The United States’ war with Iran has entered a new phase, with President Donald Trump ordering a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
The decision will have major ripple effects for the energy industry, but also for food systems across the globe.
Raj Patel, a research professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, studies global food policy. He spoke to the Texas Standard about the war’s ongoing impact. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: How could a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz affect food?
Raj Patel: Well, I mean, it’s true that if you’re spending more on gas, then there’s less available to spend on food. But the more permanent way that this is affecting things is through fertilizer prices.
Say more about fertilizer prices. I don’t think that that’s something that… I know it’s been mentioned in the course of this standoff, but really?
Fertilizer, particularly the kind that transits through the Strait of Hormuz, is made with natural gas. And a blockage in that fertilizer pipeline means that fertilizer prices around the world have been increasing.
So before the war, it was about, you know, for urea, about $460 to $480 a ton, and now it’s near $700 — so a 45% increase. And that matters for farmers here in Texas. There are certain crops like watermelons and cantaloupes that look like they’re not going to get their allocation or it’s gonna be too expensive to fertilize them.
Even though the U.S. produces more fertilizer than we import, because we’re part of a world market, when the price goes up elsewhere in the world, it also goes up here. And for Texas farmers, they couldn’t have come at a worse time.
How immediate is something like this? Because we’re talking about fertilizer fairly early in the food production chain here. So is it more of a lagging impact or will it be felt more immediately?
This is definitely something that’s going to build up over time. So the sort of immediate impact of the fuel price rises is going to be in sort of shipping costs and in natural gas prices for cooking.
But this is certainly something that we’re going to see over the medium term as farmers are already, for example, shifting away from growing corn to growing soybeans because soybeans require less fertilizer. So we’re already locking in some of these longer-term impacts.
And then, you know, these impacts are going to be felt June, July, just when we’ve come through this SNAP realignment here in Texas, which means that, for many families, money’s going to particularly tight. And I think this is something to watch for not just today, but certainly through the rest of the year.
Well, how much does American agriculture depend on fertilizer flowing through the Strait of Hormuz? It seems very distant and I would imagine countries, like perhaps China, being more dependent. We would have our own sources, no?
Well, we certainly have our own sources of fossil fuel, and that means that we’re less dependent on the world. If we were to close our borders today, we’d be okay when it comes, for example, to urea.
But the problem is, as I say, we’re part of a global market, so the farmers who haven’t locked in their urea purchases already are in trouble.
And then there’s another story that doesn’t get reported as much, and that’s about sulfur. About half the world’s sulfur comes through the Strait of Hormuz, and it’s a byproduct of oil and gas refining. But you need it to produce phosphate fertilizer. We have plants that produce that in Florida, but without the sulfur imports those plants can’t work.
So we’re very much embedded in a global web of fertilizer that’s not just about the nitrogen, but about, for example, phosphate production. And that means that while we have many of the some of the basic sort of primary inputs for making our own fertilizer here in the U.S., because of the way that we’ve woven ourselves into this international circuit of exchange and commodity production, we are very much hostage to what happens in the Gulf.
Are there particular items in the grocery store where we might see costs jump as a direct result of a fertilizer shortage?
Well, honestly, I mean, anything that requires large inputs of commodity crops is going to be difficult.
But do keep an eye out for the watermelons and cantaloupes, particularly those grown in Texas. Those, I think, are ones that are particularly vulnerable right now.
