Strait of Hormuz Closure: The War Ended on Paper. The World’s Fertilizer Didn’t Get the Memo

The Strait of Hormuz closure was supposed to be ending. Ships are cautiously returning to the world’s most important waterway — but the cargo that feeds the planet is not moving with them.

Iran effectively blocked the strait on 28 February, after the United States and Israel launched their air war: the Revolutionary Guard warned off merchant traffic, boarded vessels and laid mines. The memorandum of understanding signed on 17 June was meant to reopen the artery through which a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas normally flow.

Oil tankers have begun a hesitant restart. But according to UN trade monitors, fertilizer shipments — up to 30 percent of the world’s traded supply normally transits Hormuz — remain effectively at zero. Tracking data shows no visible resumption since the MoU. LNG, the key feedstock for making fertilizer, is similarly stalled. Operators, burned once, are waiting to see if the peace holds.

Here is why this matters far beyond shipping desks. Unlike oil, fertilizer has no internationally coordinated strategic reserves. Analysts estimate global fertilizer prices running 15 to 20 percent higher through the first half of the year, and American broadcasters are already asking what a fertilizer shortage does to food prices. For import-dependent farming nations — Bangladesh prominent among them, where the government has just taken World Bank emergency support partly for fertilizer — the arithmetic is brutal: costlier fertilizer means costlier rice, and costlier rice is measured in hungry households, not percentage points.

Wars, it turns out, do not end when documents are signed. They end when a shipowner in Doha decides it is safe to load urea again. Until then, the Hormuz crisis has simply changed shape — from a military story into a slow-motion food story, moving from the front pages to the dinner table.

Fact basis: strait blocked since 28 Feb 2026 (Wikipedia/UNCTAD); MoU 17 June; 25% seaborne oil, 20% LNG, up to 30% traded fertilizer transit Hormuz; fertilizer flows at zero post-MoU (UNCTAD/WTO tracker); +15–20% fertilizer price estimate; no strategic fertilizer reserves; NPR on US food prices.