Operation Epic Fury Has Closed the World’s Most Critical Maritime Passage. The Humanitarian Consequences Are Only Beginning.

On 1 March 2026, the day after Operation Epic Fury began, not a single tanker broadcast an identification signal in the Strait of Hormuz. The narrow passage between Iran and Oman—barely twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest navigable point, carrying roughly twenty per cent of the world’s oil, twenty per cent of its liquefied natural gas, and a third of its seaborne fertiliser trade—had gone dark. Eighteen days later, it remains effectively closed. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has attacked at least twenty-one merchant ships, reportedly laid sea mines, and declared that any vessel attempting transit will be set ablaze. More than 150 ships sit anchored outside the strait, waiting. The International Energy Agency has called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. But the oil shock, severe as it is, may prove to be the lesser catastrophe. If the Strait of Hormuz remains shut, the world faces a humanitarian crisis that dwarfs anything the war’s architects appear to have contemplated.

The danger is not the barrel. It is the bushel.

The Strait of Hormuz is not merely an energy chokepoint. It is the single most critical bottleneck in the global food system. Approximately thirty-five per cent of the world’s urea exports, thirty per cent of its ammonia, forty-four per cent of its seaborne sulphur, and twenty per cent of its phosphate fertiliser transit that passage. These are not obscure commodities. They are the chemical foundation of modern agriculture. Without nitrogen fertiliser, synthesised from natural gas and ammonia, crop yields collapse. Without sulphur and phosphate, the soil amendments on which billions of people’s food supply depends simply do not get made. As the Carnegie Endowment has observed, the world spent fifty years building strategic oil reserves for exactly this scenario. It spent zero years building fertiliser reserves.

The consequences are already materialising. Urea prices at the New Orleans benchmark hub have surged from $475 to $680 per metric ton—a spike of over forty per cent. Oxford Economics has raised its fertiliser price forecast by twenty per cent for the second quarter of 2026. QatarEnergy, which supplies a fifth of global LNG—a critical feedstock for nitrogen fertiliser production—has declared force majeure. Over 1.1 million tonnes of fertiliser are now........

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