Johan Jörgensen is the founder of Sweden Foodtech, a leading think tank on the future of food.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of AgFunderNews.
On February 28, 2026, US and Israeli forces struck Iran. Within hours, maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, through which passes roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil, one-fifth of its LNG, and a third of its seaborne fertilizer trade — had collapsed by nearly 97%.
Brent crude surged toward $120. But the oil shock may not be the most devastating part. The fertilizer shock is.
Urea, the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertilizer — made by superheating natural gas — jumped 32% in a single week. At the Port of New Orleans, the benchmark import hub, it went from $516 per metric ton on February 27 to $683 on March 5. One ton of urea now costs US farmers the equivalent of 126 bushels of corn, up from 75 in December. Major Gulf producers including Qatar Fertilizer Company and SABIC have declared force majeure. There is no strategic reserve for nitrogen fertilizer, as there is for oil.
And it is March. The spring planting window is open across the Northern Hemisphere. The FAO’s chief economist Máximo Torero has warned that the loss of Gulf exports creates an immediate global shortfall with no quick substitutes. The World Food Program estimates 45 million more people could be pushed into extreme hunger if the conflict persists.
Welcome to the new normal.
Not a shock. A pattern.
September 2019. Iranian drone strikes on Saudi Aramco knock out 5% of global oil supply overnight. Brent spikes. Nothing changes.
2020–2021. Covid-19 crashes energy demand. Economies reopen faster than supply responds. European gas prices spike 500%. Fertilizer costs follow.
February 2022. Russia invades Ukraine. Wheat futures surge 60%. Nitrogen fertilizer prices triple. According to Oxfam, synthetic fertilizer companies increased their profits tenfold on average. Farmers suffered; the industry banked. 275 million people hover on the brink of acute food insecurity.
June 2025. The 12-Day War between Israel and Iran. Oil spikes 10%, retreats. The market exhales. Nothing structural changes.
February 2026. Operation Epic Fury. The strait closes. Oil at $120. Fertilizer stranded. Spring planting at risk across three continents.
These are not outliers. They are a pattern. And every single one hits food through the same mechanism: fossil energy feeds fertilizer, fertilizer feeds crops, crops feed prices, prices feed hunger.
Five major disruptions in seven years, each one slightly worse than the last, each one followed by a period of calm used to justify doing nothing fundamental. This is what structural fragility looks like from the inside.
The numbers behind the dependency
Food systems consume at least 15% of total global fossil fuel use. For staple crops like corn and wheat, energy and fertilizer combined account for more than half of total operating costs. And virtually all synthetic nitrogen fertilizer comes from the Haber-Bosch process, which superheats natural gas to synthesize ammonia — consuming 3–5% of global natural gas production in the process. The people it feeds? Roughly half of humanity.
The geographic concentration makes it worse. The Persian Gulf accounts for roughly 40–50% of all seaborne urea exports. Bank of America has warned that the current conflict could threaten 65–70% of global urea supplies. Energy feeds into food through a league of mechanisms — not just fertilizer, but diesel for machinery, transport, cold chain, processing, packaging. When energy convulses, the entire food cost stack moves at once.
For farmers in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kenya, and Sudan, the mathematics are existential. For US farmers — in the world’s most agriculturally self-sufficient major economy — the margin between crop revenues and input costs is already the tightest in a decade.
Food’s Google moment
There is a moment in every technological revolution when the old guard smirks. I wrote about it on AgFunderNews in 2023, comparing foodtech sceptics to the telecom incumbents who laughed at the internet. The smirk. The confidence of people who mistake their own size for permanence.
We are at that kind of inflection point. Before Google, after Google. Before AI, after AI. The pattern is always the same: transformation seems unlikely until it seems inevitable, and those who moved early look not just right but obviously right.
The energy parallel is instructive. Solar cost $76 per watt in 1977. Today it is below $0.20 — a 99% reduction. Wind costs have fallen 70% in a decade. And crucially: the 2022 Russia-Ukraine energy shock did not slow the energy transition. It accelerated it. Europe broke records for renewable deployment. Every major energy crisis of the past decade has accelerated the shift away from fossil fuels. Every major food crisis has been used to justify doing nothing.
That asymmetry cannot hold. Food has been lucky. The luck is running out.
