A food crisis is rarely announced with the sound of an alarm bell. It begins quietly: a fertiliser shipment that does not arrive, a farmer who cuts his application rate because the price has doubled, a government that can no longer afford subsidies, a cargo ship that takes a longer and more expensive route.
By the time those decisions reach the supermarket shelf, the problem is no longer about fertiliser. It is about food.
That is why the extraordinary developments now unfolding across global energy, fertiliser and shipping markets deserve far more attention than they are receiving. The danger is not simply another bout of food inflation. It is that a combination of geopolitical conflict, trade restrictions, sanctions, penal carbon taxes, energy disruption and competition between rich and poor nations could produce a man-made food crisis in which the poorest countries are effectively priced out of the world’s food system. The EU imposes close to 50 distinct sanctions, on assets, banks, currency, oil, gas, fertilisers, shipping, insurance etc. The US has a raft of sanctions and is waging trade wars with all and sundry.
The central key issue is nitrogen fertiliser. Modern agriculture depends heavily on nitrogen to produce high yields of wheat, maize, rice and many other crops. Nitrogen fertiliser itself depends on natural gas, making food production intimately connected to the energy system.
And the world’s nitrogen supply chain is increasingly exposed to geopolitical shocks.
Russia and Belarus occupy an important position in the global fertiliser trade. Russia is a major producer and exporter of nitrogen fertilisers, while Belarus is one of the world’s significant suppliers of potash.
The European Union placed sanctions on both countries. Belarusian potash has faced sanctions, while Russian fertilisers have been subjected to increasingly restrictive trade measures, including tariffs imposing a huge burden on EU farmers resulting in food inflation.
The political objective is to impose economic pressure on Moscow and Minsk. But the boomerang sanctions are hurting world food supplies and EU citizens.
When a major producer is removed, or partially removed, from a market, the missing supply does not simply disappear. Buyers compete for alternative supplies. Prices rise, trade routes get longer. Wealthier countries can afford to pay more. Poorer countries cannot.
India, China, Brazil and other large economies have been buying significant quantities of Russian fertilisers, while Russia and Belarus have increasingly redirected exports towards countries outside the Western sanctions system. At the same time, China has restricted some fertiliser exports to protect its own domestic market.
The result is a global market that may still have fertiliser available, but at a price increasingly determined by whoever has the deepest pockets. It is a problem of affordability.
The situation becomes considerably more serious when the fertiliser market is combined with disruption to energy and shipping in the Middle East.
The Persian Gulf is a major centre of global nitrogen-fertiliser production and trade. Countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Iran have enormous petrochemical industries, and natural gas is both the energy source and a fundamental feedstock for producing ammonia and nitrogen fertilisers.
Any prolonged disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz therefore has consequences far beyond the oil market.
If fertiliser cannot leave the region, production has to stop. And if shipping costs soar, the price of every tonne delivered to farmers rises. Some critical infrastructure and petrochemical plants have been damaged or virtually destroyed and may take 5 years or more to repair once hostilities subside.
This is precisely the kind of shock that agriculture is poorly equipped to absorb.
Farmers cannot simply decide to use half as much nitrogen and expect half the yield. Crop responses can be sharply non-linear. A modest reduction in fertiliser can sometimes produce a disproportionately large reduction in output, particularly in marginal soil types already nutrient-poor.
That creates a dangerous chain reaction.
Higher gas prices lead to higher fertiliser prices. Higher fertiliser prices lead farmers to cut applications. Lower applications reduce yields. Lower yields tighten food supplies. Tight supplies push food prices higher.
And then the poorest consumers are hit.
Not all crops are equally vulnerable.
Maize is among the biggest concerns because of its substantial nitrogen requirements. A significant reduction in maize production would affect not only the human food supply but also livestock feed and biofuel markets.
Rice is arguably even more politically sensitive. It is a staple for billions of people, particularly across Asia, and depends heavily on fertiliser to maintain high yields. Small farmers facing dramatically higher input costs may have little choice but to reduce applications.
Wheat presents a different problem. Nitrogen affects both yield and grain quality, including protein levels important to bread and pasta production. A fertiliser shortage can therefore mean not merely less wheat, but poorer-quality wheat.
Sugarcane and many commercial vegetables are also heavily dependent on nitrogen.
The danger is that farmers confronted with unaffordable fertiliser may change what they plant. Crops such as soybeans have an important advantage because legumes can obtain nitrogen through biological fixation. A farmer may therefore have an economic incentive to move away from nitrogen-hungry crops.
That may make sense for an individual farmer.
Collectively, however, millions of such decisions could dramatically alter the world’s supply of staple grains.
This is where the moral and political dimensions of the crisis become unavoidable.
