Soaring oil and gas prices aren’t the only costs that communities worldwide will bear from the widening Iran war. The conflict is also coming for food.

That’s because the Middle East is a crucial hub for global energy and fertilizer markets—both of which have been upended by the war. In the weeks since U.S. and Israeli forces began striking Iran, attacks on energy infrastructure across the region have rattled markets and spiked oil and gas prices. At the same time, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital maritime choke point, has throttled exports of energy and fertilizer, driving up prices for the key agricultural input.

Together, those shocks threaten to unleash higher food prices around the world, further compounding pressures on consumers at a time when global food prices are already on the rise.

“It’s going to start having an impact soon here in the U.S., even sooner in some other places where fuel prices are a much bigger part of the cost of food on the grocery shelf,” said Christopher Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University.

By driving up energy costs, the Iran war has also raised transportation costs, which will hit landlocked countries that import much of their food especially hard.

Many countries in the Middle East—including Iran—are big importers of agricultural commodities such as grains and vegetable oil, much of which comes in via maritime shipments, Joseph Glauber, a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who is now at the International Food Policy Research Institute, told Foreign Policy.

The region is also a major hub for fertilizer production, with between 20 percent and 30 percent of global fertilizer exports typically transiting the Strait of Hormuz—traffic that has now largely ground to a halt as a result of the war. Natural gas—prices of which have skyrocketed in recent days—is also a key feedstock in fertilizer. All of those forces have pushed up the cost of fertilizer, further straining farmers at a time when they are already facing tight margins and fueling fears of higher food prices.

The agricultural industry is already warning of a global food price shock. In the United Kingdom, the National Farmers’ Union has said that food prices are set to surge as a result of the war; the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of the United States’ biggest agricultural lobbying groups, has raised concerns about the “affordability of essential goods.”

And some producers are starting to scale back. In Australia, which is one of the world’s major agricultural exporters, wheat farmers are now decreasing their plantings amid the fertilizer crunch, Bloombergreported.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO of Yara International—one of the world’s biggest fertilizer companies—said that the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz for a year would have a “catastrophic” impact.

“Given the importance of fertilizer, this is something that can seriously impact crop yields if the war continues for an extended period,” he said. “This is a regional conflict with global implications and it goes straight into the food system.”

These shock waves harken back to 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent economic shock waves rippling around the world. The invasion curtailed crucial commodity exports from Ukraine and triggered a global energy crisis that drove up fertilizer and transportation prices, sparking warnings that hundreds of millions of people would be pitched deeper into food insecurity. An estimated 349 million people were ultimately pushed into hunger, according to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP).

Surging prices could also spell trouble for governments, stoking public anger and driving political instability in landlocked and import-dependent countries, just as they did during the Arab Spring.

Take Egypt, which is one of the world’s biggest wheat importers. Surging grain prices drove up the price of bread in the country by about 37 percent in the years preceding the Arab Spring—fueling frustration and helping lay the groundwork for the massive demonstrations that would ultimately sweep Cairo and topple the government of strongman Hosni Mubarak.

“Food insecurity lays the foundation for civil strife and conflict, and that’s how this can propagate,” said Barrett, the Cornell University economist.

The war can move “into other places, where public unrest because of rising food insecurity and rising food prices lead governments who aren’t responding well to face the wrath of their populace,” he added.

Some markets are already feeling the pain. Wheat prices have soared in Egypt, prompting the government to reinstate price controls on unsubsidized bread loaves sold in private bakeries. And it’s not just Egypt that’s being squeezed, either; food prices have been ballooning across the Middle East due to the conflict, according to estimates by Save the Children, a humanitarian organization.

As the conflict has widened, aid agencies have been increasingly sounding the alarm. The WFP has warned that the world could see record levels of food insecurity in 2026 if the Iran war continues, with an estimated 45 million more people being forced into acute food insecurity as a result of the conflict.

“If this conflict continues, it will send shockwaves across the globe, and families who already cannot afford their next meal will be hit the hardest,” Carl Skau, WFP’s deputy executive director and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

The countries that are most vulnerable to the war’s energy and agricultural shocks are in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, according to the WFP. They include Sudan, which imports more than 80 percent of its wheat and has been engulfed in a devastating civil war for nearly three years, and Somalia, which has been grappling with a drought and has reportedly already seen some food prices rise by 20 percent as a result of the Iran war.

“If there’s disruption in food deliveries, people will not survive this,” said Michael Werz, an expert in food security at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“You can live without a refrigerator; you can live with a half-full tank of gas; you can live when your apartment is cold,” he added. “You can’t live without food.”

In the United States, rising food prices threaten to take effect as the U.S. approaches midterm elections, posing yet another challenge to Republicans as many Americans struggle with the affordability of goods. Raised prices have long been unpopular: Back in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered food inflation that also took a toll on then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval.

Even before the Iran war began, U.S. food prices were spiking, along with food insecurity. Food prices in January were 2.9 percent higher than they were the same time in 2025, and prior to the conflict were projected to spike further by 3.1 percent this year.

A prolonged Iran war will also further strain American farmers, one of the Trump administration’s key constituencies, who have already been grappling with the sweeping fallout of his trade war and have called for the safe transit of fertilizer through the Strait of Hormuz. But the Trump administration doesn’t seem too worried.

“Clearly, the administration takes the farm community somewhat for granted,” Barrett said. “It just assumes, probably justifiably so, that that’s a very safe constituency in electoral terms.”