The People Who Die Quietly: Geopolitics, Fertiliser and the Coming Hunger Crisis

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 29 August 2026

Wars have casualties that appear on television and casualties that do not. The former are counted in ruined apartment buildings, soldiers killed in trenches, missile strikes and funerals. The latter die months or years afterwards, often thousands of miles from the battlefield. They die because the price of maize has risen beyond what their families can afford; because a clinic no longer receives Western funding; because a vaccination programme has closed; because a farmer could afford only half as much fertiliser as he used the previous year; because a lorry carrying humanitarian grain costs twice as much to operate; or because an international organisation, confronted with ten starving populations and enough money to feed only four of them, has been obliged to decide who shall eat.

The emerging international crisis of 2026 threatens to produce casualties overwhelmingly of this second kind. A combination of Western retrenchment from international development, enormous increases in defence expenditure, exhaustion after successive humanitarian emergencies and the economic consequences of the US-Israeli war against Iran has created something approaching a perfect storm for the world’s poorest people. The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has damaged Gulf revenues and international trade simultaneously. The consequences extend far beyond petroleum. The Gulf is an important source of humanitarian and development finance, particularly across the Muslim world, Africa and the Middle East. More ominously still, Hormuz is one of the principal arteries through which the fertilisers upon which modern agriculture depends reach the rest of the world.

The numbers already affected by hunger are immense. The World Food Programme estimates that it needs some US$13 billion to reach 110 million vulnerable people during 2026. Yet international humanitarian financing has been contracting precisely as demand has been expanding. Western governments, confronted by ageing populations, sluggish growth, rising debt, domestic political hostility towards overseas expenditure and demands for dramatically increased military budgets, have discovered that foreign aid is amongst the easiest lines in a national budget to cut. The OECD expects official development assistance to decline for a third consecutive year in 2026, with Sub-Saharan Africa and the least developed countries suffering particularly heavily and health and humanitarian programmes amongst the sectors facing the deepest reductions.

This might sound like accountancy. In poor countries, accountancy becomes mortality.

Recent research into European aid reductions illustrates the potential scale. One assessment of reductions by Britain, Germany and France estimated that they might collectively be associated with more than 11.5 million preventable deaths by the end of the decade if the programmes previously financed are not replaced. Such estimates necessarily depend upon assumptions and ought not to be mistaken for predictions possessing mathematical certainty. Nevertheless their order of magnitude is important. Aid finances vaccinations, malaria prevention, maternal healthcare, nutrition programmes, clean water, sanitation and emergency food. Remove enough of these things from sufficiently poor societies and some of the people who would otherwise have lived will die.

The United States has historically been still more important. The contraction of American assistance has therefore reverberated through humanitarian organisations whose operating models were constructed upon an assumption of continuing US support. The result is not merely that development projects are postponed. Emergency programmes are being rationed. The World Food Programme has described the brutal logic in terms that ought to trouble the conscience of every prosperous country: resources must increasingly be concentrated upon people already closest to starvation, leaving those merely hungry to deteriorate further.

Somalia provides a glimpse of what this new humanitarian order looks like. Six million Somalis are currently facing acute food insecurity. Approximately 1.9 million children under five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition this year, including almost half a million suffering its severe form. Yet the WFP has only about one tenth of the resources available to it during the 2022 Somali hunger emergency. Hundreds of health and nutrition facilities have already closed because of reductions in humanitarian financing. The consequence is grimly mechanical. A malnourished child must travel farther to reach treatment; treatment therefore begins later; malnutrition has progressed further when the child arrives; and the probability that the child dies increases.

The Gulf crisis now adds a second great withdrawal of resources. For decades the hydrocarbon monarchies have recycled part of their extraordinary energy revenues abroad through sovereign investment, bilateral assistance, Islamic charitable organisations, development funds, reconstruction projects and direct support for governments. This system has never been wholly altruistic — foreign assistance seldom is — and Gulf development finance has invariably been entangled with diplomacy, commercial interests, religion and regional competition. Nevertheless the money has been real, and poor countries have benefited from it.

