🌾🚜 The global food crisis unleashed by the war. From Minnesota to Punjab, fertiliser costs are up and harvests are set to be hit

In Punjab, farmers are beginning to panic.

India’s agricultural heartland is feeling the reverberations of the war in the Gulf, according to Rajpal Singh, who grows rice, wheat and corn in the region.

People were already struggling to access fertiliser due to government controls, Singh says. Now, with the start of the rice planting season just three months away, the war is threatening to choke supplies of vital crop nutrients entirely. It has already meant six-to-eight-hour power cuts in his village an hour-and-a-half’s drive from the city of Ludhiana.

With corn planting just three to four weeks away, he is looking at huge losses — if he even manages to buy enough fertiliser. “With the economic climate we have now, it’s hard to find credit, it’s hard to find cash.”

The threat to food security, however, may be just as grave a risk. “You can live without your fridge or without your car for a while,” says Michael Werz, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “You cannot live if you do not have food staples.”

The impact on the global food system caused by the Iran war could be even bigger than the crisis triggered by Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, experts say.

That is a particularly serious concern for the world’s poorer countries, but the longer the conflict lasts, the more severe the food shock will become and the more people will be affected.

The disruption is already having an impact. Across Asia and Africa, fuel cost rises have pushed food prices higher. African countries such as Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania and Sudan, which are especially reliant on seaborne fertilisers, are already suffering. In Somalia, prices of basic foods have risen by around a fifth since the conflict began, according to the UN’s World Food Programme.

Other regions are bracing for their harvests to fall short if the conflict continues. South Asian nations such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh rely on gas imported from the Gulf to produce their own crop nutrients.

Even countries less directly exposed, including the US, will feel the effects through higher prices.

What will be primarily an economic problem for some will be an existential one for others. Some 45mn more people in poorer countries could face acute food insecurity by June, according to the UN — on top of 318mn who are already insecure.

“In every market you have to get food from rural areas into cities — usually on diesel-powered trucks,” says Raj Patel, a food systems scholar at the University of Texas. “All of that gets paid for by the wholesaler and, ultimately, the consumer.”

In Bangladesh, in the northern district of Dinajpur, rice farmers say they have gone days without reliable access to diesel, needed to power irrigation pumps and threshing machines.

Higher fuel and transport costs are also pushing up prices in local markets across Africa, according to the UN. “The food has not disappeared — it is still there,” says David Laborde of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. “But it is becoming more costly to move it, to process it and ultimately to access it.”

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