Maeve Cullinan Global Health Security Reporter

Pregnant women in Kabul, sheep-herders outside of Mogadishu, the urban-poor in Colombo. As the war in Iran passes 100 days, these are the people on the front line of a new hunger crisis.

Months ago, the UN cautioned that a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz would push millions into hunger; now they say their worst fears are materialising.

A report produced by the World Food Programme (WFP), the UN’s food-assistance branch, found that 45 million additional people now face “critical” levels of food insecurity as a direct result of the war in the Gulf.

Across the world, 260 million people already face similar levels of food insecurity. Most live in poor and fragile countries and are unable to meet their basic caloric needs.

Many are selling off livestock and land to put food on the table.

In the long term, the food crisis will irreversibly damage physical and cognitive health, particularly in children, experts say.

“We told the world the closure of the Strait was going to have a massive impact,” Dr Jean-Martin Bauer, the World Food Programme’s director of food security analysis, told The Telegraph.

“There have been impacts on energy markets, on trade, on shipping, and all these are combining to create this cost of living crisis affecting millions of people.”

But even if the Strait reopened tomorrow – and a peace deal currently feels elusive – experts say the war’s impact on food security will be long-felt.

The crisis revolves around two critical elements: energy and fertiliser.

Both form the backbone of modern farming and food distribution. A quarter of global oil supplies are shipped through the Strait, along with roughly a third of the world’s fertiliser.

Because of the bottleneck, oil has now been consistently fluctuating in and around $100 per barrel, up 30 per cent since before the war. Fertiliser prices have risen even more sharply, spiking up to 50 per cent since February.

Fertiliser is a particular problem, because, unlike oil, the world operates no strategic reserve to manage the shortfall.

As a result, the overall cost of producing, distributing, and ultimately purchasing food is far more expensive.

“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not a regional issue; it is a global food security risk,” Dr Qu Dongyu, head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation Council of the UN, said at a high-level meeting earlier this week.

The World Food Programme (WFP) report focused on three countries – Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sri Lanka – chosen for their different geographies and varying vulnerabilities, to map out how exactly the strain on global agriculture is affecting people on the ground.

“These deep dives are specific cases that we can learn from,” Dr Baurer of the WFP.

“What we’re seeing with these studies in Afghanistan and Somalia and Sri Lanka is that this risk to the food systems of these fragile countries is materialising before our very eyes.”

Somalia

Somalia, Africa’s easternmost country, is particularly exposed to the current crisis.

Already grappling with extreme drought and conflict, the country imports 100 per cent of its oil and 90 per cent of its grains, which make up around half of the population’s calorie intake a day.

The East African country also relies on the Middle East for 91 per cent of its exports.

Saudi Arabia purchases upwards of $350 million worth of Somali livestock every year, which is the country’s main source of external revenue, with Oman and Dubai accounting for most of the rest.

The Gulf as a whole is importing less of almost all goods as insurance and freight costs skyrocket.

It’s a devastating blow to the country’s livestock industry, which forms much of Somalia’s economic backbone. Around 65 per cent of the country’s population are involved in animal raising in some way, mostly working as herders.

The proportion of Somali households that can no longer afford what the UN calls the “basic food basket” – things like cooking oil and grains – has risen from 47 to 60 per cent in late 2025, according to the WFP’s analysis.

It means ultimately an additional 2.5 million people in Somalia could be unable to afford a basic food basket by the end of the year.

Soaring jet fuel prices, which have risen on average 150 per cent since the beginning of the war, are also hampering humanitarian efforts, according to the WFP.

The United Nations Humanitarian Air Service – which delivers food to hard-to-reach areas in Somalia and other conflict-affected countries – is facing significantly higher costs, and has had to scale back its operations as a result.

Compounding the impacts is a significant drop in overall foreign assistance, as Western countries have slashed their overseas aid budgets to pivot spending towards defence. In Somalia, the WFP is now operating with an 89 per cent funding gap.

“The risk is increasing, but the response capacity is less,” said Dr Bauer.

Afghanistan

Before February, Afghanistan was already in the grips of a severe hunger crisis.

An estimated 4.9 million mothers and children are already suffering from acute malnutrition, a near-record figure.

An eight-month-long border closure with Pakistan, the country’s key trading partner, repeated floods and earthquakes, and a steep fall-off in foreign aid as Western countries increasingly slash overseas development budgets have all exacerbated the crisis, according to the UN.

After tensions between Kabul and Islamabad escalated in October last year, the Taliban pivoted much of its trade – of things like raw materials, fresh produce, fuels – from Pakistan to Iran.

“By February 60 per cent of Afghanistan’s trade went through Iran, so when the first bomb hit, Afghanistan was economically exposed,” John Aylieff, Afghanistan Representative and Country Director, told The Telegraph.

The World Bank has said Afghanistan’s per capita GDP has now declined by 5.6 per cent.

An additional 2.3 million Afghans are food insecure as a result, mostly pregnant women and children who are more vulnerable to food shortages.

Mr Aylieff told The Telegraph calls to WFP’s emergency hotline have surged in recent months, with women begging the organisation to help them feed their starving infants.

