The UN is ready to open a corridor for urea through the strait within ten days. For seven months, Washington and Tehran have refused to give it those ten days, and the planting season in Asia and Africa will not wait.
Jorge Moreira da Silva is now delivering the same warning for the third time in six months. In May, in Paris, he said the world had only a few weeks left to prevent a massive humanitarian crisis. Over the summer, in New York, he pleaded for a chance at last for the mechanism his task force had prepared back in the spring. On October 14 in Bangkok, on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the UN Under-Secretary-General repeated himself almost word for word: "It is absolutely essential to reach an agreement in the next few weeks. Otherwise, we will miss the planting season."
The figure on which his plan rests sounds almost like a mockery. Five vessels a day. That, by UN estimates, is enough traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to keep fertilizer flowing to the countries that need it most. Before the war, roughly a third of global urea trade and nearly half of seaborne sulfur shipments passed through that same corridor, only a few dozen miles wide. Today the great powers cannot agree on five ships.
None of the parties to the conflict ever declared war on fertilizer. It was simply left behind as a hostage. Oil and gas became the stuff of bargaining, ultimatums, and late-night phone calls. Urea, ammonia, and sulfur remained cargo remembered only by agronomists, food program economists, and agriculture ministers in countries where the harvest feeds villages rather than commodity exchanges. The price of this forgetfulness will arrive late, in the spring and summer of 2027, when the fields of Punjab, Mozambique, and Mindanao reveal how much nitrogen never made it into the soil.
Five Missing Ships: What the UN Is Offering Washington and Tehran
The mechanism in question was born on March 27, 2026. Four weeks after the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced the creation of a special task force for the safe passage of humanitarian cargo and agricultural inputs through the strait. Moreira da Silva, executive director of the United Nations Office for Project Services, was put in charge. The task force included representatives of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the International Maritime Organization, and the International Chamber of Commerce.
The design is deliberately modest. A coordination center is set up in Oman, where vessels register and receive an agreed-upon corridor. UN observers in Persian Gulf ports, working alongside local authorities, inspect the loading. During transit, each ship is tracked, and if any country has suspicions about a vessel or its cargo, an additional inspection is carried out. The mechanism covers fertilizers and related raw materials: urea, ammonia, and sulfur.
Moreira da Silva says the system could be up and running within seven to ten days of an agreement between Washington and Tehran. In the spring he cited a seven-day timeline and added an unpleasant detail: even an immediate reopening of the strait would bring the market back to normal only after three to four months. Over the past six months, he says, the head of the task force has consulted with more than a hundred states. Support, he emphasizes, is nearly unanimous, especially among the poorest importers.
The problem is that the unanimity of a hundred countries is worthless without the consent of two. Hormuz today is closed from both sides at once. Since February 28, Iran has used the strait as a lever of pressure, restricting passage and imposing tolls. Since April 13, the United States has maintained a naval blockade of Iranian ports. Any vessel carrying fertilizer needs the tacit permission of both sides, and each suspects that a humanitarian corridor would become a loophole for the other.
Urea Costlier Than Oil: The Blow the World Missed in February
When the strikes began in late February, markets were watching oil. Before the war, about a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas passed through Hormuz, and crude quickly jumped past $100 a barrel. Fertilizer, by contrast, long remained a line item in analysts' notes. That was a mistake.
The Persian Gulf has long been the planet's nitrogen pantry. Cheap gas from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Iran itself is converted into ammonia and urea at the world's largest complexes, while sulfur, a byproduct of oil and gas fields, goes into phosphate fertilizer production from Morocco to China. According to the World Trade Organization, fertilizer exports through the strait effectively came to a halt after the war began. The WTO puts this route's share of global seaborne exports at 34% for urea, 23% for ammonia, and nearly 20% for phosphates. The World Bank counts in tonnage: roughly 16 million metric tons of fertilizer a year.
Prices reacted faster than in 2022. In March, urea climbed to $725.60 per metric ton, up 53.7% in a month, a four-year high. Estimates of the scale of the shock vary depending on the baseline, and that discrepancy is worth keeping in mind. Measured against December 2025, global urea prices had risen 85% by March. For American farmers, prices rose 56% in the eight weeks following the closure of the strait. The difference comes down to contracts: much of the nitrogen for the 2026 spring season in developed countries had been contracted before the war. Poor importers buying hand-to-mouth on the spot market had no such cushion.
An honest caveat is in order here. The urea market proved more resilient than the pessimists warned. By the end of July, according to the same WTO data, the price had nearly returned to its prewar level, thanks to Chinese and Russian supplies, reduced demand, and deferred purchases. Phosphates behaved differently. Sulfur has no quick substitute, and by summer sulfuric acid had climbed to more than $500 per metric ton. That is precisely why Moreira da Silva speaks of urea together with "related inputs."
