No one in Bangladesh voted for the war. No one here had any say in whether the United States and Israel should attack Iran on February 28. Yet, as revealed by an Al Jazeera report on March 18, most fertiliser factories in the country have reportedly been forced to shut down. The Boro rice harvest, the single most important crop in our agricultural calendar, is weeks away from its critical fertilisation window. And the natural gas that keeps those factories running, which comes from the Gulf region, is facing severe disruption moving through a strait that two foreign militaries have turned into a battlefield.
This is the story the global conversation about the Iran war is almost entirely missing. Everyone is wondering about missile counts and oil prices and the fate of the Iranian regime. But in the rice fields across Bangladesh, a different kind of damage is quietly accumulating, and it has nothing to do with missiles.
Bangladesh is one of the most fertiliser-dependent agricultural economies in South Asia. Boro rice, our largest and most productive rice season, harvested between April and June, requires intensive nitrogen fertilisation during its growth phase. There is no negotiating with the biology of the crop. Without urea applied at the right moment, yields fall and the shortfall is not something that can easily be made up later in the season. Amid severe disruptions to Qatar’s LNG exports linked to the conflict, QatarEnergy, the state-owned petroleum and natural gas company, reportedly halted output at one of the world’s largest urea facilities in the country, cutting off a critical feedstock for nitrogen fertiliser production across the region, according to media reports.
UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)’s Chief Economist Máximo Torero was unusually direct in his assessment. Speaking to NPR on March 20, he named Bangladesh as one of the countries facing the most immediate impact in South Asia, alongside India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. And he said something that should alarm anyone paying attention: unlike the 2022 Russia-Ukraine crisis, when countries scrambled and found alternatives from the Gulf, this time alternatives may be far more limited. The Gulf itself is the source of the problem.
The numbers behind this are genuinely staggering. According to estimates, nearly a third of all globally traded fertiliser normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Nearly half of all globally traded urea, the nitrogen fertiliser that rice depends on most critically, comes from the Gulf region. Since the war began, urea prices have jumped roughly 50 percent, from around $482 per metric ton on February 27 to over $720 by mid-March, according to Argus, a specialist commodities pricing agency. For a Bangladeshi farmer already operating on thin margins, a 50 percent increase in their single largest input cost is not just an inconvenience but potentially the difference between planting and not planting.
And here is the part that makes this particularly problematic. Bangladesh sources a significant share of its fertiliser from the Gulf region. When a country that depends heavily on a critical agricultural import loses access to that supply at the exact moment its most productive crop needs it most, the consequences are felt everywhere: in the market, in the field, and eventually on the plate.
There is a broader point here that extends beyond Bangladesh. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a sharp analysis on March 12 noting that even if the Strait of Hormuz reopened soon, restarting fertiliser production and transport could take weeks. Weeks that Northern Hemisphere farmers simply do not have given where we are in the planting calendar. As historian Adam Tooze has observed, wars that collide with agricultural cycles inflict damage that outlasts the fighting itself. The US and Israel do not seem to have factored that in.
The global conversation tends to frame the economic fallout of this war in terms of oil prices and stock markets, metrics that wealthy countries and financial professionals watch. But the deeper and longer lasting damage may be in food systems, and it will fall hardest on the people who are already most vulnerable. Analysts at Rabobank have specifically identified Bangladesh among the countries likely to be worst affected in the region, and the data supports that assessment. Rice and maize, the staple crops in South and Southeast Asia, are among the most nitrogen-intensive crops in the world. A sustained fertiliser shortage will eventually reduce yields. And reduced yields in a country of more than 17 crore people where food security and rice security are essentially the same thing is a different order of problem entirely.
What makes this moment particularly important to name clearly is the politics of who suffers. The countries that will pay the heaviest price for this war in food terms are not the countries that launched it. The US produces a large share of its fertiliser domestically. Even American farmers who have been hurt—and they have been—with urea prices at the Port of New Orleans up by 32 percent and the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation writing a letter to Trump asking for urgent intervention, still have domestic buffers that countries like Bangladesh simply do not possess.
We are not collateral damage in some abstract geopolitical sense. There are actual fields in this country where the timing of fertiliser application over the next few weeks will determine what kind of harvest comes in May and June. There are farmers making decisions right now about whether they can afford inputs whose prices have surged because of a war they had no part in starting.
On March 23, Trump paused his threats to bomb Iranian power plants, claiming negotiations were underway. Iran denied it. The markets briefly celebrated. Oil fell. On March 27, he extended the hiatus for 10 more days. Yet, the fertiliser that Bangladesh needed to produce is still not moving through the Strait of Hormuz, and the planting calendar does not care about diplomatic manoeuvring in Washington.
The world is debating who is winning a war. Bangladesh is wondering whether it will have enough urea for its rice.
Md Kawsar Uddin is associate professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at the International University of Business Agriculture and Technology (IUBAT).
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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