Note: This post expands on my previous article "Oil Crisis Today, Food Crisis Tomorrow"
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| A severely malnourished boy in Hajjah, Yemen. (Hani Mohammed/Associated Press) |
The connection between a missile strike on a Qatari gas plant and a severely malnourished child may not be immediately obvious to many observers of the Iran war. Yet there is a direct chain of cause and effect that could lead, later this year, to a major crisis in child nutrition across Asia and Africa.
To understand why the effective closure of a narrow strait threatens the food security of billions, it is necessary to understand the invisible architecture upon which modern agriculture depends — combining nitrogen from the atmosphere with hydrogen from natural gas to produce ammonia, the base from which all synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are created. Without this process, according to Vaclav Smil’s landmark study Enriching the Earth (MIT Press) and peer-reviewed research published in Nature Geoscience, roughly half the world’s current population of 8 billion could not be fed.
Natural gas is therefore not merely an energy input: it is the essential chemical feedstock. And the Persian Gulf, with the world’s cheapest natural gas reserves, is where the process runs most efficiently. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman and pre-war Iran together account for nearly half of all globally traded urea. All of it exits through the Strait of Hormuz. There is no pipeline alternative, no overland route, no substitute corridor.
As urea prices rise, farmers reduce planted acreage or switch from high-yielding to less demanding crops. Lower yields mean less food. Less food means higher prices. Higher prices mean that families already spending half or more of their income on food cut back on what they eat and on the nutritional quality of what they can afford.
Bearing the Cost
The children who bear that cost first — and hardest — are the youngest: infants, toddlers, and those still in the womb when their mothers face a food price shock. The result, in the clinical language of nutrition, is child wasting — serious and severe malnutrition in which a child becomes dangerously thin for their height. The note below explains the term; the numbers that follow explain the scale.
Less visible but potentially as consequential is a second dependency the world has barely discussed. The Gulf supplies nearly half of all globally traded sulfur — a byproduct of oil and gas refining that is the essential chemical precursor for processing phosphate into plant-available fertiliser. Without Gulf sulfur, phosphate production chains fracture globally, even in countries that mine their own phosphate rock. The Hormuz closure is therefore disrupting all three primary nutrient systems — nitrogen, phosphate and potash — simultaneously.
The transmission from fertiliser prices to food prices is well documented, though it is not immediate. Fertiliser accounts for roughly 35 to 45% of the operating costs of growing corn and wheat — the two staple cereals that underpin global food security. Research published in Nature Food on the 2022 fertiliser shock found that food output prices typically peak around ten months after a fertiliser price surge, as higher input costs work their way through planting decisions, harvests and supply chains to the consumer.
A Ten-Month Clock Is Running
The same research estimated that the combined effect of high energy and fertiliser prices could drive food costs up by more than 80% compared to pre-shock levels — and projected up to 100 million additional people undernourished and up to one million additional deaths if prices remained elevated, with the greatest impacts concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. Urea is currently up 57% year-on-year. The ten-month clock is running.
What Food Price Shocks Do to Children
We have recent evidence of what food price rises do to children. The chart below shows the scale of the last comparable food price shock — driven by COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war. At its peak in January 2023, global food price inflation reached 13.6%, and exceeded 25% across many low-income countries.
The 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World — an authoritative annual report of FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO — documents that even a 10% rise in food prices is associated with roughly 1.85 million additional seriously malnourished children (wasted) globally, and approximately 745,000 additional children in the most life-threatening category of severe wasting.
When prices rose to the levels shown below during 2022 and 2023, the effects on child wasting across low-income countries were measurable within months. Almost all of that burden fell in Asia and Africa.
The chart below projects what different levels of food price increase would mean for child wasting, based on that same SOFI relationship — applied to the 2024 regional baselines from the UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates 2025: 42.8 million wasted children globally, 24.4 million in South Asia alone, and 10.2 million in sub-Saharan Africa.
A Floor, Not a Ceiling
Two things are important to understand about these projections. First, they are drawn directly from the SOFI 2025 report’s documented relationship between food prices and child wasting — this is not modelling or speculation but an application of observed historical elasticities to current baseline figures. Second, and critically, these projections almost certainly understate the real impact on the most vulnerable regions.
The SOFI elasticities are global averages. South Asia already has the world’s highest wasting prevalence at 13.6%, and sub-Saharan African families already spend 60 to 70% of their income on food. Both populations are already farming and feeding at the steepest part of the food price-to-nutrition curve — where every additional percentage point of price increase produces disproportionately greater harm than the global average predicts. The figures in the chart are a floor, not a ceiling.
