Wars rarely stay where they start.
The conflict in Iran is now sending shockwaves into a place few people associate with missiles or oil markets – the soil beneath farmers in some of the world's most vulnerable communities.
The world's largest fertilizer company, Yara International, has issued a stark warning: the war could trigger a global scramble for fertilizer that prices the poorest countries out of the market entirely. The most exposed region is Africa, where millions of farmers depend on imported inputs to keep food on their own tables, let alone the world's.
The message coming from the industry's top floor is blunt: act now, before the supply crunch hardens into a full-blown food crisis.
A quiet crisis already underway
The economics behind the warning are unsettlingly simple.
Roughly 35% of the world's urea – a key ingredient in nitrogen-based fertilizer – comes from Gulf states. Since the United States and Israel began military action against Iran at the end of February, urea prices have jumped between 60% and 70%. Supplies of ammonia, the foundational raw material for nitrogen fertilizer, have also been hit hard. In some Gulf states, including Qatar, ammonia production has been suspended entirely. The substance is highly toxic and storing it during wartime is too dangerous to justify continued output.
S&P Global Market Intelligence has confirmed that the disruption is already pushing through global supply chains. Its analysts note that food systems face both direct and indirect threats from fuel and fertilizer restrictions and that African dependence on Middle Eastern nitrogenous fertilizers varies sharply across the continent, with countries like Ethiopia and Kenya among the most exposed in sub-Saharan Africa.
The result is the early stage of what industry voices are calling a global auction for fertilizer, in which wealthier nations outbid poorer ones for shrinking supplies. There will not be a famine in Europe. The question is who Europe ends up taking the food away from.
Why Africa pays the steepest price
Africa is not short on agricultural potential. The continent has enough land, sun, and labor to be a global breadbasket. The reality, however, is that it remains a net food importer, and the gap between potential and reality is exactly where this kind of shock lands hardest.
For decades, African farmers have made do with under-fertilized soils, fragile supply chains, and thin financial buffers. When global input prices spike, there is little room to absorb the shock.
In Europe, the situation is structurally different. Soils are intensively managed, and farmers can ease back on fertilizer use without devastating their yields. They also have access to government cushions: the European Union recently relaxed state aid rules and authorized grants of up to €50,000 per farmer to offset the extra cost of fuel and fertilizer linked to the war.
In sub-Saharan Africa, no such safety net exists. Farmers there are starting from weaker soil health, smaller food reserves, and far tighter access to credit. They now face two compounding pressures at once – securing fertilizer for the current sowing season and stockpiling enough inputs for 2027's crops, a routine but capital-intensive part of farm planning.
When fertilizer becomes unaffordable in this environment, the loss does not just hit one harvest. It quietly compounds across two.
A production system stretched thin
Even outside the immediate war zone, the global fertilizer industry is operating on increasingly fragile margins. Production has been lost every day since the conflict began, and bringing capacity back online will take weeks — in some cases months. Storage is becoming its own bottleneck. There is only so much room inside production plants to hold inventory before output must be slowed further.
Each lost day translates, eventually, into a smaller harvest somewhere downstream.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, global food security is increasingly determined less by how much food the world can grow and more by who can afford the inputs to grow it. Fertilizer sits at the center of that equation. When it gets expensive, the gap between high-income and low-income food systems widens — fast.
The War Nobody is Talking About in Agriculture
Treating farming like a business
One message has come through clearly from industry leaders: farming, especially in vulnerable regions, has to be treated as a business and supported like one.
That means trade policy that recognizes fertilizer as critical infrastructure. It means financing tools that let smallholder farmers absorb price shocks without abandoning their fields. And it means coordinated international action, the kind that prevents a global auction from forming in the first place.
There is still time to soften the impact, but the window is narrowing. The sowing season in sub-Saharan Africa is starting now. Decisions made in capital cities over the next few weeks will shape what is, and isn't, on dinner tables across the continent for the next two years.
The bigger lesson
This crisis is, in many ways, a familiar one. A distant war. A chokepoint in global supply. A slow-motion shock that lands hardest on the people with the fewest resources to absorb it.
The World Bank has long flagged the structural fragility of food systems in the world's poorest regions. Each new disruption – a war, a pandemic, a climate shock – exposes the same fault line: a global food system that produces enough food in aggregate but distributes it through markets that can quickly shut out those who need it most.
Fertilizer is not a glamorous subject. It rarely makes headlines until prices double and crops fail. But it sits at the very foundation of the modern food system. When it becomes unaffordable, the consequences travel quietly, through smaller harvests, thinner meals, and rising hunger, long after the news cycle has moved on.
The warning from the world's largest fertilizer company is not a forecast. It is a flare. Whether the world chooses to act on it will be measured, eventually, in harvests.
