How war in the Middle East could sow hunger

The longer the conflict in the Middle East continues, the greater the likelihood that people around the globe will pay more for food. And those in the most vulnerable countries could face hunger.
The Arabian Gulf is a dominant source of fertiliser. Though the region is best known as a prodigious source of oil and natural gas, its abundance of energy has spurred the development of factories that make the raw materials for many types of fertiliser, especially those that deliver nitrogen.
Nitrogen fertilisers are essentially natural gas reconfigured as plant nutrients. They nourish crops that yield roughly half the world’s food supply.
For now, most factories in the Arabian Gulf that make nitrogen fertilisers are continuing to produce them.
But delivering their wares to farmers is suddenly impossible, given the effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel linking the Gulf to the Indian Ocean.
The cessation of marine traffic on the strait is the primary reason that oil and gas prices have surged. If the waterway remains off limits, prices for key fertilisers, and the chemicals used to make them, will go up. That could prompt farmers to limit their application, reducing the world’s food supply while making sustenance less affordable.
“It’s bad — there’s no other way of putting it,” said Chris Lawson, vice-president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a London-based research and data firm focused on commodities. “The world is highly reliant on fertiliser and associated raw materials supplied out of that region.”
War has a way of exposing vulnerabilities that arise from interconnection. Four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the world gained a wrenching lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries were substantial sources of wheat and other grains. Shortages of bread soon emerged from West Africa to South Asia.
Russia and Ukraine also produce significant quantities of fertiliser. The enduring conflict made those products scarce, driving up prices and prompting farmers to conserve their use of fertiliser. The result was depleted harvests.
The latest upheaval in the Middle East does not affect the harvesting of grain, but its impacts for fertiliser may be even more profound.
“The volumes are greater this time around, potentially, than in the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” said Sarah Marlow, global editor for fertilisers at Argus Media, a news and data service focused on commodities. “You’ve got multiple producing countries.”
Fertilisers can be divided into three basic types that deliver particular nutrients to soils: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Five primary fertiliser exporters — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Bahrain — rely heavily on the Strait of Hormuz to export their wares.
Collectively, these countries supply more than one-third of the world’s trade in urea, the dominant form of nitrogen fertiliser, as well as nearly one-fourth of another type, ammonia, according to data compiled by the International Fertilizer Association, a trade group based in London. The same five countries produce nearly one-fifth of phosphate fertilisers.
One major source of urea, QatarEnergy, halted production this past week when it lost access to natural gas after strikes from Iranian drones and missiles. Other factories are continuing to make urea, stockpiling it near ports and waiting for shipping to restart.
“No one knows how long this could go on and still have enough storage,” said Laura Cross, director of market intelligence at the International Fertilizer Association.
Some view the evolving crisis confronting agriculture as a warning sign about excessive reliance on a handful of fertiliser producers to satisfy humanity’s need for calories.
The pandemic exposed the risks of depending on a single country, China, for basic ingredients for medicines. The upheaval in the Middle East has underscored the dangers of relying on the Arabian Gulf for oil and gas, prompting talk that countries must move faster to deploy renewable sources of energy like wind and solar. And the disruption of the fertiliser industry is a reminder that the same volatile region is a vital part of the world’s food supply.
“The long-term solution is not to be dependent on fertiliser that has to be trafficked through Strait of Hormuz,” said Raj Patel, a political economist and expert in sustainable food at the University of Texas at Austin. “We have become rather hooked on these imports.”
One potential solution, he added, is found in India and Brazil, where governments have encouraged farmers to slash their application of imported fertilisers by diversifying their crops and adding locally available nutrients to soils.