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 physically blocked in the strait, roughly a week’s worth of global trade. And unlike the 2022 Ukraine crisis, where Russia continued shipping fertiliser even under sanctions and the supply reduction was partial and gradual, the Hormuz closure is total and immediate. There are no alternative producers of this scale waiting in the wings. China restricts fertiliser exports, prioritising its domestic market, and those restrictions will continue until August 2026. Russia has export quotas in place. Egypt and Morocco can absorb some demand, but not remotely enough.

What does this mean for the people who eat what these fertilisers grow? The transmission is direct and it is fast. As Raj Patel of the University of Texas has warned, a farmer in Thailand who is ninety per cent import-dependent, buying urea made from gas, shipped through Hormuz, and priced in strengthening dollars, faces a cost shock on every dimension simultaneously. Multiply that farmer across South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America and the picture becomes starkly clear. If farmers respond rationally to soaring input costs by reducing fertiliser application—and they will—crop yields will fall. Food prices will rise. And the people who spend the highest share of their income on food will be pushed toward hunger. Not in six months. In weeks.

The timing could not be worse. The Northern Hemisphere spring planting season is underway right now. Vessels from the Gulf to the US Gulf Coast take thirty days. That means the fertiliser that American corn and soybean farmers need for March and April planting should have shipped in February—the very week the war began. Market analysts are already reporting that farmers are discussing “crop switching,” moving acreage from nitrogen-intensive corn to soybeans, which require less fertiliser. If that trend holds, the 2026 harvest will see a significant shortfall in corn production, driving up the cost of livestock feed and, eventually, consumer prices for meat and dairy worldwide. The CSIS has described the strait’s closure as a “worst case scenario” for global fertiliser markets.

But the most acute danger is not in the American Midwest. It is in the countries that were already starving. The humanitarian system was buckling before the first bomb fell. In Sudan, 24.6 million people face acute food insecurity. In Yemen, 16.7 million. In Syria, 9.2 million. In Gaza, the figure is ninety-four per cent of the population. The Iran war does not create these crises. It pours accelerant on every one of them, simultaneously, through the single mechanism of energy and fertiliser disruption. The 2022 Ukraine shock pushed an estimated forty million additional people into acute hunger, according to the World Food Programme. The Hormuz closure, by several measures, is more severe.

Then there are the hundred million people who live in the Gulf states themselves. As Project Syndicate has reported, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq etc. import approximately seventy per cent of their food through the Strait of Hormuz. Replacing those disrupted imports would require moving 191.3 million pounds of food into the region every single day—an unprecedented logistical operation, potentially through contested airspace. For comparison, the entire World Food Programme delivered an average of just fifteen million pounds of food per day to eighty-one million people across seventy-one countries in 2024. The maths is sobering: feeding the Gulf under a prolonged blockade would require an operation roughly thirteen times the WFP’s entire global daily output. And the blockade is coinciding with Ramadan, when household food consumption across the Gulf can jump by fifty to a hundred per cent.

The regional displacement crisis compounds the pressure. Inside Iran, 3.2 million people have been internally displaced—a figure without modern precedent for the opening weeks of a conflict. In Lebanon, more than one million have been displaced in barely two weeks. “It is the second time in two years my family has been displaced,” a Mercy Corps staff member told reporters last week. “Prices keep rising, and my children’s school has been interrupted again.” She is one of millions. Iran hosts large populations of Afghan and Iraqi refugees who now face secondary displacement, potentially being pushed back toward countries of origin that cannot absorb them. Across the broader Middle East, the IOM reports that more than nineteen million people were already living in internal displacement before 28 February. Every one of them needs to eat. Every one of them depends on supply chains that now run through a war zone.

The fiscal arithmetic underscores the inversion of priorities. The United States had spent at least $12 billion on Operation Epic Fury by mid-March, according to National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett—a figure that almost certainly understates the true cost. That sum could fund US humanitarian assistance abroad at current levels for nearly three years. Instead, it has purchased the conditions for a global food emergency, while appropriated humanitarian funds sit unreleased inside the State Department.

The critical question now is not what the war has already cost, but what happens if the strait remains shut. Every week of closure deepens the fertiliser deficit, narrows the planting window, and tightens the vice on import-dependent nations. Even in the most optimistic scenario—a ceasefire tomorrow and the strait reopened—restarting production and transport would take weeks that Northern Hemisphere farmers do not have. In a scenario of prolonged closure lasting months, the cascade becomes irreversible: missed planting seasons cannot be recovered, depleted food stocks cannot be replenished at speed, and the countries already in crisis tip into catastrophe. A food security analyst quoted by Nutrition Insight has called it “the first true twenty-first-century conflict that could unleash a slow-motion famine machine.” That assessment, three weeks into this war, no longer looks like hyperbole.

The Strait of Hormuz must be treated not merely as a military theatre but as a humanitarian lifeline. The fertiliser and food supply chains transiting that passage are the metabolic pathways of global food security, and treating them as collateral of a naval standoff is an act of collective negligence. Safe passage for commercial shipping—particularly fertiliser carriers—must be a non-negotiable element of any ceasefire framework. Congress must release the humanitarian funds already sitting inside the State Department. G7 nations must begin planning, now, for strategic fertiliser reserves—the glaring gap in global crisis preparedness that this war has exposed. And the international community must recognise that every day of Hormuz closure is not merely a day of elevated oil prices. It is a day subtracted from the food security of the world’s most vulnerable people.

The alternative—diplomacy, restraint, the preservation of the negotiating channels that Oman’s foreign minister confirmed were making substantial progress just days before the first strikes—was available. It was not pursued. The bill is coming due. It will not arrive at the gas pump in Washington or London. It will arrive at the dinner table in Khartoum, in Dhaka, in the Bekaa Valley, and in the fields of sub-Saharan Africa where the fertiliser never came. And by then, it will be too late to pay it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)