The war with Iran has weakened this source of finance at precisely the wrong moment. Qatar offers an unusually dramatic example. The interruption of LNG production and exports and the wider economic effects of the conflict have prompted Doha to reduce overseas aid by about 85 per cent, according to recent reporting. Other Gulf states possess different fiscal positions and varying capacities to absorb the shock, but the principle is straightforward. A government suddenly deprived of substantial export revenues protects domestic salaries, subsidies, security and politically sensitive expenditure before it protects development programmes in distant countries. The rich Gulf states are not becoming poor. But their willingness and ability to act as financiers of poorer states are being diminished just as Western governments are retreating from precisely the same field.

There is, however, a still more dangerous connection between the Strait of Hormuz and world poverty, and it is one that is easily overlooked because fertiliser is less dramatic than oil.

Modern civilisation eats fertiliser.

The extraordinary increase in agricultural productivity that permitted the world’s population to rise beyond eight billion people rests substantially upon artificial nitrogen fertilisers, alongside phosphate and potassium inputs, improved seed varieties, irrigation, pesticides and mechanisation. Roughly half of global food production ultimately depends upon synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. Remove it abruptly and the world does not simply return to some romantic vision of traditional agriculture. Crop yields fall — dramatically in many places — while billions of people remain expecting to be fed.

Hormuz is consequently not merely an oil chokepoint. Before the war, approximately one third of globally traded urea passed through the Strait, as did almost half of seaborne sulphur, an essential input in phosphate fertiliser production. The Gulf states are major producers of ammonia and urea because nitrogen fertiliser production is intimately connected with natural gas. The same geological accident that made the Gulf extraordinarily important to the world’s energy system therefore made it extraordinarily important to the world’s agricultural system as well.

The disruption has not been theoretical. Fertiliser shipments collapsed during the war. Some traffic subsequently began moving again following the June interim arrangements, but the system has remained far from normal, with ships stranded, infrastructure damaged and uncertainty discouraging new cargoes. The World Trade Organization has recorded severe disruption to urea and phosphate trade, while the Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that interruptions today will affect harvests in the latter part of 2026 and into 2027.

This delay is essential to understanding the danger. An oil shortage appears almost immediately at the petrol pump. A fertiliser shortage initially appears in an invoice received by a farmer. He responds by buying less fertiliser. Nothing visibly catastrophic happens that afternoon. The crop grows a little less vigorously. Several months later the harvest is smaller. Grain inventories subsequently decline. Traders anticipate scarcity. Prices rise. Governments impose export restrictions to protect their domestic populations, thereby making the international shortage worse. Poor importing states find themselves unable to compete for available grain. Families that already spend 60, 70 or 80 per cent of their income upon food begin skipping meals.

Then children begin dying.

The FAO has identified Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique amongst particularly exposed African countries, alongside vulnerable states in Asia including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This is partly because agricultural systems in poorer countries have fewer cushions against input shocks. A wealthy European farmer confronted with expensive fertiliser may receive government assistance, borrow against substantial assets, alter his crop mix or employ more sophisticated precision agriculture. A smallholder in East Africa may simply use less fertiliser. His yield falls accordingly.

There is an especially cruel asymmetry here. Agricultural productivity in much of Sub-Saharan Africa is already comparatively low, while population growth remains rapid. These are precisely the societies in which relatively modest reductions in agricultural inputs can have disproportionate consequences. Nor is fertiliser infinitely substitutable between sources. Russia, China, Morocco and other producers may compensate for some lost Gulf supplies, but logistics, foreign exchange constraints, export controls and higher prices determine whether fertiliser theoretically available somewhere in the world is actually available to a Tanzanian or Somali farmer at the right moment.

Timing matters because agriculture cannot wait for diplomacy. Fertiliser delivered three months after the relevant stage in a crop cycle might as well not have been delivered at all. A missed application becomes a reduced harvest, and a reduced harvest cannot subsequently be repaired by reopening the Strait.

