Global food crisis: did anyone think about this before attacking Iran?

Wars have unintended consequences and those who suffer the most in the long run are often those who have the least to do with the fighting itself. As the most powerful and wealthy country on earth the US is least affected by its own war. Certainly, the gas prices at the pump have gone up for the average consumer. Inflation is a percentage point higher and the Pentagon has asked Congress for a $200bn supplemental to pay for the replacement of the thousands of missiles and other pieces of ordnance that it has fired at Iran, as well as the cost of maintaining such a large force in the Gulf. But in the larger scheme of things the US economy can absorb $2bn a day spent on a foreign war (whether it makes sense or otherwise) and there are compensations too. US oil and gas majors are reaping handsome profits from the much higher prices of Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate, and the US has become the world’s largest exporter of LNG as countries seek alternatives to supplies blocked for weeks in the Strait of Hormuz and with no resumption of free passage in sight. US oil refiners are reporting windfall profits too as they turn cheap American oil into pricey exports. Iran can try to retaliate by attacking US bases or assets in the immediate vicinity of the Gulf region; but although the Iran war is not popular with the American public, the 325mn Americans living in the continental US can go about their daily lives blissfully immune to worries of Iranian counter-strikes against their own lives or property. This after all is not the days of the Cold War where the threat of Soviet nuclear bombers and multiple warhead missiles was ever present.

Yet once we discount the US, the ripples of the Iran war are everywhere and clear to see. Starting with Iran itself. Two million Iranians have lost their jobs, millions have been displaced and thousands killed or maimed. The bill for the country’s reconstruction (up to the recent ceasefire) is estimated at around $580bn – equivalent to Ukraine after four years of fighting. Already, precarious economic conditions and poor health and education services have been degraded and stressed even more. Shut off from the global internet for months at a time the Iranian population has been pushed even further into isolation and darkness. In Lebanon, thousands of civilians have been killed in Israeli bombing strikes, hospitals and schools destroyed and over one million people (a fifth of the population) forced to flee their homes. Thousands of Syrian refugees have gone back home placing new strains on Syria as it struggles to rebuild after decades of civil war. If we turn to Asia, we see countries highly dependent on oil and gas supplies from the Gulf introducing emergency energy saving measures, offering free public transport, cancelling flights and asking employees to work from home. Import prices across Asia have posted their steepest rise in three decades. In Europe too the prospect of higher energy costs, inflation and unemployment comes at the very moment when the EU economies were slowing recovering from the shocks of COVID–19 and the war in Ukraine. European governments trying to cut expensive energy subsidies and reduce fossil fuel consumption are being forced into reverse gear. The EU has had to develop a scheme to share jet fuel. It is an irony of the Trump administration that whereas the President has consistently hammered the Europeans for inadequate defence spending, his policies such as swingeing tariffs and now the economic impact of the Iran war have consistently undermined the ability of European governments to meet their defence targets. Even when the Iran war is over, based on something more permanent than short, shaky ceasefires, it will take months and probably even years for global energy supply chains to return to normal as production facilities are rebuilt and shipping companies have the confidence to return to the Gulf. Like interest on bad debt, our citizens are still paying for wars decades after they have ended. But whereas in the past these were at least the wars of our own countries, in the globalised world of the 21st century, we end up paying for other people’s wars as well.

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the world’s poorest and hungriest populations. Just four years ago, the world faced a major potential food crisis after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The latter is a principal exporter of grain to Africa and the Middle East but Russia mined the Black Sea and blocked the passage of commercial shipping in and out of Ukraine’s ports and then proceeded to bombard grain loading facilities and storage depots at those ports, such as Odesa and Chornomorsk. Its use of chemical explosives, land mines and overall battlefield operations blighted whole stretches of Ukrainian farming land, further depressing grain production and driving export prices to astronomical levels. Yet Ukraine and Russia came to an agreement, brokered by Turkey and the UN, to reopen the Black Sea to both Ukrainian and Russian agricultural exports. Turkey and Romania launched a task force to de-mine the Black Sea. This agreement proved shaky and Ukraine sent its grain close to the western Black Sea coastline and towards its Danube ports to avoid Russian fire. It opened an overland route to Poland as well. These steps were enough to calm international food markets and avoid widespread hunger, especially as Russia was able to export fertiliser while Ukraine exported its grain and sunflowers. But even a catastrophe averted still leaves scars. The Economist has calculated that the 2022-2023 Ukrainian grain crisis killed more people in the global south than died on the battlefields of the Donbas.

