Navigated

The food crisis to come

Hunger and even famine are foreseeable consequences of the war on Iran. Now the world must act to shield the poorest from effects that will continue long after the fighting stops, argues Adam Hanieh Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have come to occupy a fa

Settings
Translate Article
Print
Share
Listen

Few 20th-century transformations did more to remake the world than the “Green Revolution”. From the 1950s onwards, new high-yielding crop varieties, synthetic fertilisers, chemical pesticides and large-scale irrigation drove a sharp increase in the output of staple crops such as wheat and rice. In its more celebratory accounts, this transformation pushed back famine and helped support rapid population growth across much of Asia and Latin America. India, one of the key centres of the Green Revolution, more than doubled wheat production between the mid-1960s and early 1970s.

As numerous critics have noted, the Green Revolution also came with enormous ecological and social costs. But one of its less discussed consequences was the link it established between food production and the fossil fuel industry across every stage of farming. Higher yields depended on a vast expansion of mechanisation, pumped irrigation and, above all, synthetic fertiliser use.

Before the mid-20th century, farmers across the global south relied on organic inputs such as manure and compost to maintain soil nutrients. The new highyielding varieties of the Green Revolution, by contrast, could only deliver their promised output through large and repeated applications of industrial fertilisers, especially nitrogen-based products such as urea and ammonium nitrate. Since many of these fertilisers are derived from natural gas, the Green Revolution meant that the world’s food production became ever more closely tied to a constantly increasing supply of hydrocarbon inputs.

Doubts have long been expressed about the sustainability of this fossil fuel-based food system. But as oil and gas prices have risen steeply amid the US-Israeli war on Iran and a significant part of the global fertiliser trade has been brought to a standstill by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, its potential vulnerabilities have been made clear. After only seven weeks, food shortages and even famine are now looking more likely for millions of people across vulnerable countries in Africa and Asia.

Recent data from the World Bank captures these links between energy and food sharply. In March, the organisation’s energy price index rose 41.6 per cent, led by a 59.4 per cent increase in European natural gas and a 45.8 per cent rise in Brent crude oil. In the same month, food prices rose 2.7 per cent and fertiliser prices 26.2 per cent. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned that, if the crisis persists, global fertiliser prices could average 15 to 20 per cent higher in the first half of 2026.

Comparisons are frequently drawn with the food price shocks of 2007-08 and 2022, when surging energy costs helped drive fertiliser and freight prices higher, amplifying wider disruptions to trade and pushing up the cost of basic staples. Yet the current moment differs from those earlier crises in one crucial respect. During the past two decades, Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have come to occupy a far more central place in the global food economy than is often recognised.

The Gulf states now shape the production and circulation of food directly, supplying key chemical inputs, exporting large volumes of finished fertilisers and controlling the logistical corridors through which food and agricultural commodities move across much of the Middle East, central and east Asia and Africa.

That deeper integration with the global food system is what makes the ongoing conflict both different from, and potentially far more serious than, earlier price shocks. Ashock in the Gulf can now cascade rapidly through the supply chains that carry food from the farm to the shelf. Any prolonged disruption in the region can therefore spread far more widely, whether this is because of the closure of key maritime corridors, higher freight and insurance costs, interruptions at ports and re-export hubs or damage to energy and industrial infrastructure.

Beyond oil and gas

One of the clearest signs of the Gulf’s changing role in the world food economy is its growing weight in chemicals and fertiliser production. The old image of the Gulf monarchies as little more than oil and gas exporters no longer holds. Today, the region sits at the centre of modern agriculture, not only as a major producer of fertilisers in its ownright but also as a force shaping fertiliser industries across neighbouring countries.

This shift reflects a broader transformation in the Gulf’s oil and gas industry. In recent years, the region’s large stateowned energy companies have moved down the hydrocarbon value chain, using cheap gas, large-scale industrial infrastructure and state-backed investment to become major producers of the chemical feedstocks on which modern agriculture depends.

This vertical integration has been enabled in part by the enormous financial surpluses generated in the Gulf through expanding hydrocarbon exports to China and wider east Asia. Companies such as Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) have used these windfall revenues to fund industrial diversification into chemical production.

A key example here is ammonia, which the International Energy Agency describes as making “an indispensable contribution to global agricultural systems” and is the starting point for all mineral nitrogen fertilisers. About 70 per cent of the world’s ammonia is used in fertiliser production, and just under 30 per cent of global ammonia exports originate in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is the world’s second-largest exporter of ammonia, while Oman ranked sixth in 2024.

The Gulf’s ammonia exports are especially important for markets outside North America and western Europe. In 2024, for instance, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar together supplied more than three-quarters of India’s ammonia imports and 30 per cent of Morocco’s. As a result, food production in south Asia and north Africa has become deeply dependent on Gulf nitrogen flows.

Sulphur is another crucial basic input into modern agriculture. While less visible than ammonia, it is used to make the sulphuric acid needed to turn phosphate rock into phosphoric acid and, from there, phosphate fertilisers. Roughly half of the world’s global seaborne sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz, with most of this produced by the Gulf’s state-owned energy companies — above all Adnoc, QatarEnergy, the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and Saudi Aramco. Morocco, home to the world’s largest phosphate industry, is the biggest sulphur importer globally, with about three-quarters of its 2024 imports coming from the Gulf.

Chemicals such as ammonia and sulphur are significant to agriculture because they are converted into finished fertilisers on a vast scale. Much of the Gulf’s ammonia is processed into urea, the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertiliser. Gulf countries account for 35 per cent of global urea trade; Saudi Arabia was the world’s largest urea exporter in 2024, while Oman ranked third. Monoammonium phosphate (MAP) and diammonium phosphate (DAP), ttwo of the principal fertilisers used to supply crops with phosphorus, are also closely tied to Gulf production and export routes. In 2024, countries upstream of Hormuz accounted for 18 per cent of global MAP and DAPtrade.

As Leiden University’s Christian

The food crisis to come

Hun­ger and even fam­ine are fore­see­able con­sequences of the war on Iran. Now the world must act to shield the poorest from effects that will con­tinue long after the fight­ing stops, argues Adam Hanieh Saudi Ara­bia, Qatar and the UAE have come to occupy a fa

Bey­ond oil and gas

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunger and even famine are foreseeable consequences of the war on Iran. Now the world must act to shield the poorest from effects that will continue long after the fighting stops, argues Adam Hanieh Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have come to occupy a fa

Beyond oil and gas