The Fragility Is the Feature

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs warned that disruptions at the Strait of Hormuz could spike global food prices by constraining the nitrogen fertilizer supply that industrial agriculture depends on to function.

That warning is now reality.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks across the Gulf and closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. Traffic through the strait fell from roughly 130 vessels per day to single digits—a decline of more than 95%. The largest disruption to global energy supply since the 1970s is now also the largest disruption to global fertilizer supply in modern history.

The Gulf region produces nearly half the world's urea and 30% of its ammonia. About one-third of all seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. That trade has effectively stopped. Urea prices have climbed 50% since the war began. The global fertilizer supply chain has contracted by a third. China has restricted fertilizer exports until August to protect its own domestic supply. India—normally the world's second-largest nitrogen fertilizer producer—depends on Iranian and Qatari natural gas to run its plants, and those gas fields have been severely damaged in the conflict.

None of this was unforeseeable. All of it was structural.

Modern industrial agriculture has been engineered around a single assumption: that synthetic inputs manufactured from fossil fuels will always be available, always affordable, and always deliverable across global supply chains. Nitrogen fertilizer alone accounts for roughly 60% of global fertilizer use and 20–30% of total crop production costs. When one shipping lane closes, that assumption collapses—and food prices, planting decisions, and the ability of entire nations to feed themselves follow.

The word for this is counterparty risk. Every regional food system that depends on petrochemical fertilizer shipped from the other side of the world has stacked its ability to feed people on top of a chain of dependencies it cannot control: natural gas extraction, ammonia synthesis, refining capacity, international shipping lanes, maritime insurance markets, and the foreign policy decisions of governments thousands of miles away. Remove any single link and the whole chain breaks.

The consequences are already materializing. U.S. corn farmers are in their fourth consecutive year of negative margins, and many delayed fertilizer purchases waiting for prices to drop or for federal assistance payments to arrive. They are now exposed to sharply higher input costs at the worst possible moment—the start of planting season. Analysts expect U.S. corn acreage to fall from 98.8 million acres in 2025 to roughly 94 million in 2026 as farmers shift toward soybeans, which require less nitrogen. Spring wheat acreage is expected to decline sharply. Some farmers who cannot source fertilizer at all may skip planting entirely—including producers of watermelons, cantaloupe, and pumpkins in states like Texas and Indiana.

And the United States is relatively insulated. It produces about three-quarters of its own fertilizer. Countries that depend on Gulf imports for their nitrogen supply—across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—face the prospect of reduced harvests, crop losses, and food price inflation that will hit their poorest citizens hardest.

This is the fragility that the Food Freedom Foundation exists to address.

Holistic regenerative agriculture works from a fundamentally different premise. Instead of importing fertility from distant supply chains, it rebuilds the biological capacity of the land itself. Healthy soil ecosystems cycle nutrients through living root systems, mycorrhizal networks, and the movement of animals across the landscape. A regenerating regional food system does not need a clear shipping lane through the Strait of Hormuz to grow food next year. It needs functioning ecology underfoot.

This is not a theoretical distinction. It is the difference between a food system that breaks when geopolitics shift and one that continues to feed people regardless.

Every crisis like this one is an argument for ecological regeneration—for abundance, resilience, and peace. Our challenge is to fund that work at scale before the next chokepoint closes.

Disruption like this is painful. But it does one useful thing—it makes the fragility impossible to ignore. People do not rethink their food system when everything is cheap and easy. They rethink it when the shelves get thin and the prices stop making sense. If this moment wakes even a few more people up to the fact that their food supply depends on forces entirely outside their control, then the disruption will have done more for food sovereignty than a decade of policy papers.