The Hormuz Crisis Isn't an Oil Story. It's a Fertilizer Story. And No One Built a Reserve.

Mostak Ali farms 33 bighas of Boro rice paddy in Lalmonirhat, a district in northern Bangladesh. Every day during planting season, he needs 13 liters of diesel to run his irrigation pump. Under fuel rationing triggered by the Hormuz crisis, he's allowed two. He travels 12 kilometers to get them. This detail, reported by The Daily Star⁶, is a small story that contains the architecture of a very large catastrophe.

Since February 28, 2026, when the US and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran and Tehran retaliated by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, global attention has been locked onto oil prices. Brent crude hit $126 per barrel at its peak², nearly doubling from January. The IEA coordinated the largest strategic petroleum reserve release in history. Gas prices in America briefly touched $4.05 a gallon. All of this has dominated front pages.

But I think the more consequential crisis is happening in the soil — and it's one that no strategic reserve can fix.

The strait isn't just an oil pipeline. It's a fertilizer artery. Up to 30% of internationally traded fertilizers¹ normally transit through Hormuz. The Gulf region accounts for 36% of global urea exports³, with Iran and Qatar as the two largest exporters. QAFCO, Qatar's state fertilizer company, alone supplies 14% of the world's urea⁴ from a single production site. And the region provides close to 50% of globally traded sulfur³, a critical feedstock for phosphate fertilizers.

When tanker traffic through Hormuz collapsed by more than 90%¹ within days of the escalation, this didn't just spike energy prices. It physically bottlenecked roughly 3 to 4 million tonnes of fertilizer per month¹² from reaching global markets. FOB urea prices have surged from around $493 per metric ton to between $800 and $900¹¹, roughly doubling. Unlike oil, where the IEA coordinated releases from strategic petroleum reserves, there are no strategic fertilizer reserves². Not in any country. Not coordinated by any international body. This asymmetry is the crux of the entire problem.

Now, there's a smart counterargument I want to take seriously: energy and food aren't parallel crises. They're the same crisis. Urea is synthesized through the Haber-Bosch process, which consumes natural gas as both feedstock and fuel — gas typically constitutes 70-90% of urea production costs. So when the Hormuz closure disrupts LNG flows, it doesn't create two separate shocks; it creates one integrated shock where energy price escalation drives fertilizer scarcity. Stabilize oil and gas markets, and you attenuate the food crisis downstream.

This argument is correct about the chemistry. It is dangerously wrong about the timing.

The problem is that crops grow on fixed calendars, and market price signals don't. Bangladesh's Boro rice season — which produces 55% of the country's annual rice⁶ — has a planting and fertilization window that runs roughly January through March. The blockade began February 28. The USDA now projects Bangladesh's Boro rice output will fall 1.4% year-on-year, with the agency explicitly attributing the decline to "disruptions in irrigation and fertiliser application resulting from fuel and fertiliser shortages"⁵. That modest-sounding percentage conceals a razor-thin margin: one expert told The Daily Star that a 20% drop in Boro production could trigger a food crisis comparable to Bangladesh's 1974 famine⁶.

The situation is no less precarious in India. Indian fertilizer plants are running at roughly half to 70% capacity⁷ due to LNG shortages. India's government front-loaded imports and diversified supply routes, stockpiling urea and DAP at record levels ahead of the June Kharif season¹⁵. But this came at enormous cost — Indian urea import bids jumped from $510 per tonne in February to nearly $950 in April¹⁶. India has the fiscal muscle to absorb this. Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Ethiopia do not. And that's the distributional catastrophe the aggregate numbers hide.

As NPR reported from Vikramgarh, India⁷, a farmer named Dashrat Lahenge couldn't find fertilizer to boost his chili yield for export. His family is picking beans at a loss — middlemen offer 10 cents a kilo when he expected 70. He says they'll still plant rice when the monsoon comes, but "in a year like this, we'll grow rice just to eat."

That single sentence captures the mechanism by which a fertilizer shock becomes a food crisis, becomes a political crisis, becomes a security problem. Farmers shift from cash crops to subsistence. Export volumes contract. Government revenues shrink. Food prices in urban markets climb. The FAO's Máximo Torero put it precisely: since fertilizer use follows a nonlinear yield response, "even modest reductions can result in disproportionately large declines in crop yields"¹.

The WFP has now projected that 45 million additional people could be pushed into acute hunger⁸ if the conflict persists through mid-year and oil remains above $100 — pushing the global total to a record 363 million. The WFP's own logistics are scrambled: food aid bound for Afghanistan through Hormuz is now being trucked from Dubai through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, across the Caspian Sea, through Turkmenistan⁹ — at triple the cost. That's not a rerouting. That's a logistical odyssey.

So what should have been done, and what still can be? The Carnegie Endowment's Noah Gordon identified the core asymmetry¹⁰: because fertilizer has less value per ton than oil, a ship captain running the Hormuz blockade prefers to carry crude. The Saudi pipeline to the Red Sea carries oil, not ammonia. Navy escorts prioritize energy tankers. Every layer of crisis infrastructure privileges the commodity that matters to rich countries over the commodity that feeds poor ones.

I think this reveals a genuine institutional failure — not because the energy-first framework is analytically wrong (the causal chain does run through energy), but because treating food security as a "downstream complement" has produced, across decades, the exact preparedness gap we're watching play out in real time. The International Fertilizer Association noted¹⁷ that nearly 18.5 million tonnes of urea were exported through Hormuz in 2024 alone. No institution maintained a buffer against the loss of that flow. Not the IEA. Not the FAO. Not the G7. Russia has begun calling on BRICS nations to build shared food reserves¹⁹, and whatever one thinks of Moscow's motives, the proposal has gained traction because the alternative — the current status quo — has no answer for a farmer in Lalmonirhat who needs urea today and cannot wait for energy markets to normalize over two quarters.

The April 17 announcement that Iran would reopen the strait offered a brief reprieve — oil prices dropped 11%². But the strait was closed again days later, and as of this writing, the US and Iran remain deadlocked in a dual blockade. Even if a deal materializes tomorrow, WFP's shipping chief estimates 1-5 months¹⁸ to untangle the cargo backlog.

Here is what I'm watching. If urea remains above $700/ton through May, the Kharif season planting decisions being made right now across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh will lock in reduced yields that show up as food price spikes in Q4 2026 and Q1 2027. That's the delayed-fuse consequence nobody is pricing in yet. The American Farm Bureau Federation has already warned¹⁴ that US farmers are shifting acreage from corn to soybeans because nitrogen fertilizer is too expensive — meaning the grain supply contraction won't just be a South Asian phenomenon. If China maintains its fertilizer export restrictions through August¹⁴, there is no spare capacity to fill the Gulf gap. The fertilizer crisis will become a food price crisis by fall, and the countries least able to absorb it have the thinnest reserves. Watch Bangladesh's rice imports in Q3 and Pakistan's wheat flour prices in August. That's where the catastrophe, if it comes, will arrive first.