The caveat, however, holds only through July. Then the ceasefire collapsed, the strait closed again, and autumn brought new demand. As early as the spring, agricultural economists' models laid out a protracted-conflict scenario in which U.S. urea prices would peak at around $996 per short ton in October 2026. October has arrived, and the conflict has dragged on.
A Ceasefire That Forgot About Fertilizer
The chronology of the diplomatic failure is worth reconstructing, because it reveals the logic that condemned the humanitarian corridor to waiting.
In April, Islamabad hosted a 21-hour round of direct talks, the highest-level U.S.-Iranian contacts since 1979. The American delegation was led by Vice President JD Vance, the Iranian one by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. The two sides split over two issues: the fate of highly enriched uranium and control over passage through the strait. Within hours of the breakdown, Donald Trump announced a naval blockade, threatening 50% tariffs on any country that helped Iran. On the very first day, according to U.S. figures, six merchant vessels turned back toward Iranian ports.
On June 14, Trump announced a ceasefire, and on June 17 a memorandum brokered by Pakistan was signed, which came to be known as the Islamabad Accord. The document proclaimed an immediate and permanent cessation of hostilities on all fronts, gave the parties sixty days to negotiate a grand bargain, and obligated Iran not to charge transit fees during that period. Washington temporarily allowed sales of Iranian oil. Vance flew to Switzerland to open negotiations.
The agreement began to unravel within days. Tehran insisted that ships follow a northern route along the Iranian coast, established before the ceasefire. On June 25 and 27, Iranian drones attacked merchant vessels that had chosen the southern route. On July 7, Trump declared the ceasefire over, Washington revoked the license for Iranian oil sales, and U.S. aircraft, according to Central Command, struck more than eighty targets. On July 10, the president formally notified Congress that the war had resumed. On July 11, Iran announced the closure of the strait. A week later, the Iranian Foreign Ministry described the agreement as "suspended," and Tehran still insists that the Americans violated it first.
The most telling detail of this story is buried in a dry note from the International Food Policy Research Institute, published in September. Even during the ceasefire window, from mid-June to mid-July, when some shipping resumed, fertilizer accounted for a negligible share of the restored traffic. A month of relative calm was spent shipping out oil and gas and evacuating stranded ships. Back in March, the International Maritime Organization counted some two thousand vessels and twenty thousand seafarers trapped by the war. Urea ended up at the back of that line.
The explanation is simple and unpleasant. Absent a dedicated mechanism, commercial logic hands the window to the most valuable cargo. A tanker carrying two million barrels is worth dozens of times more than a bulk carrier loaded with urea; insurance and freight make sense for the former but not for fertilizer. The market is not malicious; it is simply doing the math. The UN mechanism is designed precisely to pull fertilizer out of that arithmetic.
Who Benefits from Someone Else's Hunger
Officially, no one opposes the mechanism. In practice, each side has reasons not to hurry, and they are more transparent than they seem.
For Tehran, the strait has remained its main, if not its only, instrument of pressure on Washington since the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in February. Any corridor opened without a political price devalues that leverage. Iran's position has not changed since April: the country claims the right to manage traffic in the strait and to levy fees. Over the summer, the Council of the International Maritime Organization condemned Iran's attempts to assert sovereignty over the strait and its unilateral creation of a traffic control authority.
Herein, in my view, lies the central and rarely acknowledged impasse. The UN mechanism, with its vessel registration, coordination center, and agreed corridors, is structurally reminiscent of the very "traffic management" that Tehran is seeking. The difference lies in who holds the registry. For Washington, agreeing to such a scheme is risky as a precedent: today the UN registers bulk carriers loaded with urea, tomorrow Iran demands recognition of a similar arrangement for tankers. For Tehran, conversely, a scheme without Iranian participation means surrendering what it has gained by force.
The American logic is different but equally rigid. The Trump administration insists that the nuclear program be on the table from the outset rather than deferred until a "grand bargain." Any partial relief, humanitarian relief included, is viewed in Washington as a concession that eases the pressure of the blockade. In August, Trump claimed "total control" of the strait by the United States and promised to maintain the blockade for as long as it takes. In this worldview, fertilizer belongs to the category of costs borne by others.
A separate irony is that the blockade also hits Iranian urea. The Islamic Republic is itself among the major exporters of nitrogen fertilizer, with its complexes in Asaluyeh running on gas from South Pars. Iranian urea cannot leave the country because of American warships; Qatari and Saudi urea is stuck because of Iranian drones. The strait is locked at both ends, and for fertilizer it makes no difference whose lock is on the door.
