A Closed Strait of Hormuz Risks a Global Food Security Crisis

The war in Iran has done more than rattle energy markets. It has exposed an ordinary farm input as a strategic commodity. Urea is a concentrated, easy-to-transport nitrogen fertilizer that increases the yields of many crops, especially staple grains like corn, rice, and wheat. These small white pellets are essentially natural gas in solid form, bound with nitrogen fixed from the atmosphere through the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process. They are literally a building block of the Green Revoluti...