Yet the Iran war has now raised the spectre of a global hunger crisis once more. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz (now made even more complex by the double blockades of both Iran and the US) has mainly been discussed in terms of oil and gas shortages and price hikes, as 11 million barrels of oil a day cannot get to market. But its impact on food production is even more dramatic, and in places far removed from the theatre of conflict. Already the UN’s World Food Programme has warned that if the Strait remains closed by June, another 45 million people will join the 300 million who already struggle to feed themselves every day. Already throughout Africa and Asia, the poor are growing less on their plots as fertiliser becomes more expensive and harder to find, and they are skipping at least one meal a day as cooking oil becomes prohibitive too. The reason is that the Gulf plays an outsized role in the global food chain even if Iran and its Arab neighbours are not themselves big food exporters. The region currently blockaded in the Gulf is responsible for 30% of globally traded fertiliser. The 20% of liquefied natural gas that it produces and exports is a key component in manufacturing fertiliser and cooking oil. The 15% Gulf share in global oil output helps to fuel agricultural machinery on farms and distribute food to markets. Currently two million tonnes of fertiliser are blocked on immobilised ships in the Gulf. This is equivalent to 12% of all the fertiliser that was transported through the Strait of Hormuz in 2024. If the ships do not reach their destinations soon, there will be less fertiliser to boost crop production over the summer. By harvesting time in the autumn yields will be reduced, prices will rise further and hunger will spread quickly, both in cities as well as the countryside.

The Iran war has indeed shown us that the Gulf is arguably more important to global food supply than oil and gas deliveries. It accounts for 30-35% of the international trade in urea and 25-30% in ammonia that are the core components of fertiliser. A single company in Qatar produces 14% of the world’s urea supply and it has been out of operation for over a month due to Iranian drone and missile strikes. Usually when one supply route closes, traders look for alternatives but in the case of fertiliser, this is far from straightforward. Russia, a major exporter, is on the receiving end of international sanctions, particularly on commercial shipping or access to credit, and Russia’s ports and storage depots are now being attacked by Ukrainian drones. China has also been a major fertiliser exporter but is now hoarding its own supply given the prolonged uncertainty in the Strait of Hormuz. The higher price of gas and shortages in supply are also forcing other producers, notably India and Bangladesh, to curtail production. Given that the use of fertiliser can double agricultural output, these signals spell trouble for global food production. Farmers in the EU need not fret too much. They receive subsidies from the EU common budgets and (as they have done in France and Ireland recently) can quickly block the highways to press demands for lower fuel duty and other forms of tax relief. They have large stocks of fertiliser and can switch from fertiliser intensive crops such as maize (corn) to less intensive ones, such as soya beans. But with the price of urea up by 65% and ammonia up by 40% the impact on the world’s 500 million smallholders, who can barely afford to feed their own families, will be severe. Many of them will give up using fertiliser altogether diminishing the amount of wheat, chickpeas or barley that they are able to grow. As with oil and gas, Asia and Africa are heavily dependent on fertiliser from the Gulf as well. For instance, Thailand imports 71% of its urea from that region, 67% in the case of South Africa and 41% for India. New Dehli has had to reverse plans to cut fertiliser subsidies, putting further strain on the public finances.

Timing in life is everything and problems that could be manageable in themselves become far more serious and potentially unmanageable when they combine with other factors. The climate is one, making its impact felt quickly if fertiliser and fuel shortages come on top of prolonged drought or excessive rainfall or extreme weather events. This year, climate scientists are tracking the El Niño, a recurring weather pattern that warms up the planet temporarily and leads to severe drought in some regions while causing crops to destroy flooding elsewhere. Based on past experience with El Niño (for instance the Super El Niño in 2015-2016), Latin America gets the excessive rainfall, for instance in Argentina and Uruguay, while Southern Africa, India and South East Asia get the drought. In 2016 crop production declined by two–thirds in Southern Africa. During the last El Niño in 2024 this region suffered its worst drought in 100 years with livestock wiped out and, according to the World Bank, 30 million people needing food assistance. Climate scientists are predicting another severe El Niño. It will come on top of four of the warmest summers on record and the cumulative impact of other manifestations of climate change such as extreme weather events and stresses on water supplies, irrigation, soil erosion and biodiversity loss. The context of climate change means that even a small and relatively short shock to global supply chains can have a disproportionate effect on hunger levels at scale and over considerable distances. Particularly when the most affected areas are those already dependent on humanitarian aid to sustain the local community.