Oil and Fertiliser: Two Curves Heading in the Same Direction
Now look at what is happening to oil and fertiliser prices since the war began on February 28. Oil has surged over 40%, with Brent crude jumping above $103 per barrel this week as Iran continued attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure, the Shah gas field in the UAE was suspended, and an Iraqi oil field was struck by drones. Fertiliser prices are tracking the same curve — and may yet surpass it.
To understand why the effective closure of a narrow strait threatens the food security of billions, it is necessary to understand the invisible architecture upon which modern agriculture depends — combining nitrogen from the atmosphere with hydrogen from natural gas to produce ammonia, the base from which all synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are created. Without this process, according to Vaclav Smil’s landmark study Enriching the Earth (MIT Press) and peer-reviewed research published in Nature Geoscience, roughly half the world’s current population of 8 billion could not be fed.
Natural gas is therefore not merely an energy input: it is the essential chemical feedstock. And the Persian Gulf, with the world’s cheapest natural gas reserves, is where the process runs most efficiently. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman and pre-war Iran together account for nearly half of all globally traded urea. All of it exits through the Strait of Hormuz. There is no pipeline alternative, no overland route, no substitute corridor.
As urea prices rise, farmers reduce planted acreage or switch from high-yielding to less demanding crops. Lower yields mean less food. Less food means higher prices. Higher prices mean that families already spending half or more of their income on food cut back on what they eat and on the nutritional quality of what they can afford.
Bearing the Cost
The children who bear that cost first — and hardest — are the youngest: infants, toddlers, and those still in the womb when their mothers face a food price shock. The result, in the clinical language of nutrition, is child wasting — serious and severe malnutrition in which a child becomes dangerously thin for their height. The note below explains the term; the numbers that follow explain the scale.
Three Nutrients, One ChokepointNote on terminology: Child wasting is defined by the World Health Organisation as a weight-for-height more than two standard deviations below the median of the WHO Child Growth Standards — in plain terms, a child who is dangerously thin for their height as a result of recent, severe lack of adequate food and/or repeated infectious disease, involving rapid loss of muscle and fat tissue. Severe wasting is defined at more than three standard deviations below the median. A mid-upper arm circumference below 125mm is used as a rapid field screening tool. Acutely malnourished children are thirteen times more likely to die before their fifth birthday.
Less visible but potentially as consequential is a second dependency the world has barely discussed. The Gulf supplies nearly half of all globally traded sulfur — a byproduct of oil and gas refining that is the essential chemical precursor for processing phosphate into plant-available fertiliser. Without Gulf sulfur, phosphate production chains fracture globally, even in countries that mine their own phosphate rock. The Hormuz closure is therefore disrupting all three primary nutrient systems — nitrogen, phosphate and potash — simultaneously.
The transmission from fertiliser prices to food prices is well documented, though it is not immediate. Fertiliser accounts for roughly 35 to 45% of the operating costs of growing corn and wheat — the two staple cereals that underpin global food security. Research published in Nature Food on the 2022 fertiliser shock found that food output prices typically peak around ten months after a fertiliser price surge, as higher input costs work their way through planting decisions, harvests and supply chains to the consumer.
A Ten-Month Clock Is Running
The same research estimated that the combined effect of high energy and fertiliser prices could drive food costs up by more than 80% compared to pre-shock levels — and projected up to 100 million additional people undernourished and up to one million additional deaths if prices remained elevated, with the greatest impacts concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. Urea is currently up 57% year-on-year. The ten-month clock is running.
What Food Price Shocks Do to Children
We have recent evidence of what food price rises do to children. The chart below shows the scale of the last comparable food price shock — driven by COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war. At its peak in January 2023, global food price inflation reached 13.6%, and exceeded 25% across many low-income countries.
The 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World — an authoritative annual report of FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO — documents that even a 10% rise in food prices is associated with roughly 1.85 million additional seriously malnourished children (wasted) globally, and approximately 745,000 additional children in the most life-threatening category of severe wasting.
When prices rose to the levels shown below during 2022 and 2023, the effects on child wasting across low-income countries were measurable within months. Almost all of that burden fell in Asia and Africa.
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| Global food price inflation peaked at 13.6% in January 2023, with many low-income countries experiencing peaks above 25%. Food price increases of this magnitude are associated with measurable rises in child wasting within months. Source: FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025. CC BY 4.0. |
The chart below projects what different levels of food price increase would mean for child wasting, based on that same SOFI relationship — applied to the 2024 regional baselines from the UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates 2025: 42.8 million wasted children globally, 24.4 million in South Asia alone, and 10.2 million in sub-Saharan Africa.
