Op-ed: The Persian Gulf oil crisis is a food crisis

***I'm torn on whether this belongs in ~food or ~enviro, and will leave others to judge. I lean towards ~enviro because the editorial's analysis ultimately focuses on eliminating the fossil fuel dependencies of fertilizer production, agriculture, and food processing/transportation rather than food abundance, but it's got "food" in the title.

From the article:

When the Strait of Hormuz closes, here’s what happens: Energy prices spike immediately. Fertilizer prices follow. Reduced harvests come a season later. Food price inflation—at the gas station, at the grocery store, at the diner—is brought to you not by fertilizer prices, but the price of oil.

Diesel costs more, so trucking costs more, so everything on every shelf costs more. Cooking fuel prices rise and restaurants pass it on to their consumers. (A thali meal platter in India is up 10 percent this week, Bloomberg reports.) Processing and packaging, which together account for 42 percent of fossil fuel use in the food supply chain, become more expensive before a single field is planted with a gram less fertilizer.

A working-class family in Iowa paying more at the pump and more at the checkout is not in the same position as a smallholder farmer in Kenya facing a 50 percent spike in urea prices, but they have more in common with one another than they do with Iowa-based hog-farming conglomerate. Working families around the world are set to lose, while a few well-placed corporations are set to make a killing.

We have already seen what happens when fertilizer supply is interrupted. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, fertilizer prices tripled from their 2020 baseline. The mechanism was twofold: Russia and Belarus together account for roughly 40 percent of global potash exports, and Russia is also among the world’s largest urea exporters; Western sanctions disrupted that supply.

Simultaneously, Russia restricted natural gas flows to Europe, shutting down European fertilizer plants that depend on cheap gas as feedstock. The price spike came from two directions at once. Brazil’s fertilizer import bill nearly doubled. The FAO Food Price Index hit an all-time high. Millions of people were pushed toward hunger—not because of a shortage of food, but because the inputs required to grow it became unaffordable.