Yet, this said, food crises unlike many other types of crisis do not come out of the blue. They are more slow-burning as it takes time for all the contributing factors to come together and tip food–insecure populations over the precipice. And as they are highly predictable, they are also highly treatable. Last year’s harvest was good at the global level. Lots of corn going into ethanol production can be redirected to food production. It is a question of focusing political and media attention on the gathering food crisis in time to mobilise international action and the movement of fertiliser and food to the areas most likely to suffer extreme hunger. Yet the political context is today as unfavourable as the environmental. The Trump Administration has abolished USAID and scrapped whole US assistance programmes in food, agriculture, transport and distribution capacity building, healthcare and disease prevention and control. The US has cut its contribution to UN agencies and relief programmes as well. The Europeans have long prided themselves on their commitment to overseas aid but as they try to find extra money for defence, aid and development funding has been the easy target. Europeans are now far from the UN target of 0.7% of GDP to be devoted to foreign aid. According to the OECD, which tracks foreign aid spending, the development assistance budgets of the rich industrialised countries fell by between 9–17 % in 2025, after already falling by an average 9% the year before. Public opinion is also in a different mood these days, worried first and foremost about rising energy bills at home and the cost of living. The generosity of the 1980s when Bob Geldof organised big rock Band Aid and Live Aid concerts around the world in support of the starving of Ethiopia, and sympathy songs recorded by celebrities with catchy titles such as “Don’t they know it’s Christmas” raced to the top of the charts, raising millions for relief aid, seems very distant now. Growing wealth inequalities in Western countries, more child poverty and rapidly rising pension and welfare budgets have swung public attention towards social deprivation at home rather than in the Horn of Africa. Farmers facing higher costs for diesel fuel may well want to turn corn into ethanol to run their tractors and combine harvesters after all. In wealthy countries energy accounts for half the cost of food production. So farmers are growing less to compensate for the higher fertiliser and diesel prices. Famines and hunger crises have come and gone in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Mali and Haiti with scant attention.

The world’s worst humanitarian disaster unfolding in Sudan (where the civil war has just marked the end of its third year) has displaced half of the country’s population of 53 million. Yet it has received very little press coverage as wars and economic crises closer to home have dominated the political cycle. The possible exception here is Gaza where the UN declared a famine emergency in August 2025 after 2 years of Israeli bombardment. The UN Office of Human Rights pointed the finger at Israel for a deliberate policy of using food distribution to drive the population of Gaza out of the northern part of the strip. Yet even street demonstrations in support of the Palestinians across Europe did not motivate EU governments to put pressure on Tel Aviv or abrogate trade and defence agreements with Israel. Only this week have EU foreign ministers met to discuss the future of the EU-Israel Association Agreement and Italy suspended its bilateral defence agreement with the country. Media coverage of the Iran War has involved mainly defence strategists debating the merits of missiles, drones and air defence systems while business correspondents pop up to predict the ups and downs of the stock market. Perhaps unsurprisingly Trump and Netanyahu do not mention civilian casualties or the humanitarian conditions in Iran, Lebanon and the wider Middle East region in their numerous press briefings. Instead, they justify the destruction of civilian housing and infrastructure (the first step in disrupting water, food and medicine supply chains) by claiming that they are legitimate military targets. The latest Israeli claim is that ambulances in Lebanon are Hezbollah taxis (a claim like many others not substantiated with any evidence). A growing disregard for the laws of armed conflict and the protection of civilians evident in attacks on bridges, railway networks, water treatment plants, electricity grids and medical facilities (like the Pasteur Institute in Tehran) can only foster the climate of impunity that will encourage other belligerents to act with similar cynicism in other conflicts, making it more difficult for NGOs and international relief agencies to operate in war zones and contributing to the breakdown in food production, imports and distribution.

