The current maritime barrier in the Strait of Hormuz – a hub for essential international trade – poses a significant disadvantage to the feed industry: global dependence on artificial fertilizers for raw materials such as soy and grains. Experts warn of inflation not only in oil and staple foods, but also in active and fortified products that are related to these items.
This could threaten domestic costs for food producers, as Gulf fertilizer disruptions and Hormuz shipping delays spread through international commodity prices for soybeans, grains and oilseeds.
The sea route has been closed since February following the Israeli and US military attacks on Iran, which have caused geopolitical and economic chaos in the region and abroad.
Nutrition Insights Talks with Marco Cantero, Greenpeace EU Director of Agricultural Policy, to discuss how this crisis reveals the fragility of food systems and the potential impact on the feed industry.
“Industrial agribusinesses want to portray themselves as the only thing standing between people and empty shelves. In fact, it’s the intensive, chemical-dependent model of industrial agriculture that makes our global food system so fragile in the first place.”
“After the global chaos of the CoVID-19 outbreak, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the US-Israeli war on Iran, food and grocery prices have skyrocketed. How many times do we have to learn this lesson?”
Regional food security and inflation
The US-Iran war threatens to raise food prices, which have been affected by inflation for years, and worsen food insecurity in countries already affected by conflict.
The Strait of Hormuz has been blocked by shipping during the US-Iran war, threatening 25% of the world’s urea exports and feed supply chain.The Gulf region is almost entirely dependent on food imports, such as rice (77%), corn (89%), soybeans (95%), and vegetable oil (91%), according to the Institute for Public Policy Research. Sixty million people live in this region.
These ingredients are central to several feed categories, from plant proteins and premixes to emulsifiers. Blocked imports may cause prices to rise on grocery shelves, putting pressure on producers to make adjustments.
Michael Wiers, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes that food inflation has reached 40% in the past year, so any supply disruption would have “significant consequences.” He adds that the price of rice has increased seven times and the price of green lentils and vegetable flour has increased three times.
The conflict also affects areas prone to malnutrition and hunger, according to the fifth phase of food security classification. A recent analysis of Action Against Hunger shows that Sudan has 24.6 million people, Yemen 16.7 million and Syria 9.2 million people facing severe food insecurity. In Gaza, it affects 94% of the population, and in South Sudan, 56%.
Nutrition Insights Previously spoke to the organization, which asked food companies to collaborate with NGOs and innovate the necessary methods of food distribution instead of increasing production.
A local plant-based diet may protect against the crisis
Industrial food is dominated by the use of fertilizers. However, Cantero notes that shifting animal food crops to human nutrition—especially plant-based sources for supplements and fortified foods—reduces the vulnerability of geopolitical shocks.
“In the EU, two-thirds of cereals are used to produce animal feed. There is clearly a lot of untapped potential to reduce our vulnerability by sending crops to feed people, not livestock.”
“A system where more people eat food that is plant-based, local and organic can be remarkably resilient in an event like the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz,” he says.
Francesca Galilei, Food Systems Policy Officer at the International Federation for Animal Husbandry, previously told us about the inefficiencies in the industrial farming system, where large amounts of agricultural crops are grown for animal feed for human consumption.
Greenpeace warns that the Hormuz crisis represents an addiction to chemical fertilizers – plant-based nutrition offers a way of resilience.“For every 100 calories of human food grains fed to livestock, only 17-30 calories enter the human food chain. Production needs to be made to use human food grains as animal feed,” she argued.
Ecological practices for food security
According to Wiers at the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S.-Iran conflict has put one-third of the world’s fertilizer trade at risk of disruption. Fertilizers account for 25% of agricultural production costs. He adds that natural gas shipments have declined, affecting feedstocks for nitrogen-based fertilizers.
Weirs points out that the affected areas of Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are major fertilizer exporters.
Barriers to fertilizer exports may translate into less availability and higher prices for crops that rely on the fertilizer, which is processed into nutrients such as protein, fiber and sugar.
Greenpeace Ottawa’s Amanda Larson, director of the Global Big Egg Project, sees the big picture: geopolitical shocks are hitting farmers in the northern hemisphere during spring, threatening harvests and “shocking food prices.”
Referring to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Weirs noted that the war led to the rebuilding of a major trading system while another 27.2 million people fell into poverty and another 22.3 million went hungry two years after the invasion.
“The systematic weaponization of food, water, and fertilizer in a drought-prone region makes this the first real conflict of the twenty-first century that could unleash a slow-motion famine machine,” he warns.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace’s Contero comments: “If we want true independence, we must stop chemical-addicted industrial agriculture. Local, ecological agriculture is the only real way to food sovereignty.”
“By working with nature to naturally regulate the nutrients in the soil, farmers can break the cycle of dependency. In Europe, this means ending the current system of direct payments, which favors large landowners – primarily grain producers – and a systematic transfer that supports small farms, encourages agro-ecological practices, and encourages the agricultural practices needed to restore plants. From animal-based proteins.
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