Name: Farmers face price rises due to fertilizer shortage
Uploaded: 2026-04-02T11:18:46.635Z
Duration: 3 min 21 s
Description: U.K. farmer, Caroline Harriott, discusses the risks to farming and food inflation if fertilizer is unable to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

U.K. farmer, Caroline Harriott, discusses the risks to farming and food inflation if fertilizer is unable to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Farmers in the Northern Hemisphere are experiencing severe disruptions in fertilizer supplies, largely due to the ongoing conflict affecting shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. This has caused the price of urea fertilizer to rise by approximately 50%, creating significant cost pressures for agricultural producers.

Many farms have already purchased fertilizer for the current planting season, but concerns are growing about future shortages and the impact on food supply chains. The OECD has raised its inflation forecast for the UK, citing these disruptions as a contributing factor, while farmers warn that prolonged shortages could lead to higher food prices and further economic challenges.

Farmers face price rises due to fertilizer shortage

For farmers in the Northern Hemisphere, like Caroline, the disruption to fertiliser supplies could hardly have come at a worse time. We won't get through the middle of the season without having to buy some very expensive fertiliser and goodness knows what would happen. Well, I don't think farmers, a lot of farmers won't even be here this time next year. If you were to harvest a crop of recent headlines since the start of the Iran war, you'd find plenty on the disruption to oil and gas supplies unable to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and some, but far fewer, on the supply shock to fertiliser that's driving massive price spikes and looming food insecurity. Let me try to translate that into what does that mean in terms of food supply. So that's enough fertiliser and enough nutrition to create about 20 billion meals per week that are now lost as a result of this. And here's why. Around a third of all the global fertiliser trade by sea normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz, according to the UN, including urea, the most used nitrogen fertiliser. And although some countries produce large amounts of their own fertiliser domestically, the process requires LNG, mostly imported from the Gulf, also badly disrupted and in short supply, limiting domestic fertiliser production as well. As a result, since the war began, prices for urea fertiliser have jumped by around 50%, from just under $500 per metric tonne to around $700. At this farm in southern England, it's yet another cost pressure they can't avoid. On the fertiliser side, if things turned round in the next two months, we'd just about be OK. But goodness knows what we're going to do if it carries on. And for those people that have run out of winter food, which a lot of farmers have, they've not got fertiliser to put on their grass so they can turn their cows out. Their cost of production will be huge and they'll go out of business. When will customers start to see the price on the shelves reflect those higher costs? To a certain degree. The trouble with farming is that we're price takers, not price makers. And the biggest problem with that is that we have very little power to influence the supermarkets putting up the price of milk. Many farms will have bought in fertiliser for the current planting season already. But when this gets used up, there are concerns about impending shortages. So much so that US farmers have written to President Trump urging him to use military ships to get fertiliser through the Strait of Hormuz. Without intervention, they warn, we could see food supply chain disruption not seen since 2022, when food price inflation hit a 40-year high. The more that we see this protracted conflict, that's going to impact certainly fertiliser prices, some of those other key commodities that are key inputs into overall supply chains. And the knock-on risk is we could actually see food inflation be materially higher from here. It's a serious concern in the UK, where the OECD has just raised its forecast for overall inflation to jump to 4% this year, while slashing its outlook for UK economic growth more sharply than for any other G20 economy. Ben Boulos, CNBC News.

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