Insulating Global Hunger from Petropower Geopolitics

Energy is among the few commodities we cannot live without. It is not only a basic consumption need but the essential input into the production, transportation, and preparation of food. Consequently, energy shocks have been a major indicator of and vector for hunger for at least 50 years.

Energy affects food prices and availability in four ways: through the direct energy costs of agricultural production, especially diesel; through the cost of agricultural inputs, especially fertilizer (nitrogen fertilizers alone account for the calories that support nearly half of all human life); macroeconomically through inflation and exchange rates; and through the erosion of exchange entitlements of the very poor—whose fixed household budgets must cover the rising costs of two essential goods.

While the effects can be global, local context determines severity. Places that are logistically isolated have larger transportation costs associated with food and are therefore more vulnerable to energy shocks. This is true both for food-producing countries and food-importing countries, because geographically isolated producers depend on fuel and fertilizer imports for production.

Energy shocks have been especially destabilizing for food systems in islanded countries, as in North Korea and Cuba after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In both cases, the loss of subsidized fuel, fertilizer, trade, and food imports sharply raised input costs and disrupted agricultural production, forcing governments to adapt to far more constrained external supplies. North Korea’s collapse contributed to a catastrophic famine, while Cuba’s Special Period produced severe and widespread hardship.

Today, as the world continues to reel from the food crisis trigged by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine, the single most important energy transportation corridor, the Strait of Hormuz, is at the epicenter of a war that does not have a clear end. The conflict over the strait, and its effects on energy markets, will only intensify the current global food crisis. And it could push Yemen and Afghanistan over the edge into famine.

Behind the Blockade

Though Afghanistan already posed significant internal transport challenges, aid delivery to its borders was at least relatively straightforward until the Iran war, traveling from United Aarab Emirates (UAE) ports across the Strait of Hormuz to Iran and then over Iranian land routes. Now, aid delivery must journey around the entire Arabian Peninsula to keep clear of the battlefield, going into Azerbaijan and across the Caspian Sea. According to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), food import costs have tripled as a result. And WFP estimates that 2.3 million Afghanis—a third of the country’s population—could join the 13.8 million at risk of starvation.

Yemen, meanwhile, obtains most of its staple food through commercial imports, as its 12-year civil war has destroyed the nation’s economy and basic transportation infrastructure. While the Yemeni people have been under persistent risk of starvation and malnutrition throughout the war, Yemen’s proximity to the Middle East conflict and the presence of Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the country has made its remaining critical infrastructure a target. The cost of aid delivery has grown not only as a result of the risk to life, but because the reduction in viable delivery routes have compound fuel and food prices.

The sheer breadth of the effects of the energy crisis is also on display in nearby Somalia and Sri Lanka. Somalia imports all of its fuel and nearly all of its cereal grains. Now, it must persuade freight markets to brave deadly waters for a country with a diminishing ability to pay for imports. Sri Lanka’s case is little better as it depends on Middle Eastern freight routes and fertilizer imports, one-third of which originate in the Persian Gulf.

Energy Shocks and Geopolitics

History reveals that the battle over the Strait of Hormuz will only intensify or prolong the current global hunger crisis and may even precipitate famines in the most vulnerable regions.

In the 1970s, oil shocks raised farm-input and transport costs at the same time several vulnerable countries were facing droughts, civil wars, and disastrous policymaking. The corresponding spike in food prices drove up chronic hunger levels across the board, while simultaneously complicating international aid delivery—itself made more expensive by rising fuel costs. Between 1972 and 1975, 2 million people died in famines across South Asia and Africa.

Oil price spikes were also a major factor in the 2007–2012 food crises, which spun out of the financial crisis. And while the current food crisis originated with the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s war against Ukraine has also played a major role, with some analysts estimating that energy and fertilizer costs have had a greater impact on food price inflation than Russian and Ukrainian grain export losses.

In each of these cases, countries that were especially import-dependent, with scarce foreign exchange or fiscal capacity, and with a large share of households in extreme poverty, were at greater risk of expanded malnutrition and even famine.

The war in Iran initially caused the withholding of approximately 20 million barrels per day of oil products from global markets. Oil prices remained below the worst forecasts only because inventories were used, demand fell, non-Gulf producers supplied more, and some Gulf oil was able to move through other routes. But while the markets’ response absorbed some of the impact, it did did not eliminate the risk of a deeper shock.

By June, daily global production had recovered to 9.4 million barrels below pre-war levels. But the fertilizer shock will last longer. The World Bank Group (WBG) fertilizer index rose more than 12 percent in the first quarter of 2026, with urea prices reaching their highest level since 2022 because of disruptions to Gulf production and the export of natural gas, ammonia, sulfur, and finished fertilizer. The WBG projects the index to rise more than 30 percent this year. Meanwhile, the WFP estimated in April that 45 million additional people could face acute food insecurity if the conflict and high oil prices continued through the second quarter of 2026.

An Economic Security Imperative

We live in a world with globally interdependent trade for commodities essential to life. Consequently, wars in one part of the world can cause great suffering for families far away from domestic fighting. And where wars disrupt the trade of not just food but energy, history shows a deepening of hunger will follow.

Short-term government interventions in energy crises are deeply challenged by their structural nature. Supply-side crises resolve most quickly when markets are diversified and can quickly adjust, as wheat markets did after Russia’s invasion in 2022. While carbon fuel and feedstock supplies are not so monopolized as they were in the 1970s, a handful of states and regions still dominate production. And when geopolitics interrupts supply, as  in the Middle East and Russia, markets have little recourse.

States must hold the long and short terms together, taking steps to ease their citizens’ suffering where possible while enacting a future with greater energy diversification and stronger political norms against the weaponization of food.

In the near term, governments should strengthen targeted cash transfers, food assistance, school meals, and other social-protection mechanisms for households most exposed to food inflation. The objective should be to preserve families’ ability to purchase food without creating broad subsidies or price controls that distort markets and become fiscally unsustainable.

Looking ahead, repeated crises make plain that commercializing renewable, modular, and affordable energy is an economic security imperative as much as it is a climate goal. America’s principal global rival, China, has electrified and diversified its economy more aggressively than any other—not likely due to any sense of moral climate commitment, but to weather crises precisely like the Iran war. And indeed it has.

To insulate hunger from petropower geopolitics, the global community must also expand its research investment—and imagination—such that fertilizer itself can be produced economically with widely available renewable feedstocks and at smaller scales. Governments must also restrain themselves, by new norms or treaties, from export restrictions on food, fertilizer, and energy. These kinds of export restrictions are contagious, negative-sum games that, in the ensuing market panic, accumulate far more harm to the world than benefit their originators.

We are in a new era of sharpening great power rivalries and open war. It is also an era of repeated shocks to global markets and uncertainty in trade. Until we can solve the fundamental problems of international politics, world leaders need to solve the comparatively modest problem of insulating vulnerable economies from these rough waters without closing themselves off to the benefits of trade.