Africa's Fertiliser Crisis: How the Hormuz Closure Is Threatening the Continent's 2026 Harvest

The headlines from the Strait of Hormuz crisis focus, understandably, on oil prices, naval movements, and diplomatic manoeuvring. But for the farmers of sub-Saharan Africa, the most consequential consequence of the crisis has nothing to do with any of those things. It has to do with fertiliser — and a planting season that will not wait for geopolitical crises to resolve themselves.

The Dependency That Developed Quietly

Sub-Saharan Africa's dependence on imported nitrogen fertilisers is one of the less-discussed structural vulnerabilities of the continent's agricultural sector. African soils are among the most depleted in the world, the product of decades of cultivation without adequate nutrient replacement. The Green Revolution that transformed agricultural productivity in Asia and Latin America from the 1960s onwards largely bypassed Africa — partly because of the cost of fertilisers, partly because of the absence of the irrigation infrastructure that makes intensive fertiliser use economically rational, and partly because of the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s that eliminated the state fertiliser distribution systems that had existed in many countries.

The result is that African agriculture is simultaneously more dependent on imported fertilisers than it should be — because soil depletion makes them necessary for any reasonable yield — and less able to afford them than it needs to be. More than 60% of the nitrogen fertilisers used in sub-Saharan Africa are imported, and the majority of those imports come from or transit through the Persian Gulf corridor that the Strait of Hormuz closure has now disrupted.

The Planting Window Problem

Agricultural calendars do not accommodate geopolitical crises. The long rains planting season across East Africa — Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia — runs from March through May, and farmers need fertiliser on hand before they plant. If fertiliser is not available at the point of planting, the season's yield is set at a lower level from which it cannot recover, regardless of what happens to supply chains later in the year. In West Africa, the main season planting window for maize, sorghum, and cowpea similarly falls between March and June.

Fertiliser prices across the continent have risen 40–60% since the Hormuz crisis began. For smallholder farmers operating on thin margins with minimal access to credit, that increase is prohibitive. Survey data from agricultural development NGOs working across East and West Africa suggests that 30–40% of smallholder farmers who would normally apply nitrogen fertiliser are planning to reduce or eliminate its use this season — not because they do not understand its importance, but because they simply cannot afford it at current prices.

The Food Security Arithmetic

The yield consequences of reduced fertiliser application will vary by crop and location, but agricultural economists estimate a 15–25% reduction in yields for nitrogen-dependent crops where fertiliser application is significantly cut. Across the countries and crops most affected, this translates into tens of millions of additional people facing food insecurity in the second half of 2026 and into 2027 — a period when global food prices will already be elevated by the energy and fertiliser shocks of the current crisis.

The tragedy of this situation is that it was foreseeable. The dependence of African agriculture on imported fertilisers from the Persian Gulf corridor was a known vulnerability long before the current crisis. The investment in domestic fertiliser production, blending facilities, and soil health programmes that would have reduced that vulnerability has been chronically underfunded. The bill for that underinvestment is now arriving — not in the form of an abstract risk assessment, but in the form of hungry families and disrupted livelihoods across a continent that had no part in creating the crisis that is now devastating it.