Even if the strait opened up and the war ended tomorrow, it would take weeks to reboot the supply chain. Behind this, though, is a more pernicious long-term trend, one that will make us more, not less, vulnerable to fossil-fueled disruptions in the food system.

It’s Going To Get Worse Next Year

As the clean energy transition reduces fossil fuel demand in transport and power, the oil and gas industry is increasingly turning to petrochemicals—particularly fertilizers and food-grade plastics—as its growth frontier. Petrochemicals are on track to become the single-largest driver of oil demand growth, accounting for nearly half of all growth by 2050. The food system is where Big Oil plans to park its future.

This will worsen the feedback loop. When fossil fuel prices spike, fertilizer and food prices spike in tandem. The corporations that profit from the system—both fossil fuel companies and the agrochemical giants that depend on them—have every incentive to maintain it. And as the 2022 profiteering numbers make plain, they do.

The False Fixes

“Green” ammonia is produced using hydrogen generated via electrolysis powered by renewable electricity, combined with nitrogen from the air—in principle, a zero-carbon process. “Blue” ammonia uses conventional natural gas production but pairs it with carbon capture and storage, reducing emissions without eliminating fossil fuel use. Both are real technologies.

Neither is remotely at scale: less than one percent of global ammonia is currently produced through either pathway. Of all ammonia projects planned in the United States, 95 percent are based on conventional fossil fuels.

Converting to green ammonia would require 24 times more electricity than current production—roughly five percent of global electricity—along with 30 times more land and 50 times more water. And even if you cleaned up production entirely, 60 percent of fertilizer-related greenhouse gas emissions occur after the fertilizer is applied to fields, primarily as nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The production fix doesn’t touch the application problem.

Precision agriculture and AI-driven farming are similarly oversold. A USDA field study found that autosteered tractors can actually increase fuel use. Algorithms that calibrate fertilizer applications are typically optimized for yield per hectare, not for reducing total fertilizer volumes. The data centers that power AI farm platforms are going to double their energy demands by 2030.

What Actually Works—and What It Costs

Agroecological farming reduces and ultimately eliminates the need for synthetic fertilizers by working with biological nitrogen fixation, composting, crop rotation, intercropping, and the careful integration of livestock. India’s Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming program is transitioning six million farmers.

France has committed to reducing pesticide use by 50 percent. Cuba rebuilt its food system around agroecology after losing access to Soviet petrochemical imports in the 1990s—a historical precedent that should concentrate minds right now.

Rebuilding local food supply chains reduces dependency on the long-distance shipping routes that pass through chokepoints. Reducing ultra-processed food consumption has the dual benefit of cutting the most energy-intensive segment of the food chain and improving public health. (Ultra-processed foods use two to ten times more energy in production than whole foods.)

Redirecting subsidies is the policy lever that makes everything else possible. Fossil fuel subsidies have surged past $1 trillion annually globally, while nearly 90 percent of the $540 billion in annual agricultural support goes to chemical-intensive commodity crop production. Redirecting even a fraction toward agroecological transition, renewable energy on farms, and local food infrastructure would reshape the landscape. It bears repeating: the most direct way to stop hunger is to stop the war.

The suffering in Iran and the Gulf is real and immediate, as are its effects worldwide. Every day that the conflict persists is a day of choked petrochemical flows through the Straight of Hormuz, with cascading effects on food prices, from São Paulo to Nairobi to Dhaka—and on grocery bills and gas prices from Des Moines to Detroit.

The American working class and the African smallholder are not, finally, on opposite sides of this crisis. They are both downstream of a food system that was built around a substance that is running out and now controlled by a handful of states and corporations.

Yet this architecture can be changed—not through green ammonia projects in the planning phase, or algorithms optimized for yield, but through the proven, scalable practices that millions of farmers are using right now. The question is whether we will scale them before the next chokepoint closes.