The global fertilizer market is navigating one of its most complex periods in recent memory. What began as a geopolitical shock to energy and shipping markets has evolved into a slow-moving structural test of the entire agricultural supply chain — and as of June 2026, the situation remains unresolved. The Strait of Hormuz, which briefly showed signs of recovery following the US-Iran peace agreement, has seen a sharp reversal after Iran’s IRGC declared the waterway shut on June 21 in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon, with ship tracking data showing transits falling from 35 vessels on Saturday to just 12 on Sunday.

Alkagesta trades across a broad range of nitrogen, phosphate, and specialty fertilizer products, sourcing from reliable global origins and matching supply streams with markets where agricultural fundamentals are strongest. The desk’s focus is on building long-term supply partnerships across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and key emerging agricultural markets.

A Supply Chain Under Structural Stress

The crisis has exposed the fragility of a global fertilizer supply chain optimised so aggressively for efficiency that it left itself with no buffer. Approximately one third of all globally traded fertilizers move through the Strait — all converging at a single chokepoint with next to no redundancy built in. Urea prices surged past $800 per tonne FOB Egypt at the height of the disruption, force majeure clauses were invoked across contracts previously considered watertight, and producers across South Asia reduced output as Qatari gas supplies tightened.

Even the brief reopening that followed the June 14 US-Iran agreement failed to restore normal flows. At its peak, tanker transits reached just 25 vessels on June 19 — still well below the pre-war baseline of more than 100 daily transits — before Iran’s IRGC declared the waterway shut again days later. The episode has reinforced what the disruption made clear from the outset: restoring physical supply flows is a process, not an event, and the market should not be expected to normalise quickly.

The disruption has reverberated well beyond fertilizer logistics. At the 181st Session of the FAO Council, FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu stated the closure of the Strait “is not a regional issue — it is a global food security risk,” noting that 20–30% of global fertilizer exports transit through the chokepoint. G7 agriculture ministers have since convened in an extraordinary session to coordinate on supply diversification and market transparency. As Alkagesta’s Fertilizer Desk Lead Vusal Muradov wrote in a recently published analysis: “The businesses that can keep quality supply moving across these bottlenecks and areas of tension are no longer niche operators — they are essential global infrastructure.”

Execution and Integrity in a Pressured Market

In this environment, delivering the right product to the right place at the right time has become as commercially important as price discovery. Fertilizer demand is deeply seasonal — missing a delivery window can mean missing an entire growing season. Alkagesta’s desk manages that complexity across product specifications, storage, port infrastructure, inland logistics, and multi-jurisdictional regulatory requirements, while monitoring energy and ammonia markets closely given their direct influence on nitrogen fertilizer production economics.

What those markets are signaling right now is anything but stable. The brief reopening of the Strait following the June 14 agreement — and its rapid reversal days later — has made one thing clear: the market should not be pricing in a swift return to pre-war operating conditions. For fertilizer buyers and traders, the implications are significant. Planting seasons do not wait for geopolitical negotiations to conclude, and the supply chains that serve them cannot be rebuilt overnight even when shipping lanes reopen. The businesses best positioned to weather this period are those that built depth — in sourcing relationships, logistics optionality, and execution capability — before the disruption began, not in response to it.

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