The crisis behind the crisis: why fertilizer belongs at the heart of the food and energy conversation

“In fertilizer markets, availability is not the same as access. Even when production continues, disruption to shipping, insurance, ports, or routing can quickly turn into shortages on farm.”

Energy, food, and fertilizer are three faces of the same system. The Strait of Hormuz made that visible to everyone in March – and it sets the agenda for Monaco at the end of June.

Last year, about a third of global urea trade – the world’s most widely traded nitrogen fertilizer – moved through the Strait of Hormuz. So did roughly a fifth of the world’s LNG. So did the natural gas that some fertilizer producers in Europe and Asia depend on to make their own product. When that waterway came under threat in March, the world saw an energy crisis. Yet it was also a food security crisis with a thirty-day delay built in. And linking the two was a fertilizer crisis.

Five Gulf countries – Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain – together accounted for 34 percent of global urea trade in 2024, 23 percent of global ammonia, and 18 percent of ammoniated phosphates. The Strait, in other words, is not just one chokepoint. It is three: oil, gas, and the fertilizers those feedstocks build.

Around half of the world’s population eats food grown with mineral fertilizers. At that scale, fertilizer trade is not a commodity flow. It is critical infrastructure – and it sits at the intersection of two other infrastructures that the world’s governing institutions have long recognised as critical: energy and food. The Hormuz episode is the clearest evidence yet that fertilizer needs to be governed with equal recognition.

In fertilizer markets, availability is not the same as access. Even when production continues, disruption to shipping, insurance, ports, or routing can quickly turn supply on paper into shortages on farm. The lag between trouble at sea and trouble in the field can be as little as thirty days – the time between a missed port call and a missed top-dressing window. A urea delivery that arrives a month late on a Bangladeshi boro rice crop, or a Kenyan maize crop, can shave a part of the harvest. For farmers, timing is not flexible.

In March, IFA wrote an open letter to the global community. In April, we wrote a letter to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) setting out exactly what was at stake. Using IFASTAT data, we quantified the exposure. We continue to engage with the G7 Food Security Taskforce. The point we made is simple, and we will keep making it: keeping fertilizer moving through contested waters is not optional if food systems are to function. We have urged the IMO, flag-state authorities, and the marine insurance regime to recognise fertilizer cargo as essential trade alongside energy cargo, so that risk premia and routing decisions reflect that designation. And we have asked governments to resist the reflex to ban exports – a reflex that, every time it has been tried, has deepened the crisis it was meant to contain.

The larger point is structural. Fertilizer markets are now exposed to the same forces shaping energy markets – geopolitics, concentrated supply, infrastructure constraints. Reliability of supply is becoming the defining feature of how these markets function. The institutions that govern global trade – the IMO, the WTO, export credit agencies, and the insurance industry – have to catch up. Energy got that recognition decades ago. Fertilizer cannot afford to wait that long.

That is the agenda we are taking to Monaco. We moved the IFA Annual Conference there from Abu Dhabi this year because the conditions changed and we needed to respond quickly and pragmatically. At the end of June, the industry and its policy counterparts will take stock of what the Hormuz episode has taught us, what the global trade system needs to do, and what governments, regulators, and the multilateral system can do next. The questions on the table will not be confined to fertilizer. They will be about how energy, food, and fertilizer – three faces of the same system – get governed together in a more volatile world.

In that world, food security will not be decided by production capacity alone. It will be decided by whether the systems that move nutrients from where they are made to where they are needed hold – predictably, affordably, and at scale. That is the question we expect Monaco to confront head-on. It is also, increasingly, the question on which the rest of the food security agenda depends. ■