The 11,000-year design flaw
Annual monoculture — the dominant logic of food production for eleven thousand years — is fragile by design. Every season the biological system resets completely. Seeds purchased. Synthetic nitrogen applied. Pests suppressed with petroleum compounds. If anything goes wrong, the field is bare. No buffer, no redundancy, no biological memory.
We are still farming with the logic of the Fertile Crescent. Plant, harvest, store, survive the winter, start again. That logic made sense eleven thousand years ago. Today it is a structural liability — and we have the science to dismantle it.
Food forests, perennial polycultures, agroforestry systems, integrated aquaponics — these produce food continuously rather than in seasonal bursts, build soil rather than depleting it, and require minimal external inputs. The Land Institute’s Kernza perennial wheatgrass produces harvestable grain from the same root system for years without replanting. None of these systems need Hormuz to stay open.
Can regenerative ag actually feed the world?
Yes. But the argument has three layers, and you need all three.
First. We already produce enough. The world produces enough calories to nourish over ten billion people — more than today’s population and above the projected peak. According to the UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024, one-fifth of all food produced is lost or wasted — over one billion meals a day. The FAO calculates a further 13% is lost before it reaches consumers. Hunger is not a yield problem. It is a systems problem, and centralized industrial monoculture is exceptionally bad at solving it.
Second. Regenerative systems match or exceed conventional yields, and the science is now overwhelming. A landmark Nature Communications meta-analysis from January 2026 — 184 meta-analyses, 6,741 effect sizes based on 17,989 original studies over 50 years — found that agricultural diversification maintains neutral crop yields while increasing financial profitability, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration benefits by up to 2,823% over 20 years. An October 2025 study across 3,663 field observations on six continents found crop rotation outperforms monoculture: total yields up 20%, dietary energy and protein up 14–27%, farm revenue up 14–27%. These are not advocacy documents. They are peer-reviewed science.
Third — and this is the argument no sceptic answers well — the real comparison is not regenerative versus today’s optimal industrial system. It is regenerative versus a collapsing one. Industrial monoculture has high peak yield under ideal conditions and catastrophic fragility under disruption. Regenerative systems have somewhat lower peak yield and dramatically higher resilience under the conditions that are actually becoming normal. That is not wishful thinking. It is arithmetic.
Hunger is not a yield problem. It is a systems problem. And a system built on centralized production, fossil inputs, and thin supply chains is extraordinarily bad at solving it.
One more number: nine plants account for 66% of all global crop production. That nutritional monoculture is a public health emergency in its own right. The estimated cost of diet-related disease to the global economy exceeds $10 trillion annually. The food transition is, among other things, a cost-reduction strategy of extraordinary scale.
Regenerative is not a marketing word
The word is being hollowed out by the same corporate co-option that hollowed out ‘sustainable’. Regenerative is not a certification scheme. It is not what happens when a large food company adds cover cropping to its supplier requirements while leaving the rest of its model untouched.
Regenerative means the productive capacity of the system increases over time. Soil builds. Biodiversity expands. The farm becomes more capable and more independent with each passing season — rather than more dependent on purchased inputs and more fragile in the face of the next Hormuz blockade.
Genuinely regenerative systems are also genuinely attractive. Food forests produce diversity that industrial monoculture cannot match. The finest food cultures in the world — Basque, Japanese, Mexican, West African — are built on exactly the kind of ecologically embedded production that regenerative systems restore. This is not a sacrifice. It is a return to abundance. And as synthetic nitrogen approaches $700 per metric ton, the economics of low-input systems look fundamentally different than they did five years ago.
The people who will drive this are not in food
The transformation of the food system will not be led by the food system. The incumbents — commodity traders, input manufacturers, large processors — have rational, deeply embedded interests in the status quo. They have built their competitive advantages, lobbying infrastructure, and subsidy capture around a system that works well for them, even as it fails everyone else. Asking them to lead its transformation is like asking the telecom monopolies of the 1990s to invent the internet.
The transformation will come from outside: pension funds and sovereign wealth funds looking for long-horizon, climate-resilient assets; technology investors who understand learning curves and have no attachment to how food has always been done; healthcare systems that grasp the connection between food system design and chronic disease, and have every financial incentive to invest in prevention.