The organisation, which is the largest provider of food assistance in Afghanistan, has suffered a 40 per cent blow to its budget since 2024. It says it is now only able to provide food assistance to a fraction of those in need.

Before February, WFP could only provide emergency food aid to a quarter of malnourished children and one in three pregnant and breastfeeding women.

The war in Iran has forced the organisation to scale down ever more.

“We can’t transport food into Afghanistan through Iranian ports, so we have to go by truck via land. We go through several countries to get there from our hub in Dubai – the UAE, Saudi, Syria, Turkey, Azerbaijan, over the Caspian Sea, into Afghanistan,” Mr Aylieff said.

“It costs five times more and takes three times longer,” he said, adding that transporting supplies like fortified biscuits – ready-to eat, shelf stable biscuits that are high-calorie and packed with essential nutrients – into Afghanistan used to take 10 days and can now sometimes take as long as 75.

“One million kids now can’t be fed just because of the transport issue. We have to turn away six out of seven children who need treatment for malnutrition,” he said.

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is a middle-income country; its GDP per capita is more than six times Somalia’s.

Yet it is also acutely exposed to events in the Gulf, the UN says.

Sri Lanka is heavily economically tied to the Middle East. It imports 63 per cent of its energy and between 90 and 100 per cent of its fertiliser from the region.

It also exports almost 45 per cent of its tea, one of its most vital foreign exchange earners, to the Middle East. Experts estimate the country loses between $10 and $15 million per week when exports to the Gulf are disrupted.

Remittances sent back to Sri Lanka from the Gulf also generate an estimated $3.4 billion for the country’s economy, but thousands of workers have returned home as industries like construction, farming, and tourism have ground to a halt.

More than 8 out of 10 Sri Lankans who leave the country for work do so in the Middle East – chiefly Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

“The Gulf employs a lot of people from South Asia, and so remittances have been harmed and reduced as well, and as a consequence household food security for those households dependent migrant workers have been hit,” Leigh Mante, a Fellow on Climate and Energy at the think-tank ORF Middle East, told The Telegraph.

Fertiliser is now also more expensive and difficult to obtain in Sri Lanka.

The problem is particularly acute in the South Asian country after a disastrous decision taken by the government in 2021 – where it banned the importation of chemical fertilisers completely – led to an agricultural crisis which is still playing out.

The country is now unable to access roughly a third of its normal fertiliser supply, which is set to hit the nation’s supply of rice significantly next year after harvest.

The WFP projects that up to 1.3 million additional people in Sri Lanka may be at risk of being unable to meet their basic food needs, adding to an existing baseline of 4.7 million.

Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopened tomorrow, experts warn the food crisis is set to only get worse because of the delayed impact of falling fertiliser supply.

Farmers in almost all regions of the world are grappling with higher prices and are reporting they have been forced to plant fewer crops, or pivot to produce that requires less fertiliser.

One major switch, according to experts, is from wheat and corn – which require high levels of nitrogen – to soybeans, far less fertiliser-intensive but used for livestock feed, not human consumption.

The effects will not be felt immediately. Crops being planted now will be harvested in the autumn and into 2027.

“The crop calendars of the world have been impacted, so not only in the east but also in the south, north, west. So we have all countries that have been touched,” Dr Maximo Torero, chief economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, told The Telegraph.

“The choices are to produce with fewer inputs, which implies lower yields, or to switch crops, or to produce less overall,” he said.

Svein Tore Holsether, chief executive of Yara – one of the world’s largest fertiliser producers – has said a shortage of nitrogen fertiliser could reduce yields for crops like wheat and maize by as much as 50 per cent in 2027.

Globally, the estimated drop in fertiliser supplies could cost the world 10 billion meals a week.

Western countries have so far been relatively sheltered from the food crisis, broadly because governments can absorb prices and help to cushion inflation, and the average person spends significantly less of their income on food than those in the Global South.

But experts say it’s only a matter of time before the effects of the Iran war are felt on the shelves.

This is mostly because of the delayed effects of fertiliser shortages.

“All the crop calendars of the world have been impacted, so not only in the East but also in the South, North, West. All countries have been touched,” said Dr Torero of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

“We had good production in previous years and currently good stocks,” said Dr Torero.

“That’s why prices have not increased so much. But by the end of the year these will be depleted, so prices will start increasing by 2027.”

British farmers say they are suffering from the fallout. In April, the cost of nitrogen fertiliser was 40 per cent higher than before the conflict.

Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers Union (NFU), said on Wednesday that growers would be considering “whether to plant at all” after a surge in the cost of agricultural essentials since the war began.

They say that without government intervention, yields of essential food items like arable crops and feed for livestock would fall.

The world’s food security is also set to be particularly precarious in 2027 as an unprecedented “super” El Niño hits the Southern Hemisphere this summer, dramatically reducing the ability of farmers to work due to heat stress and crippling crop yields.

A report released on Monday by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit predicted drops in British imports of rice, as well as fruits like grapes, lemons, oranges, and coffee.

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