There are winners in this arrangement, too, and they should be named without sentimentality. The objective beneficiaries are producers outside the Gulf with their own feedstock and unrestricted access to the sea. Russia, the world's largest fertilizer exporter by value, has gained a lucrative market and stronger bargaining power with importers in the Global South. China, which since 2021 has periodically restricted urea exports to protect its domestic market, has acquired a lever it can use selectively. Oman has found itself in the position of an indispensable intermediary: the coordination center is to be located there, and part of Omani production sits on the coast outside the strait.
For Azerbaijan, this crisis is not abstract either. SOCAR's urea plant in Sumgait, launched in 2019 with a design capacity of about 650,000 metric tons a year, runs on domestic gas and ships its output through Georgia and Turkey, bypassing all three flashpoints of maritime trade. In a world where the Persian Gulf has become a risk zone, the value of a supplier with predictable logistics is rising faster than the price of urea itself. Baku, which maintains working relations with both Tehran and Washington, has one interest above all: that the war on its southern border not turn into a prolonged isolation of the region through which Caspian transit projects pass.
The losers are more numerous, and quieter. The poorest importers have no seat at the negotiating table, no fleet near Hormuz, and no leverage over either side. International Chamber of Commerce Secretary General John Denton cited the Philippines, which imports up to 90% of the fertilizer it needs, as the most vulnerable example. By his estimate, the crisis has affected nearly 40% of global fertilizer trade, and difficulties in rerouting logistics have taken about 2.7 million metric tons off the market.
Triple Chokehold: Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Black Sea
If the problem were limited to Hormuz, it could be worked around. Saudi Arabia pumps oil through the East-West Pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea, and some cargo moves through Omani ports outside the strait. The war has deprived the world of that insurance as well.
Yemen's Houthis, who stayed on the sidelines in the first months of the conflict, opened a second front over the summer. On July 22, they declared an embargo on Saudi exports through the Bab el-Mandeb. In early August, a Saudi tanker was hit off Yanbu in the northern Red Sea, and an Indian vessel carrying Saudi oil sank off the Yemeni coast after being struck by a projectile. On August 18, the Houthis claimed an attack on a Saudi military transport and four escort ships. The Red Sea, which had become the main bypass route for Middle Eastern cargo, has itself turned into a combat zone.
The third chokepoint remains the Black Sea, where cargo ships are once again coming under attack. Ukraine and Russia together remain key grain suppliers, and Russia is also a major supplier of nitrogen and potash fertilizer. Every attack on a ship in the Black Sea adds a new premium to insurance and freight costs, ultimately paid by the buyer in Cairo or Dhaka.
Moreira da Silva describes what is happening as a convergence of factors: the climate crisis combined with simultaneous disruptions at maritime hubs in the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and Hormuz. The International Chamber of Commerce adds the weather risks posed by El Niño. Fertilizer, grain, and fuel converge at a single point: the cost of delivering any calorie to an importing country has risen manifold, and no single deal can undo that anymore.
A Calendar That Doesn't Negotiate
Moreira da Silva's main argument is not political but agronomic. The planting season cannot be rescheduled to suit diplomats. From October through December, India sows its rabi wheat, Brazil launches its soybean campaign, and countries in southern and eastern Africa plant with the arrival of the rains. Nitrogen not applied to the soil now cannot be made up in the spring. The harvest will simply be smaller.
The mechanics here are simple and merciless. A farmer whose fertilizer has doubled in price does not buy exactly half as much. He buys less, applies less, harvests less per acre, and sells his crop at a higher price, if he sells it at all. In wealthy countries, subsidies and contracts soften the blow. Poor countries absorb it in full, household by household. According to one humanitarian organization, fuel prices in Somalia have more than doubled since the war began, and in Myanmar diesel has risen 160%, hitting irrigation, milling, and transport.
Global figures still look restrained for now, and therein lies the trap. The FAO Food Price Index rose in April to its highest level in more than three years, but the increase was more moderate than at the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. The World Bank calculated that global food prices rose 5% in the two months after the strait closed, compared with 15% over the same period in 2022. Hence the temptation to conclude that the crisis is manageable.
That temptation is dangerous, because fertilizer works with a lag. Nitrogen not applied today becomes tomorrow's shortfall in the harvest, and that in turn becomes the price of bread the day after. In its August report, the International Chamber of Commerce modeled a protracted scenario. In it, cereal prices rise by up to 81% relative to 2020 levels, and oilseed prices by up to 66%. Livestock products become up to 30% more expensive, following feed costs. The Chamber itself calls this a tail risk, an extreme case. As early as the spring, the World Food Programme warned that if disruptions persisted beyond midyear, acute hunger could threaten an additional 45 million people. Midyear is long past.