Recent economic modelling gives some indication of how frightening the consequences might become. International Chamber of Commerce-commissioned research published in August examined a severe and prolonged Hormuz shock and concluded that global cereal prices might rise as much as 81 per cent above their 2020 level. In the most severely affected regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa, consumer food prices might approach 70 per cent above the baseline. Most strikingly, the model associated the severe scenario with some one million additional diet-related deaths in the year 2030 alone and another 67 million people becoming underweight.

That is not a prediction that precisely one million identifiable people will die. Economic models cannot foresee wars, harvests, government interventions, substitution between suppliers, humanitarian responses or the reopening of shipping lanes with that precision. Nevertheless it tells us something profoundly important about scale. The plausible unit in which the indirect human consequences of the Hormuz crisis must be discussed is not thousands. Under sufficiently adverse circumstances, it is millions.

And the fertiliser crisis is only one part of the mechanism.

Higher oil prices make tractors, irrigation pumps, fishing boats and food-processing plants more expensive to operate. They increase the cost of trucking grain from farms to cities. They raise the price of shipping humanitarian assistance. They weaken the currencies and balance sheets of oil-importing developing countries. They reduce the purchasing power of families. Meanwhile reduced Gulf economic activity threatens remittances sent home by migrant workers from South Asia and Africa. Thus the same geopolitical event attacks poor households simultaneously through food prices, employment, government finances and international assistance.

The result is a multiplication rather than a simple addition of crises. Imagine a Somali family whose own harvest has been damaged by drought. The farmer must now pay more for fertiliser because Gulf supplies have been disrupted. Diesel costs more. Imported grain costs more. A son working in the Gulf sends home less money because his employer is struggling. The local nutrition clinic closes because Western aid has been cut. The humanitarian organisation that might have supplied food is itself paying more for transport while receiving less money from donors. None of these developments individually needs to cause a death. Together they may do so.

This is how geopolitics kills people who have never heard of the Strait of Hormuz.

The geographical distribution of the suffering will also be profoundly unequal. Europeans will complain about food inflation. Middle-class Asian households may substitute cheaper products. Wealthy Gulf governments will draw upon reserves. Americans may pay more for groceries. But the poorest households in Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Sahel and parts of South Asia already live close to the calorific minimum necessary for survival. There is no cheaper diet into which to retreat when one is already eating the cheapest available food.

Nor is starvation the only relevant cause of death. Malnutrition weakens immune systems. Children become more susceptible to diarrhoeal disease, pneumonia, malaria and measles. Pregnant women become more vulnerable. Tuberculosis becomes harder to survive. Families withdraw children from school, sell livestock and consume seed grain. These coping strategies transform a temporary food crisis into long-term impoverishment. A child who survives severe malnutrition may suffer impaired physical and cognitive development for the remainder of his life.

Hence the phrase “death from starvation” captures only a fraction of the phenomenon. Poverty kills through interacting pathways — nutrition, infectious disease, maternal mortality, unsafe water, absence of medicine and the destruction of household resilience. This is why reductions in development assistance can generate mortality estimates so much larger than the numbers ordinarily associated with battlefield deaths.

There is a further political danger. Hunger destabilises governments. The food-price shocks of 2007–08 and 2010–11 contributed to unrest across multiple regions. Governments of poor food-importing countries frequently maintain political stability through subsidised bread, rice or fuel. When international prices rise sharply their choice becomes unenviable: spend scarce foreign currency maintaining subsidies, accumulate debt or permit domestic prices to rise. Each option carries political risks.

Food insecurity therefore feeds back into geopolitics. Hunger generates migration, internal displacement, communal conflict, recruitment opportunities for armed groups and political extremism. States weakened by food crises become more dependent upon whichever foreign power is willing to supply grain, fertiliser, fuel or credit. Russia, China, Turkey and other powers may consequently acquire influence in regions from which Western development institutions have retreated. Saving money on foreign aid may prove an exceptionally expensive way of surrendering geopolitical influence.