But all these growing environmental, financial, political and military constraints on responding to the imminent hunger crisis are not an excuse for inaction or indifference. Too many lives are at stake for that to happen. Lobbying for the survival of millions in Africa or Asia cannot be left to a handful of outspoken UN officials like Tom Fletcher, the Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. When he was interviewed by the BBC this week, the journalist was more interested in his comments on his former colleague in the UK Foreign Office, caught up in the Peter Mandelson affair, than on the global hunger crisis. EU leaders need to mobilise too and stop presenting the issue as one of defence versus food aid or fighting poverty at home at the expense of fighting it abroad. Since the end of the Second World War the rich Western countries have always done both, and not just out of a sense of humanitarian duty but also enlightened self–interest. Fighting hunger has been part of resolving the conflicts that often cause famine, preventing mass migration, protecting the stability of neighbouring countries and communities, combatting extremism and terrorism, and protecting women and children who are often the first victims. It has all been part of the same mix. So, what must EU leaders do now?

First, talk about the hunger crisis and push it up the agenda. Trump and Netanyahu, and other leaders engaged in open–ended conflicts, must not be given a free pass when it comes to being challenged on the global humanitarian consequences of their actions. It is all too easy for US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, to portray the Iran war as a temporary blip in the global economic order, as he did at the IMF Spring Meeting in Washington last week. Bessent even stated that the alternative to the US military intervention was an Iranian nuclear attack on London, as if that were the only alternative or indeed a credible near-term threat. Or a temporary spike in oil and gas prices the only consequence. These claims need to be challenged and belligerents pressed to come up with plans and resources to deal with the ripple effects of their military operations. For instance, Trump could impose a windfall tax on the US oil majors and refineries that could be paid into the World Food Programme or a special fund for cheap fertiliser or food supplies to areas where the UN assess food insecurity to have reached a threshold level. The US and Israel could also be pressured into using their military assets to help the UN relief agencies. To give one example. The World Food Programme currently has food blocked in Hormuz that could feed 4 million people for a month. It has high–energy biscuits that it needs to send from Dubai to Afghanistan but rerouting those supplies to avoid Iran entirely would mean a long, expensive route across 9 countries in Central Asia. A US or Israeli airlift could help those biscuits to arrive in time. Of course, the European air forces could step in, as they have done so often in the past with food and aid drops over places like Gaza and the Horn of Africa. But that is not the point. Even if it would be unrealistic to expect belligerents to pay for the reconstruction of what their militaries have destroyed, they can be reasonably expected to come up with mitigation strategies for the immediate humanitarian consequences. A prohibition on excluding the UN agencies from war zones or on attacks against humanitarian workers and facilities would be the starting point. Any alleged military advance from these actions (even if proven) is far outweighed by the suffering inflicted on civilians. And the best way to make the belligerents stick to the rules is to keep the spotlight of political and media scrutiny on them.

The second imperative is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. If the fertiliser doesn’t get to market soon, it will be too late for planting season across the developing countries. Yet with both the US and Iran firing at ships and seizing tankers at the moment, we are moving away from this objective rather than closer towards it. As said already, reopening the Strait is not a panacea as it will take a while to clear the backlog of two thousand stranded ships and their cargoes and to restore normal energy and raw materials loading and offloading operations. Shipping companies will wait and see before they use the Strait at the same level as before the war. They will certainly be wary of Iranian attempts to control the maritime traffic and impose transit fees. But getting traffic through the Strait moving again will bring oil and gas prices down and help to relieve shortages and supply bottlenecks. It will decrease the frantic competition for alternative sources of supply, which is driving prices up sharply and encouraging speculation and insider trading. Consequently, the EU leaders need to work with Pakistan (as diplomatic mediator between the US and Iran) to press both Tehran and Washington to agree to an immediate framework agreement just on reopening Hormuz, and lifting their blockades. The European coalition that the UK and France have brought together in recent weeks now has 12 members willing to deploy naval ships in the Gulf, including minesweepers, to escort commercial ships in a convoy system. EU member states have used this technique successfully in the past as part of their Atalanta mission in the Gulf of Aden and have plenty of operational experience. Once the European warships arrive, the US Navy would withdraw to ports or out of a delimited zone in the Gulf and Iran would withdraw its missiles away from shorelines and keep its navy (at least what is left of it) in port. The European naval force would take charge of Gulf security until the US and Iran have reached a comprehensive peace agreement providing legal and binding guarantees for freedom of navigation through the Strait.

