the fertilizer supply crisis [15].

At the same time, U.S. producers Mosaic and JR Simplot have been lobbying the Commerce Department to maintain countervailing duties on Moroccan phosphate fertilizer imports — duties that restrict an alternative supply source precisely when farmers need it most. A coalition of 64 agricultural groups urged the companies in March to withdraw their support for those duties [16]. Democratic lawmakers in a late March letter pressed the USDA to reduce fertilizer costs, and the department's deputy secretary has described the domestic fertilizer market as a "duopoly" that "lacks true competition" [16].

The USDA has also launched an investigation into fertilizer producers for potential price fixing [11].

None of this means the supply disruption is fabricated. But readers should weigh industry warnings with the understanding that the companies issuing them are posting strong profits because of the very price increases they are warning about.

Military Scenarios and Their Timelines

Fertilizer executives and analysts are modeling several escalation paths. A sustained Strait of Hormuz closure — which has now persisted for two months — directly blocks the physical transit of fertilizer cargoes. Since April 13, a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports has created what analysts describe as a "dual blockade," further complicating any resumption of trade [1].

Direct strikes on Iranian petrochemical plants — some of which have occurred during the air campaign — could permanently reduce regional production capacity [5]. Secondary sanctions on buyers of Iranian-origin fertilizer could discourage third-country importers from seeking workarounds.

The FAO has identified a three-month window from the start of the conflict — roughly ending in late May 2026 — before "risks escalate significantly, affecting global planting decisions for 2026 and beyond" [5]. The Northern Hemisphere's main planting season runs from mid-February to early May, meaning the war began at precisely the moment when farmers were making their spring fertilizer purchases [7]. For the Southern Hemisphere, a one-month war would start affecting farmers' decisions; a three-month war would reshape global production and planting patterns [11].

A wheat field deprived of nitrogen fertilizer does not produce marginally less grain — yield reductions of 30 to 50 percent are typical, depending on soil conditions [17]. The USDA's March 2026 Prospective Planting Report already projects U.S. corn and wheat acreage will fall by 3% each, with soybean acreage rising 4% as farmers shift to less fertilizer-intensive crops [11].

Alternative Supplies: Why Diversification Has Lagged

Several alternative supply sources exist, but each comes with constraints.

Morocco holds over 70% of global phosphate reserves through OCP Group and produced 30 million metric tonnes in 2024 [18]. The U.S. has been in discussions with Morocco to diversify supply since March, and OCP's phosphate and derivative exports surged 19.2% in the first three quarters of 2025 [18]. But phosphate is not nitrogen — Morocco cannot substitute for lost urea and ammonia supplies.

Russia remains the world's second-largest fertilizer exporter and has increased orders from African nations amid the Hormuz disruption [11]. EU tariffs on Russian nitrogen fertilizers, imposed after the Ukraine invasion, have redirected Russian flows to Asia and the Americas but not eliminated them from global markets [13].

Belarusian potash re-entered U.S. markets after Washington lifted sanctions in December 2025, but potash addresses a different nutrient gap (potassium) than the nitrogen deficit created by the Hormuz closure [18].

North American natural gas-based production could theoretically expand, but new ammonia plants require billions in capital investment and a minimum two-year construction timeline [11]. Domestic capacity cannot scale fast enough to offset a sudden import disruption during a planting season already underway.

The question of why importers did not diversify after the 2022 crisis has a straightforward answer: when prices fell in 2023-24, the economic incentive to invest in alternative supply chains evaporated. Gulf producers regained market share because their gas-based cost advantage made their fertilizer cheaper than alternatives once shipping normalized [13]. The same price dynamics that made Gulf fertilizer attractive in peacetime made the system fragile in wartime.

What Independent Analysts Say

The IFPRI, an independent agricultural policy research institute, has confirmed that the disruption is significant. Its analysis identifies 20-30% of global fertilizer exports as transiting the Strait of Hormuz and notes production cuts and shipping constraints have stalled millions of tonnes of trade monthly [7].

The CSIS analysis recommends short-term market stabilization, medium-term supply diversification, and long-term structural resilience investments [11]. It notes that G7 countries maintain no strategic fertilizer reserves comparable to their strategic petroleum reserves — a gap that China, which maintains national fertilizer stockpiles, does not share [11].

Agricultural economists at CGIAR and the University of Illinois have recommended structural shifts: diversification toward pulses, oilseeds, and millets; precision nutrient management using soil data; and expanded cultivation of dryland crops like sorghum [7][19]. These measures could meaningfully reduce vulnerability within 12-24 months, but none addresses the immediate spring 2026 planting crisis.

FEWS NET, the USAID-funded famine early warning system, confirmed in a March 2026 analysis that Sub-Saharan Africa's fertilizer import dependency creates acute exposure to Gulf supply disruptions, with the most vulnerable populations concentrated in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and southern Africa [9].

The Two-Month Clock

The war is now two months old. The FAO's three-month window for action closes at the end of May. Northern Hemisphere planting decisions are being made now with reduced fertilizer availability. Southern Hemisphere farmers face uncertainty about whether supplies will normalize before their planting season begins later in the year.

The food security risks are real, concentrated, and measurable. Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Brazil bear disproportionate exposure. But the scale of the threat depends on variables that remain uncertain: how long the Hormuz closure persists, whether alternative shipping routes prove viable, and whether the U.S. and Iran reach terms for any kind of humanitarian corridor.

What is already clear is that the global food system's dependence on a single 21-mile-wide chokepoint for a third of its fertilizer trade represents a structural vulnerability that two major disruptions in four years — Ukraine in 2022, Iran in 2026 — have exposed but not resolved. The question is no longer whether the system is fragile. The question is who pays the price when it breaks.