{
  "id": 842457,
  "title": "Africa keeps rebuilding its food security every time a shipping lane closes",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/14/africa-keeps-rebuilding-its-food-security-every-time-a-shipping-lane",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-08-14T05:45:34.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "MyJoyOnline Ghana",
    "slug": "myjoyonline-ghana",
    "url": "https://www.myjoyonline.com/africa-keeps-rebuilding-its-food-security-every-time-a-shipping-lane-closes/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Africa's food security has repeatedly rebounded when shipping routes are disrupted. The Strait of Hormuz, which transports about a third of the world's urea and nitrogen-based fertilizers, played a significant role in this recent case. When the Strait was closed, urea prices in the Middle East surged by 19 percent within a week. This price increase directly impacted African markets, where food already consumes half of a household's daily budget. A doubling in urea prices - from $400 to $850 per tonne - created a dangerous situation where the gap between a challenging season and hunger was eliminated.\n\nAdvocates have been calling for an enduring peace among the parties involved in the Gulf conflict. Restoring normal traffic in Hormuz would help stabilize fertiliser and fuel supplies, alleviating pressure on global markets. However, relief is not the same as resilience. This is the third major fertiliser shock in five years, following the pandemic and the Ukraine war, and now the Gulf crisis is adding to the strain on Africa.\n\nThe real challenge facing Africa lies in its structural dependence on distant conflicts. Instead of one-off events, this is a persistent issue that turns every international dispute into a domestic emergency. What should concern African nations the most is that they already possess the necessary technologies, entrepreneurs, and institutional platforms to address this issue. Organic fertilizers, biostimulants, and emerging green-ammonia pathways are already available. The key problem has been the lack of alignment between financing, policy design, and market structure with these existing resources. Improving nutrient use efficiency and promoting nature-based nutrient sourcing could increase productivity for smallholder farmers while lowering costs.\n\nAfrica holds approximately 78 percent of the world's phosphate reserves, and its fertiliser production has grown by 146 percent since 2002. The continent has the necessary machinery for pooled procurement, regional trade, and local manufacturing through initiatives such as the African Continental Free Trade Area, the Africa Trade Exchange, and the Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Action Plan. However, the missing piece is sustained investment that transforms this potential into accessible, affordable fertilizers for smallholder farmers in a timely manner.\n\nThe focus should shift from the abundance of phosphate to the critical role of nitrogen in African soils, which accounts for about 70 percent of crop yield. While Africa has gas-producing nations, these countries need to collaborate on a shared continental nitrogen agenda, focusing on coordinated investment in production that benefits African farmers rather than solely export markets. This should go hand in hand with green-ammonia initiatives to develop cleaner, renewable pathways for nitrogen production.\n\nResilience is not solely an either/or decision between organic and synthetic fertilizers or old and new methods. It is an integrated soil-health system where both locally produced mineral and organic inputs play their part and are utilized efficiently. The Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Summit is working to strike this balance, and this approach is the right one.\n\nTo achieve structural transformation, two commitments must be made in tandem. Governments must allocate investment towards local and regional production, strategic reserves, blending facilities, soil-health and extension services, and efficient trade corridors. They should also retire blanket subsidies in favor of targeted, digitally delivered support for smallholder farmers, the majority of whom are women. The private sector can be supported by building manufacturing and blending capacity, providing fertiliser financing and insurance, and establishing distribution networks for affordable supply to the last mile. Dangote's USD 7 billion regional expansion, aiming to become the world's largest urea platform, exemplifies the potential of African capital at scale. Development finance institutions can de-risk and catalyze the rest.\n\nThe Gulf crisis provides an opportunity to move Africa's fertiliser agenda from emergency response to structural transformation. This ecosystem should be affordable, climate-smart, regionally integrated, and sovereign. It is crucial to rehabilitate Africa's degraded lands and ecosystems, as the best time to build resilience is when markets are calm and the memory of previous disruptions is still fresh. Africa cannot transform its food systems while remaining dependent on global fluctuations in fertiliser, fuel, and freight. This current crisis should be the one we finally respond to meaningfully by building a fertiliser system of our own.",
  "summary": "Thousands of kilometres away, in markets across Africa where food already absorbs about half of a household’s daily spending, the arithmetic was brutal, with Urea price doubling from $400 to $850 per tonne: when fertiliser costs rise, food prices follow, and the distance between a difficult season and a hungry one narrows to nothing.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}