The Planting Season Is Now: How the Hormuz Blockade Is Creating a Global Fertilizer Crisis

The Blockade's Scale on Shipping

Before the Iran war began on February 28, 2026, approximately 130 ships transited the Strait of Hormuz per day, according to Frida Youssef, Chief of the Transport Section at UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), speaking to UN News. By early March, that figure had fallen to single digits — a decline of more than 95%, Youssef stated. The Strait is not formally closed, but "severely constrained," in UNCTAD's characterization, with multiple Iranian attacks on shipping having effectively halted commercial traffic.

UNCTAD published a report on March 10 examining the implications of this disruption. Youssef told UN News: "The disruption is no longer confined to the Strait of Hormuz; it is spreading across regional shipping routes and affecting critical supply lines." She said the knock-on effects were being felt across the Red Sea and beyond, with vessels rerouted, journeys extended, and costs rising.

Iran agreed, per AP News, to allow humanitarian aid and agricultural shipments through the Strait at the request of the United Nations. Iran's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, confirmed Iran agreed to "facilitate and expedite" such movement. As of the time of writing, the broader commercial shipping blockade through the Strait remained in effect.

Fertilizer's Dependence on the Gulf

The connection between the Strait of Hormuz and global food supply runs through fertilizer. The Strait carries around one-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade, according to CNBC citing United Nations data. AP News similarly reported the Strait handles "nearly a third of global fertilizer trade."

The Gulf region's fertilizer dominance stems from its natural gas supply — natural gas is the primary feedstock for nitrogen-based fertilizers including urea, the most widely traded fertilizer in the world. Iran is one of the largest exporters of nitrogen-based fertilizers globally, per Chris Lawson, vice president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a London-based commodities consultancy, speaking to CNBC.

Lawson quantified the disruption: "We estimate around 30% of exportable suppliers are not really available to the market right now, that is Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, but that also includes Iran." He added: "There's a lot of traded supply that is at risk — 30% of global urea trade comes out of Iran and the Hormuz-constrained countries."

Saudi Arabia produces approximately one-fifth of the world's phosphate fertilizer. The region also exports more than 40% of the world's sulfur, a key ingredient and byproduct of oil and gas refining, per AP News.

The Price Spike: What Fertilizer Actually Costs Now

Fertilizer futures contracts are less liquid than oil or grain markets, making prices harder to track in real time. But analysts told CNBC that the cost of FOB granular urea in Egypt — a widely used benchmark for nitrogen fertilizers — had jumped to approximately $700 per metric ton, up from a pre-war range of $400 to $490 per metric ton.

A Monday note from Alpine Macro, an independent investment research firm, cited by CNBC, stated that urea and ammonia prices had surged by approximately 50% and 20%, respectively, since the war began. Potash and sulfur prices had also risen.

Dawid Heyl, co-portfolio manager for the global natural resources strategy at Ninety One, told CNBC that nitrogen fertilizers were at the forefront of the crisis because nitrogen is unlike other fertilizer categories — it cannot be skipped or substituted in a growing season. "You can't skip a season of nitrogen," Heyl said in remarks reported by CNBC.

Lawson described the downstream timeline to CNBC: "It's a long supply chain — if farmers aren't able to get the urea that they need, crop yields will inevitably go lower. Nitrogen is the main nutrient that a crop needs to grow, [and] there will be inventories that can be drawn down, so you're not really going to see an impact on crop yields and a loss of crop production until later in the year."

The Timing Problem: Spring Planting Has Already Started

The crisis is arriving at the worst possible moment in the agricultural calendar. UNCTAD's Youssef told UN News: "It is now the spring planting season, when countries and farmers typically purchase fertilizers for the next harvest. If they are unable to secure enough supply — or if prices are too high — crop yields could decline."

Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the World Food Program, told AP News: "In the worst case, this means lower yields and crop failures next season. In the best case, higher input costs will be included in food prices next year."

AP News reported from Hanoi, Vietnam, and Punjab, India, where farmers were already dealing with the squeeze. Baldev Singh, a 55-year-old rice farmer in Punjab, told AP News that smallholders — the bulk of India's farmers — may not survive if the government cannot subsidize fertilizers when demand peaks in June. He said: "Right now, we are waiting and hoping."

Raj Patel, a food systems economist at the University of Texas, told AP News that some countries were already facing critical shortages. He highlighted Ethiopia, which gets over 90% of its nitrogen fertilizer from the Gulf through Djibouti — a supply route he described as "strained even before the war began in February." Patel stated: "The planting season is now. The fertilizer isn't there."

Who Gets Hit Hardest

UNCTAD's analysis specifically flagged the world's least developed economies as the most vulnerable. Youssef told UN News that these nations have "the least capacity to absorb shocks" and "will feel the effects most strongly." For those countries, higher costs for fuel, food, fertilizers, and transport can rapidly translate into pressure on public finances and household budgets, reducing food production and increasing food insecurity — particularly where import dependence is high.

AP News reported that farmers in developing countries were "already troubled by rising temperatures and erratic weather systems" before the war began. The fertilizer shortage compounds existing climate-driven agricultural stress. Skau of the World Food Program told AP News that the poorest farmers in the Northern Hemisphere rely on fertilizer imports from the Gulf, and the shortage "comes just as planting season begins."

CNBC noted that Northern Hemisphere farmers were heading into "the crucial spring months, during which major fieldwork must begin," while Southern Hemisphere farmers were simultaneously harvesting before winter — creating a global crunch across both agricultural seasons simultaneously.

What's Already Moving — and What Isn't

Iran's agreement to allow agricultural shipments through the Strait represents a partial opening, per AP News. However, the details of implementation — which vessels qualify, what verification process applies, and whether commercial fertilizer carriers will resume transits — were not publicly specified as of March 28. The broader blockade on commercial oil and gas shipping remained in force.

UNCTAD's report noted that the crisis was already affecting humanitarian supply chains, with aid agencies facing "slower, more expensive and less predictable aid shipments." Youssef stated there is "a shared global interest in keeping trade routes open, because disruptions of this scale affect all economies."

The New York Times, in a March 27 report on the global food supply impact, described fertilizer as "one of the biggest economic casualties of the US-led war in Iran," noting that shipments had "piled up on the wrong side of the Strait of Hormuz."

Historical Comparison

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine caused the most significant global fertilizer disruption before the Iran war. Russia and Belarus together account for approximately 40% of global potash exports, and Russia is a major urea exporter. That disruption drove urea prices to record highs — US market barge prices briefly exceeded $900 per metric ton in spring 2022, per DTN — before easing as alternative supply routes were established and demand softened due to affordability constraints.

The current crisis differs structurally: the Hormuz disruption affects not just one or two exporters but the entire Gulf region simultaneously, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Iran, and the UAE. Whether the agricultural shipment exception Iran agreed to will restore meaningful fertilizer flow — and whether commercial shipping companies will risk transiting a still-active war zone — remains unresolved as of March 28.