The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz caused immediate shocks to the world oil market, but analysts are also afraid that rising food prices and fertilizer shortages could increase the risk of famine in struggling nations.
Vespucci Maritime CEO Lars Jensen told Fox News Digital on Thursday that the “worst-case” scenario would resemble “the eight-year closure of the Suez Canal from 1967 to 1975.”
“Best case, there is an agreement between the U.S. and Iran within the next few weeks, and the Strait reopens — and it has to be a deal where there is trust that Iran is sufficiently satisfied with the deal such that they do not suddenly close the strait again,” Jensen said.
“Even in that case, it will still take months for the supply chains to revert back to normality,” he added.
The Suez Canal was shut down by Egypt at the beginning of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The Egyptians blocked one of the world’s most important shipping lanes by laying minefields and sinking ships to create physical barriers. The canal remained closed until 1975. It was actually the second time the canal was closed by Egypt, after a much shorter shutdown in 1956-1957.
The eight-year shutdown forced oil and goods shipments to take the much longer route around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, much as the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists of Yemen forced shipping to divert with their attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea during the Gaza War in 2023 and 2024.
The 1967 Suez Crisis cost the world an estimated $1.7 billion in lost trade (about $11 billion in today’s dollars) and made life especially difficult for the owners and crews of 14 ships that were trapped in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake for the entire eight years of the shutdown, becoming known as the “Yellow Fleet” due to the coating of sand they accumulated.
Shipping patterns have changed since 1975, and about 30 percent of the world’s fertilizer – including vital chemicals such as ammonia, nitrogen, and sulphur – now flows from the Persian Gulf, which means it must be shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. The world’s largest single exporter of nitrogen-based fertilizer, the Qatar Fertilizer Company, has been effectively offline since March.
Fertilizer prices were already elevated after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and that conflict also raised the price of fuel, which is essential to modern agriculture.
The head of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), David Miliband, called the fertilizer shortage a “food security time bomb” in early April, warning that “the window to avert a massive global hunger crisis is rapidly closing.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Friday that up to 45 million people across the world could be at risk of famine if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened within the next few months. He added that even if the Strait is reopened soon, food and fertilizer prices would remain elevated for months as shipping returned to normal.
Jensen told Fox News Digital that if the Hormuz crisis affects too many harvests, the resulting “rapid increases in food prices in very poor countries” could increase “the risk of famine and conflict.”
This could be a particularly acute risk in theaters like Sudan, which is already suffering from both savage armed conflict and food insecurity, and Gaza, which is still recovering from the 2023-2024 war launched by Hamas.
World Food Program (WFP) food security director Jean-Martin Bauer wrote at the UK Independent last Sunday that the current Middle East crisis “has led us to the brink of a catastrophic hunger crisis, which is already having perilous ripple effects across the globe.” He mentioned fuel riots in Haiti and Kenya as examples, and predicted severe impacts in places like Somalia and Afghanistan.
“Across WFP’s global operations, we are seeing the largest disruption to humanitarian supply chains since the Covid pandemic and the start of the Ukraine war. This comes at a time when global supply chains are more fragile than in previous years,” he said.