A farmer in the United States or Western Europe may complain bitterly about a doubling of fertiliser prices—and rightly so. But that farmer generally operates within an organised financial and agricultural system, with access to credit, possible subsidies and a high-value domestic market.
A smallholder farmer in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia has none of those advantages.
If the international price of fertiliser rises beyond his means, he cannot simply borrow, or wait for a government rescue package .
He applies less fertiliser.
His harvest falls.
His family’s income falls.
The price of food rises.
And the following year he may have even less money with which to buy fertiliser.
This is how a global commodity shock becomes a local humanitarian disaster.
The same principle applies at national level. Governments in poorer countries often subsidise fertiliser precisely because their farmers cannot compete on world markets. But subsidies become extraordinarily expensive when international prices surge.
The wealthy therefore have an enormous structural advantage: they can outbid the poor.
That does not mean American or European consumers are deliberately taking food from African families. It means the global market allocates scarce resources according to purchasing power rather than nutritional need.
That is an uncomfortable truth.
In wealthy countries, food represents a relatively small proportion of household spending. In poorer nations it can consume half of a family’s income, and in some cases considerably more.
That difference transforms inflation into something far more serious.
For a wealthy household, a 20 per cent increase in grocery prices is painful. For a poor household already spending 60 per cent of its income on food, it can be catastrophic.
It responds by abandoning healthcare, education, transport and other necessities. Eventually the family must cut the amount they can eat.
A global food market can therefore remain technically supplied while millions of people go hungry.
Percent of Income spent on food in various countries (Household )
A family in the United States (6.4%) or the United Kingdom (8.2%). Compare that to:
Mali: 45% to 50% – Nigeria: 55% to 60% – Kenya: 47% to 50% – Bangladesh: 48% to 50% – Myanmar 50%.
The poorest 25% of the population in these countries spend an estimated 60% to over 75% of their total household budget exclusively on food.
It would be misleading to claim that a global famine in 2027 is inevitable. Weather, harvests, diplomacy, shipping conditions and the insanity of government policy can all change.
Famines in the modern era are frequently political and economic events as much as agricultural ones. Wars destroy infrastructure. Blockades prevent food from moving. Sanctions complicate trade. Governments impose export restrictions to protect domestic consumers. Energy shortages make fertiliser prohibitively expensive.
Western political leaders are not giving peace a chance, they proceeded to feed their egos and push the cost of conflict on to their own citizens and on to the peoples of the Global south.
They chose who must bears the cost and it’s not the world leaders or the globalist elites that bear the cost.
The West faces a particularly difficult contradiction.
European and American governments want to punish those they deem to be the enemy. In the absence of an enemy one will be created to satisfy the appetite of the military industrial complex.
But energy, food and agricultural inputs are not weapons of war; they are commodities vital for the sustenance of the human family worldwide. They are the foundation of next year’s harvest. Deliberately weaponising these inputs is a crime against humanity.
Cutting access to oil and gas, restricting fertiliser imports, increasing the cost of shipping and insurance, imposing penal carbon-related costs on energy-intensive production and disrupting established supply routes are all inexcusable
These questions have not been adequately considered by politicians.
There is something profoundly perverse about a world in which governments can mobilise enormous financial resources to protect their own strategic interests while farmers in the poorest countries are left unable to buy the nutrients required to grow food.
Political leaders may win arguments, elections or diplomatic confrontations.
But none of that feeds a hungry child.
The most worrying feature of the present situation is that several risks are arriving simultaneously all easy to foresee and all or almost all due to the total failure of our political leaders
Fertiliser supplies are under pressure. Energy markets are vulnerable. Shipping routes are being disrupted. Protection of domestic markets. Sanctions fragmenting established trading relationships.
And agriculture operates on a timetable that cannot be postponed.
A farmer who cannot obtain fertiliser before planting cannot simply wait until prices fall six months later. The crop will already be in the ground. The missed application becomes a lower harvest. Multiplied across millions of farms, that becomes a supply problem.
The consequences may not become fully visible until the harvests of 2027 or 28
By then, it could be too late for governments to respond cheaply.
The world therefore faces a choice.
It can continue treating fertiliser, energy and food primarily as weapons in a geopolitical contest—or it can recognise them as strategic necessities whose uninterrupted supply is essential to global stability.
The West may believe it is applying pressure to governments it considers hostile.
But economic warfare has a habit of killing innocent people.
If the world’s poorest countries are eventually forced to compete against the world’s richest for the fertiliser needed to grow their food, the result could be one of the great inequalities of the modern era: full supermarket shelves in wealthy countries with much higher prices alongside hunger and political instability in countries that simply cannot afford to participate in the bidding war. Have we not had enough unavoidable hardship in this world without manufacturing more. Do we really need millions of hungry people heading off in search of food?
That would not be a natural disaster. It would be the consequence of decisions made predominantly by politicians in the ‘Western world’
Pat Cummins