This war is affecting everyone’s food

 

Letter to Editor

THE US-IRAN war is not just spiking gas prices; it is systematically disrupting the global food system.

The concern about global food security is a clear-eyed assessment of a supply chain built on a fossil fuel foundation.

Modern agriculture is, for better or worse, the art of turning oil and gas into food. And the Persian Gulf is the epicentre of that transformation.

Roughly one-third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. 

The Gulf states are also critical suppliers of nitrogen fertilizers, which require natural gas as a feedstock, and phosphates, which require sulfur—from region’s petrochemical industry.

With the strait closed, this critical artery has been severed. The timing could not be more catastrophic.

Across the Northern Hemisphere—from America’s breadbasket to Europe’s farms—March is the month farmers buy fertilizer for spring application.

The supply isn’t just delayed but simply not coming. US farmers are facing a 25% shortfall in usual supplies.

Fertilizer accounts for up to 25% of a farmer’s production costs. When prices surge—as they have, —farmers face a brutal choice: pay crippling prices, ration application and accept lower yields, or switch to less input-intensive crops.

Any of these paths lead to a smaller harvest. According to the World Bank: when fertilizer prices spike, they stay “higher for longer,” and downstream food inflation inevitably follows.

This is the “hidden front” of the war, as the Council on Foreign Relations terms it—a slow-motion crisis where the effects of today’s shortages won’t be fully visible until the harvest is brought in months from now.

We are, in effect, sowing the seeds of next year’s food inflation today.

But the threat doesn’t end at the farm gate. Higher energy prices translate directly into higher costs for fuelling tractors, running irrigation, and powering food processing plants.

Logistics face soaring freight rates and insurance premiums. Even before food reaches a ship or a truck, the cost of packaging—from plastic wraps to storage containers, all derived from petrochemicals—is spiking.

Chemical giant BASF has already announced price increases of up to 20% for core plastic additives.

This creates a pincer movement on consumers. First-round effects hit packaging and transport, raising the cost of getting food to the supermarket.

Second-round effects, driven by the fertilizer shock, will gradually increase the cost of the food itself—grains, cooking oil, protein—as higher input costs work their way through the system.

As MBSB Research notes, margin risk is highest for companies with little pricing power, but the ultimate “loser” in this equation is always the consumer, facing a “broader cost reset”.

The pain will not be distributed equally. The World Food Programme (WFP) has already activated emergency response systems, warning that disruptions are imperilling millions in the Middle East, a region already grappling with fragile economies and conflict.

But the crisis will reach far beyond the immediate war zone. Countries like Egypt, historically the world’s largest wheat importer, are acutely vulnerable to any shock in global grain markets.

The war is a reminder that for countries heavily reliant on food imports—like the Gulf states themselves, which import over 90% of their rice, corn, and soybeans—food security is not a given; it’s a fragile construct dependent on peaceful seas.

We may not be spared either from the turmoil as we import much of our food.

There is a bitter historical irony here. The skyrocketing bread prices and food insecurity exacerbated by global wheat shortages in 2010-2011 were contributing factors to the Arab Spring.

Today, we risk a repeat performance on a wider stage, driven not by a confluence of weather events, but by a man-made conflict at a vital chokepoint.

As critics rightly point out, this crisis exposes a “systemic failure at the heart of our global food system”. 

Our reliance on a handful of volatile nations for critical inputs like fertilizer, and the “just-in-time” logic that leaves us with no strategic reserves, has created an edifice of extreme fragility.

Unlike oil, there is no strategic petroleum reserve for fertilizer. When the supply chain breaks, the system doesn’t just creak; it seizes.

The war in Iran is a stark illustration of how twenty-first-century conflict can weaponize not just bombs and bullets, but food, water, and the very inputs that sustain modern life.

The concern over global food security is not an overreaction. It is a recognition that the price of this war will be paid in full long after the last shot is fired, by farmers unable to plant, by families facing empty shelves, and by nations pushed to the brink by a hunger that was entirely man-made. 

Professor Dato Dr Ahmad Ibrahim is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. 

The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of  MMKtT.

- Focus Malaysia.