{"id":3919,"date":"2026-07-21T21:11:59","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3919"},"modified":"2026-07-21T21:11:59","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:11:59","slug":"uns-worst-case-scenario-energy-and-fertilizer-shock-from-iran-war-could-push-nearly-19-million-more-into-chronic-hunger-by-2030","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3919","title":{"rendered":"UN\u2019s worst-case scenario: Energy and fertilizer shock from Iran war could push nearly 19 million more into chronic hunger by 2030"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report, published jointly by five UN agencies, modeled what happens to global hunger through 2030 under competing assumptions about how long the fallout from this year\u2019s conflict in the Middle East lasts. In the most pessimistic scenario, in which strikes on oil and gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf take years to repair, the report projects 522 million people will be undernourished in 2030 compared to the 503 million in a pre-conflict baseline.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3917\">The Best Fiber Supplements of 2026: Tested and Reviewed<\/a><\/p>\n<p>That gap, 18.8 million additional people pushed into chronic hunger, is driven almost entirely by two regions: Asia, where the report projects 10 million more hungry people than it would have without the war, and Africa, with 8 million more, with Latin America and the Caribbean making up the difference.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>That 18 million figure is narrower than what the World Food Programme, one of the agencies involved in the report, warned of earlier in the war. In a March analysis, WFP projected that up to 45 million more people could be pushed into acute food insecurity by mid-2026 if the conflict persisted and oil stayed above $100 a barrel. However, that number measures something different: an acute, near-term crisis rather than the longer-run undernourishment the new SOFI report tracks through 2030.<\/p>\n<p>In all the scenarios taken together, the Hormuz-related crisis could leave between 8 million and 19 million additional people undernourished in 2030 compared with the trajectory expected before the conflict.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But 18 million as a worst-case scenario is a striking number under any circumstance. It\u2019s more than four times low-end estimates of the death toll from the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered famine that killed an estimated 3.5 million to 10 million Ukrainians in between 1932 and 1933, and more than ten times the roughly 1 million to 1.5 million people who died in Ireland\u2019s potato famine. The comparison isn\u2019t exact\u2014SOFI counts people pushed into chronic hunger by 2030, not deaths\u2014but it underscores the scale of a shock that rivals some of history\u2019s greatest famines.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>M\u00e1ximo Torero Cullen, the chief economist of the UN\u2019s Food and Agriculture Organization, told <em>Fortune<\/em> over email that the Hormuz-related crisis \u201cerodes a significant part of the progress that would otherwise have occurred\u201d in reducing global hunger.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>The direct link from the Iran war and hunger is fertilizer, which is sourced from natural gas, and also fertilizer\u2019s demand and supply dynamics, according to Peter Alexander, a senior lecturer in global food security at the University of Edinburgh who has studied how energy and fertilizer shocks ripple through food systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3911\">The California Pizza Kitchen story: how two lawyers quit the courtroom to reinvent restaurants<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Alexander told <em>Fortune<\/em> that because fertilizer trades on a global market, a supply shock anywhere raises prices everywhere, regardless of whether a given country ever bought a bag of fertilizer or gas from the Gulf. Farmers then act on that price signal\u2014using less fertilizer, switching to less input-intensive crops, or not planting certain crops at all\u2014and that shrinks global food supply.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cSupply and demand would tell you that if there is less supply entering the market for food commodities, then we\u2019re going to see higher food prices,\u201d Alexander said. \u201cIt sort of doesn\u2019t really matter where the shortfall occurs. The price gets transmitted everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Alexander explained the pain lands harder in Africa and Asia because people in those regions spend a far higher share of their income on food, and food demand is inelastic.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cWhen you\u2019re not able to afford a sufficient nutritious diet because it\u2019s become more expensive, then that\u2019s why you end up having those negative consequences in the poorer regions of the world,\u201d he told <em>Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>North America, Alexander noted, is largely insulated because it is wealthy enough to absorb the price shock without nutritional consequences.<\/p>\n<p>The report\u2019s Iran war impact findings arrive against an otherwise improving backdrop. Its baseline data show global hunger has declined for a third straight year, from 8.6% of the world\u2019s population in 2022 to 7.8% in 2025, or about 645 million people.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=3909\">Gen Z entrepreneur found a Wilt Chamberlain Lakers warm-up for $3.07 outside Portland \u2014\u00a0it was a $90,000 genuine article<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UN food economist M\u00e1ximo Torero Cullen told Fortune that the Iran War \u201cerodes a significant part of the progress that would otherwise have occurred.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-united-nations"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - 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