Conflicts are increasingly disrupting the shipping lanes, grain routes, energy supplies and fertilizer markets that underpin global food security, exposing countries far beyond the battlefield.
NEW YORK — The geography of conflict is increasingly becoming the geography of food security.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned this week that the global food supply has become “collateral damage” as conflicts disrupt three strategically important maritime trade corridors: the Strait of Hormuz, the Black Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
The concern goes well beyond food production. Modern agriculture and food trade depend on functioning ports, affordable energy, fertilizer, shipping capacity and predictable trade routes. When several of those systems come under pressure at once, the effects can travel rapidly across borders.
For governments heavily dependent on imported food, the emerging risk is therefore not simply whether enough food exists globally. It is whether countries can continue to obtain it reliably and affordably.
Three Conflicts, Three Critical Trade Routes
The most immediate concern is the convergence of disruption across several major maritime corridors.
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been severely affected by the conflict involving the United States, Iran and Israel. Because the waterway is one of the world’s most important energy arteries, disruption can quickly feed into fuel, fertilizer and transportation costs.
At the Bab al-Mandab Strait, between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, tensions involving Houthi forces have added further uncertainty to commercial shipping.
The Black Sea, meanwhile, has become an increasingly acute concern for global grain markets as Russia and Ukraine attack ports and export infrastructure.
Reuters reported that Chicago wheat futures had risen more than 17% since early July amid disruption to Black Sea shipments. Egypt, one of the world’s largest wheat importers, sourced more than 82% of its wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine during the first half of 2026, illustrating how quickly warfare around export infrastructure can become an economic and food-security issue elsewhere.
Alternative wheat supplies are available from producers including Australia, Argentina and North America. But in some cases, Reuters found they were significantly more expensive than Black Sea grain.
That is the central distinction: the immediate global risk is less about food disappearing than about food becoming more expensive and difficult to move.
How Conflict Moves Through the Food System
Food markets are especially exposed to energy shocks because fuel and fertilizer are embedded throughout agricultural production and distribution.
Higher oil and gas prices can raise the cost of running farm machinery, manufacturing fertilizer, transporting commodities and operating shipping fleets. Maritime insecurity can simultaneously increase freight and insurance costs.
The result is that conflict thousands of miles away can alter global food security, reshaping the economics of producing and distributing food in countries with little direct exposure to the fighting.
For governments that subsidize food, fuel or fertilizer, those increases can also migrate rapidly onto public balance sheets. For poorer import-dependent countries, the combination of higher commodity and transportation costs can be especially difficult to absorb.
A Food System Already Under Pressure
These shocks are arriving against an already severe food-security backdrop.
The latest Global Report on Food Crises found that 266 million people across 47 countries and territories experienced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025 — almost 23% of the population analyzed and nearly double the proportion recorded in 2016.
Conflict remains the primary driver of acute hunger globally.
At the same time, the resources available to respond are shrinking. Humanitarian and development financing for food security and nutrition in crisis-affected countries has fallen back toward levels last seen in 2016–2017, while WFP’s resources have declined by almost 40%.
The consequences are most severe where conflict also restricts humanitarian access. FAO and WFP have identified famine risks during 2026 in several major crises, including Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia, while Gaza has also experienced famine conditions and continuing extreme food insecurity. Somalia’s Burhakaba District is among the areas currently identified as facing a risk of famine.
Climate Is Compounding the Risk
Geopolitical disruption is also colliding with increasingly severe climate shocks.
WFP has warned that a strong El Niño could push nearly 49 million additional people into acute food insecurity, particularly across vulnerable parts of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. That warning comes even as underlying global food supplies remain relatively strong following good harvests in 2025.
That reinforces another important distinction: availability and access are not the same thing.
A world with sufficient aggregate food production can still experience severe food insecurity if drought reduces local harvests, wars interrupt trade, fertilizer becomes more expensive, currencies weaken or humanitarian financing disappears.
Climate pressures can also disrupt the infrastructure used to move commodities. Severe drought in Europe has pushed water levels on the Rhine to historic lows, forcing vessels to reduce loads and raising transportation costs along one of the continent’s most important industrial arteries.
Why Global Food Security Is Now a National Resilience Issue
For governments, food security is increasingly becoming a question of national resilience as much as agricultural policy.
Strategic grain reserves, diversified suppliers, fertilizer access, port capacity, shipping routes and domestic agricultural productivity are becoming more consequential in an era when trade infrastructure itself can become a casualty of geopolitical confrontation.
Guterres has pointed to a UN task force established in March to support safe and predictable maritime transit through the Strait of Hormuz for humanitarian purposes, initially focusing on fertilizers and related raw materials.
Such initiatives can help protect individual supply routes. They cannot eliminate the broader structural exposure.
The world has spent decades building a highly interconnected food system designed around efficiency and global trade. That system remains capable of producing enormous quantities of food. But its efficiency also creates dependencies.
As conflicts increasingly intersect with the maritime routes, energy markets and agricultural inputs on which that system depends, food security is becoming a strategic vulnerability for countries far removed from the battlefield.
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