Stranded in Doha
In January we were stranded in Doha, a cancelled connecting flight home from New Zealand, while tensions across the Gulf continued to escalate and parts of the region closed their airspace…
We were recently stranded in Doha, a cancelled connecting flight home from New Zealand, while tensions across the Gulf continued to escalate and parts of the region closed their airspace.
Watching and hearing events unfold from there was a strange, and at times, quite unsettling experience. The news quite rightly focuses on geopolitics and energy markets, but with far too much time on my hands, it was hard not to think about something else entirely. Agriculture.
Just offshore lies one of the most important chokepoints in the global food system, the Strait of Hormuz. At its narrowest point it is only about 33 kilometres wide, yet every day enormous volumes of global trade pass through it. Roughly 20 percent of the world's oil moves through this corridor, along with a similar share of global natural gas exports.
Alongside the ongoing conflict, energy is starting to dominate the headlines, but there is another flow that has received far less attention. Fertilisers.
The Middle East has quietly become one of the world's major fertiliser export hubs. Countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE produce large quantities of ammonia, urea and sulphur, key building blocks of modern crop nutrition. Depending on the dataset, around a quarter to a third of globally traded fertiliser moves through the Strait of Hormuz.
In simple terms, a significant portion of the nutrients that underpin global crop yields travels through a shipping corridor only a few dozen kilometres wide.
Modern food production is deeply intertwined with synthetic nitrogen. It is often estimated that roughly half of global food production depends on nitrogen fertiliser produced through the Haber-Bosch process, which uses an estimated 1-2% of global energy, much of it derived from natural gas. Roughly 15-18% of global gas production comes from the Gulf states.
None of this means the food system suddenly stops if disruptions occur. Markets adjust and supply chains will try to reroute. But it does highlight just how dependent our modern agricultural system is on a relatively small number of global hubs.
For farmers, these dynamics can sit well beyond everyday decision making, yet they can influence farm economics very quickly, through diesel prices, fertiliser costs and commodity markets.
Reducing inputs, increasing resilience, and building redundancy into a system are some of the most powerful aspects of a genuinely regenerative farming approach. Farming systems that build resilient soils that release, cycle and store nutrients are going to be far less exposed to the energy shocks now originating thousands of miles away.
Luckily we’ve since returned home to peace. And for us, a return to the fields of South West England.