In its April outlook, the International Monetary Fund allowed that in a worst-case scenario, with persistently high oil, gas, and food prices, global economic growth in 2026 could fall below 2%. Iran stands apart: even before the strait closed, food inflation there had reached 98%, according to the World Bank. A blockade intended to pressure the regime hits the Iranian dinner table first.
The Lesson of Istanbul: Why the 2022 Grain Deal Worked and the Hormuz Deal Is Stalling
Moreira da Silva's mechanism has a direct predecessor, and the comparison explains a great deal. On July 22, 2022, the Black Sea Grain Initiative was signed in Istanbul with Turkish and UN mediation. A Joint Coordination Center in Istanbul registered vessels, inspectors checked cargo, and the corridor operated for almost a year. Before Russia withdrew from the agreement on July 17, 2023, about 33 million metric tons of grain and foodstuffs had been shipped under it.
The deal worked not because the warring parties were moved by humanitarian concerns. Each got something out of it. Ukraine exported its harvest and earned hard currency. Russia simultaneously signed a memorandum with the UN on facilitating exports of its own food and fertilizer and gained a platform for bargaining over sanctions. Turkey cemented its role as an indispensable mediator. When Moscow decided its benefits had been exhausted, it walked out, and the corridor closed.
The Hormuz arrangement, so far, offers neither side any tangible benefit. Iran gets neither recognition of its role in the strait nor any easing of the blockade. The United States gets no movement on the nuclear program. The UN mechanism offers both sides only one thing: avoiding the reputational damage of famine in third countries. Experience shows that in the midst of a war, that argument carries little weight.
There is an older precedent as well, one better remembered in Washington. In 1987 and 1988, at the height of the "Tanker War" between Iran and Iraq, the United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag and escorted them through the Gulf in convoys under Operation Earnest Will. When the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in April 1988, retaliatory strikes on Iranian platforms and ships followed. Back then, freedom of navigation was secured by force, not by registration. The current administration clearly prefers the same logic, even though the Iran of 2026, with its drones and coastal missiles, is not the Iran of 1988.
Moreira da Silva is trying to escape this trap by proposing to separate the fertilizer track from the grand bargain. His formula in Bangkok: while you keep negotiating a comprehensive agreement, let us do our job. He declined to name specific obstacles, citing ongoing contacts. The White House, the State Department, and the Iranian embassy in Bangkok did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In this case, silence speaks louder than any statement.
Three Scenarios Through Spring
The first scenario, which I will call the small deal, assumes that under pressure from importers, above all India, Pakistan, and the countries of the African Union, the parties agree to a humanitarian corridor not tied to the nuclear issue. The mechanism is launched within ten days, five or six bulk carriers a day begin passing through the strait, and urea prices decline, while phosphates remain expensive until mid-2027 due to the sulfur shortage. The Southern Hemisphere planting campaign is partially saved, and India's rabi crop receives nitrogen late. I put the probability of this outcome at roughly one in three.
The second scenario, a protracted one, is the most likely. Talks continue through intermediaries, the strait remains closed to most traffic, and individual ships pass under bilateral arrangements with Tehran, without the UN mechanism and without guarantees. The planting window closes. The blow to the harvest will not show up now but in the first half of 2027, when grain shortfalls in South Asia and Africa collide with low stockpiles among importers.
The third scenario, an escalatory one, involves the war expanding simultaneously in the Red Sea and the Black Sea. In that case, the International Chamber of Commerce models cease to be a tail risk and become the baseline forecast.
Let me offer some verifiable predictions. The UN mechanism will not be launched before November 15, 2026. If by December 1 not a single fertilizer vessel has passed through the strait under UN auspices, the FAO Cereal Price Index in March 2027 will be at least 10% higher than its October 2026 level. Phosphate fertilizer prices will remain above prewar levels at least until July 2027, regardless of when the strait reopens. I am prepared to revisit these numbers in the spring and hold myself to account.
One question remains to which I have no answer. What would have to happen for Washington and Tehran to consider five bulk carriers a day a smaller concession than photographs of empty fields in countries that have nothing to do with this war?
A Registry Without a Single Entry
On October 12, ships waiting at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz were photographed from Oman's Musandam Peninsula. It was the usual scene of the past seven months: silhouettes at anchor, waiting, signal lights. Somewhere on the Omani coast, according to the UN's plan, a coordination center should be operating, with a registry, observers in ports, and a tracking system. All of it has existed on paper since the spring.
The first entry in the registry has yet to be made. Meanwhile, the agronomist's calendar in Punjab and in Nampula Province keeps its records faithfully: weeks, not months, remain until the end of the rabi sowing season. Over six months, Moreira da Silva has warned the world three times that time is almost up. A fourth warning would come too late, and the reports on it will be written not by diplomats but by statisticians tallying lost harvests and the hungry.