And then there is a group almost nobody is talking about yet: the tens of millions of people being displaced by AI. McKinsey estimates up to 375 million workers may need to change occupational categories by 2030. White-collar workers, knowledge workers, people with analytical, logistical, and communications skills — entering transition periods in which they are looking for meaningful work.
The skills that made them valuable in data, logistics, software, and strategy translate directly to the food transition. And unlike the work being automated away, this work requires presence in landscapes, relationships with farmers and communities, contextual judgement. It will not be automated away.
AI is releasing enormous human capability into the world. The food transition is one of the most meaningful places that capability could go.
Liberation, not charity
The stakes are highest in the Global South, where the food system operates not as neutral infrastructure but as a mechanism of structural dependency. The green revolution increased yields and simultaneously locked hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers into purchasing inputs every season — seeds, nitrogen, pesticides — at prices set by markets on other continents, through chains controlled by corporations they will never meet. Her productivity may be higher than her grandmother’s. Her autonomy is not.
The countries most exposed to the current Hormuz crisis — Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Kenya, Somalia, Jordan, Turkey — are precisely those identified by the FAO’s Máximo Torero as lacking sufficient resilience to absorb the disruption. They are also the countries with the greatest untapped potential for biological productivity: high biodiversity, year-round growing seasons, traditional knowledge of polyculture farming displaced but not destroyed by the green revolution.
A farmer who plants a food forest does not need to buy inputs next season. A nation that rebuilds food sovereignty through agroecological diversification is not vulnerable in the way Egypt, Lebanon, and Somalia are today. This is structural liberation, not development aid.
The policy lever
Global fossil fuel subsidies reached $7 trillion in 2022 — 7.1% of global GDP, per the IMF. Agricultural subsidies in OECD countries overwhelmingly flow to commodity crops and input-intensive systems. We are paying staggering sums to maintain a food system whose fragility we are living through right now.
There is no strategic reserve for fertilizer. G7 governments stockpile oil but have no equivalent mechanism for nitrogen, even though a fertilizer shock — reduced harvests, spiking staple prices, acute hunger — is at least as serious and slower to reverse, because it operates on agricultural time.
Redirecting a fraction of existing subsidy flows toward regenerative transition support, perennial systems research, and distributed food infrastructure would be among the most cost-effective investments available to any government. It would also create the conditions for the learning curves that drove solar and wind costs down: scale, iteration, compounding improvement. The political difficulty is real. Which is precisely why the call to action here is not directed at the people defending the current system.
Who this is for?
If you are inside the incumbent food system, I have limited expectations — not because individuals lack integrity, but because the system selects against transformation. You will optimize, call it transformation, and wait for the next crisis.
If you are outside food: this is your moment.
Investors — after 2019, 2021, 2022, 2025, and 2026, describing the current food system as a stable asset class requires extraordinary willful blindness.
Technology entrepreneurs — food is where energy was in the early 2000s, with entrenched players, steepening learning curves, and talent about to become available at scale.
AI-displaced workers — your grace period is real, your skills are directly applicable, and this work cannot be automated.
Climate philanthropists — the regenerative transition is a climate intervention, a food security intervention, a public health intervention, and a rural economic development intervention simultaneously. The co-benefit density is unmatched.
The current crisis will eventually resolve. The strait will reopen. Fertilizer supply will normalize. Food price inflation will ease. And the system will go back to pretending it is resilient — until the next time. There will be a next time.
The decision
I have been in and around food for more than twenty years. I have watched the dot-com smirk aimed at foodtech. I watched GLP-1 drugs arrive faster than almost anyone predicted. I watched AI go from research curiosity to civilisational disruptor in roughly fifteen minutes.
Each had a before and after. In the before, the transformation seemed optional or distant. In the after, it seemed inevitable — and those who moved early seemed not just right but obviously right.
We are in the before of the food transition. The Hormuz blockade is not unprecedented. It is the latest in a series accelerating in frequency and severity. The tools — regenerative systems, perennial crops, food forests, agroecological knowledge, distributed production — exist and work right now, without waiting for the strait to reopen.
Before Google, after Google. Before AI, after AI. Before the food transition, after the food transition.
The after is coming. The only question is how much damage we accumulate in the before.
