ICC Secretary General: The Hormuz clock that matters isn’t diplomatic — it’s agricultural

The real clock on the Hormuz closure is agricultural — and by the time the food crisis is visible, the decisions that caused it will be six months old.

The closure of the Strait continues to be treated mainly as an energy shock. But the longer it lasts, the greater the risk that today’s disruption becomes tomorrow’s harvest failure in America and across the world.

The Hormuz crisis will not end when oil markets stop twitching. Some economic shocks travel slowly – a danger to which many governments seem oblivious.

The Persian Gulf is not merely a conduit for hydrocarbons. It is a critical artery for fertilizers and the inputs needed to produce them. Urea, ammonia, sulphur and phosphorus sit at the unglamorous heart of modern agriculture. They do not make headlines in the way oil does. But without them, yields fall, food prices rise and food insecurity spreads.

 This is the risk policymakers are still underestimating. A delayed oil shipment can sometimes be replaced or rerouted. A missed fertilizer application cannot. Farming runs to biological deadlines: if farmers miss planting or application windows, the consequences are harvested months later – in lower wheat, rice and maize output.

The Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that a closure of Hormuz beyond 90 days could trigger a systemic agrifood shock and a severe food-price crisis within six to 12 months. The economic and social consequences of today’s blockage will not be fully visible today. They will appear in the next harvest, the next import bill and the next food-price index.

The early signals are already ugly. Urea prices have surged, reportedly up 55% in Kentucky. Fertilizer affordability has deteriorated to levels not seen since the Arab Spring. Farmers in import-dependent economies are being forced to make decisions now about how much they can apply, what they can plant and what risks they can bear. These are not marginal choices. At scale, lower fertilizer use means lower yields of staple crops. What begins as a price signal in commodity markets becomes a calorie deficit in poorer households.

The geography of the risk is equally clear. The most exposed countries are those that import both food and fuel, carry limited fiscal space and have populations already stretched by inflation. Many are in Africa and Asia. For them, the closure of Hormuz is not an abstract disruption to global trade. It is a direct threat to balance sheets, budgets and bread prices. But the impact is being felt in the West, too. 70% of farmers in the United States already report being unable to afford enough fertilizer for spring planting season. 

The problem is not confined to finished fertilizer shipments. The Gulf is also vital to the movement of inputs that keep fertilizer production running elsewhere. Sulphur matters for phosphate fertilizers. Natural gas matters for nitrogen. Ammonia matters across the system. If these inputs do not move, the shock does not remain in the Strait. It cascades through factories, traders, distributors, cooperatives and farms across multiple continents.

This is why a “no rush” approach to reopening trade from the Persian Gulf is so dangerous. It assumes time is neutral. In agriculture, time is compound interest in reverse. Every week of delay raises the probability that the final bill will be paid in lower yields, higher food prices and deeper instability.

The priority must be the full reopening of the Strait. But if that cannot be achieved as a part of the latest negotiations, governments should not let the perfect become the enemy of the urgent. They should establish a protected shipping lane for fertilizers and essential fertilizer inputs immediately, backed by robust transparency and deconfliction processes.

Such a mechanism would need to be practical, not performative. It should give shipowners, insurers and traders confidence that vessels carrying fertilizers and essential fertilizer inputs can move without arbitrary interference or unacceptable security risk. That means clear notification procedures, credible monitoring and reliable deconfliction backed by the United Nations. We need to see the restoration of market flows quickly enough to prevent today’s logistics disruption from becoming a crop-yield crisis.

Governments should also resist the usual bad reflex: export restrictions. In every food shock, the temptation is to hoard. It is politically understandable but economically self-defeating. Export bans do not create more fertilizer or more grain. They compound market scarcity, amplify price spikes and invite retaliation.

Multilateral institutions should move now to support import-dependent countries with trade finance, emergency credit and targeted support for farmers. The objective should not be to smother markets with blanket subsidies. It should be to keep viable farmers buying inputs, logistics firms moving cargo and food-importing countries from being priced out at the worst possible moment.

Food systems rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. They weaken by sequence. By the time the crisis is apparent, the choices that made it inevitable were taken months earlier.

That is the lesson of Hormuz. The world is still debating whether this is a short-term disruption while farmers are already being forced to make decisions today that will have consequences next year. The clock that matters is not the diplomatic calendar. It is the agricultural one.

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