ُ@kelevitch
I’m repeating myself but nobody is talking about the famine this war is about to cause
46% of the world's urea, the fertilizer that grows half the food on earth comes from the Gulf. Qatar alone supplies 14%. That supply is now blocked.
The US is already 25% short of fertilizer for this time of year. American fertilizer prices have shot up 70% in 90 days. The president of the South Carolina Farm Bureau says farmers can't afford to plant. The American Farm Bureau wrote Trump a letter warning of ‘a threat to our food security and by extension our national security.’
But it's not Americans who'll starve first.
Plants in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have stopped fertilizer production entirely. India's monsoon planting season starts in June. If fertilizer doesn't arrive, yields collapse. India produces a quarter of the world's rice exports.
The countries that will be hit hardest? Bangladesh. India. Pakistan. Sri Lanka. Sudan. Kenya. Somalia. Countries where millions already go hungry.
The FAO says there are NO strategic international fertilizer stockpiles. Unlike oil, nobody saved any for an emergency. Because nobody planned for a war that would shut down both the Strait of Hormuz AND the Red Sea simultaneously. That's never happened in human history.
Fertilizer shocks don't work like oil shocks. Gas prices spike overnight. Crops fail months later. By the time you see it in food prices, it's too late. The planting window is NOW. March to May. If the seeds go in without fertilizer, the yields drop. If yields drop, food prices explode. If food prices explode in countries that already can't feed their people, they just… DIE.
This war wasn't sold as ‘we're going to starve Bangladesh.’ But that's what it's doing. As a direct, predictable, calculable consequence of shutting down the strait that carries a third of the world's fertilizer during planting season.
204 children killed by bombs in Iran. How many children will die from hunger in South Asia and Africa because the fertilizer never arrived?
Nobody will count them. Nobody will name them. But they'll die all the same. Because one country needed a ‘legacy’ and another needed Iran destroyed. And the food that feeds a billion people got caught in the crossfire