Third, the EU must work with the UN or an emergency response plan and a global fundraising drive. Being on the ground, and closely networked with local authorities and the NGO and charitable organisations, the UN agencies have the best means to do forecasting and scenario planning for hunger crises, looking at both scale and speed and how to recognise the tipping points and potential knock-on effects. What is different this time round is that we are not focusing on just one particular area, no matter how relevant, such as Sudan or Afghanistan, but looking at a much wider area. A crisis situation will not necessarily be tied to a single bad harvest or catastrophic weather event but spread over a number of interlinked factors. Although UN models show food prices rising by between 12-18% this year compared to pre-Iran war levels, it is more difficult to identify where they will have their greatest impact. Not just hunger but also political instability as we have seen from food riots in the past in Egypt or Venezuela. So EU-UN cooperation and modelling can help to set priorities for international action and mobilise preventative measures, such as stockpiling food close to the stricken areas, improving roads and rail access, anticipating refugee flows and people displacements, stepping up cooperation with local relief workers and putting early pressure on local authorities and militaries to heed the warnings and make preparations for humanitarian assistance. Money is key here as nearly all the UN country appeals for food aid and humanitarian relief are severely underfunded. EU governments, faced with budgets and the public finances spiralling out of control at home, and mounting debt obligations to boot, will not reverse foreign aid cuts immediately. But using frameworks like the G7, IMF and World Bank they can rally the EU’s global partners to collectively support a special fund to address food scarcity as a result of the Iran war. The EU could engage its External Action Service behind this diplomatic effort, and the EU Military Planning Staff could work similarly with its global partners to earmark transport aircraft, container ships and access to foreign ports and bases for the distribution of food aid, fresh water and medicines. Good contingency planning can save many lives when the time comes.

Fourth and finally, stockpiling and logistics. The Chinese example proves the value of building resilience through holding deep reserves of oil, gas and fertiliser to give countries more time to manage disruptions and to mobilise resources to cushion the blow for producers and consumers before the economy takes a nosedive or political unrest emerges. Deep reserves, which are common for oil and gas, but much less common for urea and ammonia, also extend to raw materials and rare earths. In crisis situations they give EU governments more latitude to deal with both domestic pressures and international responsibilities. With adequate stockpiles at home, supplies on the global market can be bought up and diverted to countries facing imminent food shortages without harming domestic populations. Mapping vulnerabilities associated with key choke points is important not only for economic activity and industrial production but also for the delivery of humanitarian aid. Piracy in the Gulf of Aden back in 2011 not only impacted commercial ships carrying goods or energy through the Suez Canal but also ships chartered by the World Food Programme to bring food to Somalia and Ethiopia. NATO was called on to escort these World Food Programme ships off the coast of Somalia. So global trade routes serve humanitarian as well as commercial purposes. This is a further reason for the EU to keep a close check on where new vulnerabilities build up along global logistics routes as economies transform and move into higher quality and specialised areas. Few people were aware, for instance, of how the Gulf states had used their oil and gas revenues to diversify their economies across the industrial value chain, particularly into chemical production. Saudi Arabia had become the world’s second largest exporter of ammonia while Oman, a small Gulf state, was number six. Or that four Gulf companies, Saudi Aramco, Adnoc, the Kuwait Petroleum Company and Qatar Energy together dominated global production of sulphur, another vital ingredient for fertiliser. EU planners need to be aware of these dependencies and find workarounds before the next shutdown of a key logistics route hits all of us. The EU also needs to be more focused and geopolitical when it comes to cooperating with governments in Africa, Latin America and Asia to secure vital supplies, for instance uranium for its nuclear power generators or potash for fertiliser. Too much hesitation or working through too many conditionalities before concluding supply agreements only allows China to move in and corner the market. It’s not only the impending global hunger crisis that requires a better balance between stockpiling, diversification and contingency planning for the use of alternative logistics routes but EU overall economic resilience as well.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.