Op-ed: The Persian Gulf Oil Crisis Is a Food Crisis
March 17, 2026 | Source: Civil Eats | by Raj Patel
American farmers are in trouble. Spring planting is here, and the inputs they need—urea, phosphate, the nitrogen for corn, wheat, and soy—are mostly imported from the Persian Gulf. In fact, up to 30 percent of the global fertilizer trade passes through the Gulf.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins acknowledged this trouble on Friday, telling reporters the administration is pursuing “every potential avenue” to keep fertilizer prices down. “We are very close to having an announcement on some solutions on what that looks like,” she said.
“We are getting almost all of our urea, almost all of our phosphate, almost all of our nitrogen from other countries around the world,” she said last week, “and that has to stop.”
It may have to stop, but it can’t in time for this season’s planting. Unlike oil, there is no strategic reserve for nitrogen fertilizer. Domestic producers cannot rapidly replace millions of tons of supply.