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| Projections apply the global average elasticity from SOFI 2025: a 10% food price rise is associated with a 4.3% rise in wasting and a 6.1% rise in severe wasting. Baselines: UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates 2025. These are conservative, linear projections. Actual impacts in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are likely to be higher — see note "A Floor, Not a Ceiling", below. |
Two things are important to understand about these projections. First, they are drawn directly from the SOFI 2025 report’s documented relationship between food prices and child wasting — this is not modelling or speculation but an application of observed historical elasticities to current baseline figures. Second, and critically, these projections almost certainly understate the real impact on the most vulnerable regions.
The SOFI elasticities are global averages. South Asia already has the world’s highest wasting prevalence at 13.6%, and sub-Saharan African families already spend 60 to 70% of their income on food. Both populations are already farming and feeding at the steepest part of the food price-to-nutrition curve — where every additional percentage point of price increase produces disproportionately greater harm than the global average predicts. The figures in the chart are a floor, not a ceiling.
Oil and Fertiliser: Two Curves Heading in the Same Direction
Now look at what is happening to oil and fertiliser prices since the war began on February 28. Oil has surged over 40%, with Brent crude jumping above $103 per barrel this week as Iran continued attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure, the Shah gas field in the UAE was suspended, and an Iraqi oil field was struck by drones. Fertiliser prices are tracking the same curve — and may yet surpass it.
Urea stood at roughly $421 per tonne when the war began. By March 16 it had reached $601, up 35% in a single month and 57% above where it was a year ago. In Southeast Asia, forward prices for April and May shipments have already crossed $700 per tonne.
Energy costs are the largest single input to food production globally. Higher oil prices raise the cost of running farm machinery, pumping irrigation water, and transporting food from field to market. Higher fertiliser prices reduce the quantities farmers can afford to apply, cutting yields directly. Both effects feed into higher food prices — and the two are now rising together, from a war that has no ceasefire in sight.
Analytics firm Signal Ocean estimates that as long as Hormuz remains closed, between 3 and 4 million tonnes of fertiliser per month will not reach markets. According to a market analysis by CRU Group (formerly the Commodities Research Unit), reported by Arab News, if fertiliser supply disruptions continue past March 20, the impact on South Asian agriculture shifts from serious to potentially irreversible for this season’s harvests.
The Right Crisis to Watch
The world’s attention is on airstrikes and oil prices. The evidence from the last comparable food price shock and the projections in the charts above are clear: when food prices rise sharply, children waste — in numbers that run to millions, concentrated in Asia and Africa. The oil and fertiliser price rises now underway are the leading indicators of a food price shock that has not yet fully arrived. The child in the photograph at the top of this article represents what arrives when it does. That story deserves at least as much attention as the price of a barrel of oil.
 Brent Crude Oil (USD/barrel). Up over 40% since February 28. |  Urea (USD/tonne). Up 57% year-on-year. |
Source: Trading Economics CFD benchmark data, March 2025–March 2026. Urea prices are closely tracking the rise in Brent crude. Oil prices may ease as emergency reserves are released; fertiliser has no equivalent buffer, and analysts warn its prices may prove more persistent.
Analytics firm Signal Ocean estimates that as long as Hormuz remains closed, between 3 and 4 million tonnes of fertiliser per month will not reach markets. According to a market analysis by CRU Group (formerly the Commodities Research Unit), reported by Arab News, if fertiliser supply disruptions continue past March 20, the impact on South Asian agriculture shifts from serious to potentially irreversible for this season’s harvests.
The Right Crisis to Watch
The world’s attention is on airstrikes and oil prices. The evidence from the last comparable food price shock and the projections in the charts above are clear: when food prices rise sharply, children waste — in numbers that run to millions, concentrated in Asia and Africa. The oil and fertiliser price rises now underway are the leading indicators of a food price shock that has not yet fully arrived. The child in the photograph at the top of this article represents what arrives when it does. That story deserves at least as much attention as the price of a barrel of oil.
It goes to show how self centered the industrial countries are when all we hear and see in their media is about the price of a barrel of oil. Nobody is even mentioning the coming food and nutrition crises except on few occasions about the rise in their own food baskets for their citizens. Where are the UN, FAO, WFP IFAD etc.?
ReplyDeleteI have been experimenting with a new feature recently added to NotebookLM. This allows you to turn reports and articles into a simple video graphic presentation. Here is the graphic version of the two articles on the fertilizer, food price, malnutrition chain. https://shorturl.at/FW9yD Try out NotebookLM's new features for your own writing projects. It is a very easy way to help explain concepts. Tom
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