None of this means that every reduction in aid is indefensible, nor that development budgets have always been efficiently administered. International development has accumulated bureaucracies, fashionable projects, consultants and programmes of questionable effectiveness. Donor governments are entitled to demand evidence that money is achieving measurable results. Nor can Western taxpayers indefinitely be regarded as possessing an unlimited obligation to finance every governmental failure elsewhere in the world.

But there is an enormous difference between reforming development assistance and abruptly withdrawing the financial architecture upon which essential health and nutrition programmes depend. Vaccination, emergency nutrition, clean water, malaria control and agricultural inputs are unusually inexpensive interventions measured against the value of the lives they preserve. When those programmes disappear abruptly, markets do not automatically replace them because the intended beneficiaries are, by definition, people without money.

The same principle applies to fertiliser. Keeping agricultural inputs moving through Hormuz should be treated as a humanitarian priority comparable to protecting grain shipments through the Black Sea. Whatever the belligerents’ wider disputes, there is a compelling international interest in insulating fertiliser, food and agricultural commodities from warfare insofar as possible. Alternative supply routes should be developed; poorer importing countries require emergency trade finance; export bans ought to be discouraged; and international financial institutions should establish facilities enabling vulnerable states to purchase fertiliser before planting windows close.

Above all, governments should understand that there is a time lag between geopolitical folly and humanitarian catastrophe.

The people who may die in 2027, 2028 or 2030 because of decisions taken in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Tehran, Jerusalem, Doha or Riyadh in 2026 will not appear upon lists of casualties from the Iran war. A malnourished infant who dies of pneumonia in Somalia will not be recorded as a victim of the closure of Hormuz. A Sudanese farmer whose family starves after he cannot afford fertiliser will not appear in military statistics. An Afghan child whose nutrition programme has disappeared after international funding reductions will not have “geopolitics” written upon her death certificate.

Yet causation does not cease to exist merely because it stretches across continents and months.

We should therefore be cautious about announcing a single number for the coming death toll. The variables remain too great. The Strait may reopen more reliably; Gulf production may recover; alternative fertiliser suppliers may expand exports; harvests may prove favourable; Western governments may restore humanitarian funding; international institutions may intervene; and high prices themselves will encourage substitution and additional production. The worst outcomes are not inevitable.

But neither are they fantasies. More than 300 million people were already experiencing acute hunger before the Middle Eastern war imposed its additional shocks. Somalia alone now has six million people facing acute food insecurity. Current modelling suggests that a prolonged Hormuz shock could eventually produce additional diet-related mortality measured around the million-per-year level in a severe scenario, while separate studies of Western aid reductions place their potential cumulative mortality consequences in the millions by the end of the decade. These figures overlap and cannot simply be added together. Nevertheless they reveal the dimensions of the risk.

We may therefore be entering an era in which the greatest casualties of contemporary geopolitical confrontation are neither American nor Iranian, neither Israeli nor Arab, neither Russian nor Ukrainian. They may be people without any meaningful connection to the disputes at all — subsistence farmers, infants, pregnant women and inhabitants of fragile states thousands of kilometres away.

The twenty-first century’s elaborate international food system has allowed humanity to sustain a population unimaginable to earlier generations. But complexity creates vulnerability. Energy produces fertiliser; fertiliser produces grain; shipping distributes it; finance permits poor states to buy it; development assistance catches those who nevertheless fall through the system. In 2026 almost every link in that chain is being weakened simultaneously.

The tragedy is that famine in the modern world is seldom caused by an absolute absence of food. It arises because food, money, fertiliser, transport and political order cease to coincide in the same place at the same time.

The world’s poorest people have remarkably little influence over any of these things. They did not decide Western aid budgets. They did not start the war with Iran. They did not close the Strait of Hormuz. They do not control the price of natural gas, maritime insurance, urea or sulphur. They cannot replenish the budgets of the World Food Programme. Yet they stand at the end of every one of these chains of causation.

And when those chains break, it is they who die.