https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/05/09/iran-farms-thailand-food/A Thai rice farmer has decided that the rational response to the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is to leave 19 hectares of land empty. The Washington Post reports that Saithong Jamjai, 53, spent weeks calculating whether to plant again in central Thailand and reached the same answer each time: fuel, fertiliser, plastics and other inputs would cost at least $33,000, while the rice she expects to sell in August would bring in only $22,000. Her conclusion was blunt: “A confirmed loss”. So she is letting the land bake under the husks from last season.
The mechanism carrying the war into Asian rice fields is urea, the nitrogen fertiliser that modern high-yield farming depends on. Iran’s destruction of gas infrastructure in the Gulf, combined with U.S. and Iranian efforts to choke the Strait of Hormuz, has blocked supplies of fuel and gas-linked fertiliser products from leaving the Middle East. According to Pranshi Goyal, senior analyst at CRU Group, 30 per cent of global urea supply has effectively been “wiped out”. Urea spot prices are up 40 per cent since February; weekly production in Iran has fallen from 182,000 to 63,000 metric tons, while Qatar and Bahrain have dropped to zero in the figures cited. China has restricted fertiliser exports to protect its own farmers, and Russia is seeing demand rise in a way that could strengthen its economy and aid its war in Ukraine.
The Food and Agriculture Organization is warning that the shock is spreading through the global food system by calendar, not by geography alone. Speaking in Rome, FAO director general Dongyu Qu called the war “a disruption at the core of the global agrifood system”. FAO chief economist Maximo Torero said the worst effects are currently in Asia, where Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Australia are entering key sowing periods, but the crisis is “moving east to west and south to north”. Farmers are already skipping planting, reducing acreage, or cutting fertiliser use, which means lower yields later this year.
The next pressure point is June, when India and Brazil, two of the world’s biggest agricultural producers, are expected to ramp up urea orders. If ships carrying urea are still not moving by then, Torero warns of “significant yield loss” across many countries, higher commodity prices, renewed inflation, and a hit to economic growth “very close to what happened in covid-19”. A likely super El Niño this year could add extreme heat and drought to the fertiliser shock, making the same planting decisions even riskier.
Thailand’s official assurances are already colliding with shortages on the ground. The Commerce Ministry said in April that the country had 343,000 tons of urea, enough for the upcoming planting season. But the Post found fertiliser shops across Ayutthaya and Suphan Buri provinces out of urea for weeks. One wholesaler sent a truck to a marketplace used by large dealers and got nothing after four days. Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow says Thailand still has sufficient farming supplies, while also acknowledging that the country is competing against richer nations and has “not faced such a crisis before”. A Russian supply attempt is likely to fail because shipping disruptions mean the urea would take at least two months to arrive, too late for the current planting window.
Thai farmers are being squeezed from both sides. Their costs are rising because fertiliser and fuel are scarce, while their expected income is falling because the Middle East, one of their major export markets, has effectively shut. The region accounted for 17 per cent of Thailand’s rice exports in 2025, with Iraq the largest single destination. Since the war began, rice shipments to the Gulf have stopped. Malaysia and the Philippines have absorbed some of the excess supply, but not enough, leaving a glut that keeps rice prices low just as input costs spike.
The human consequences are already visible: farmers taking credit from local loan sharks, planting only part of their land, growing vegetables and fish for subsistence, considering day labour, and reporting anxiety, debt and depression. Pramote Charoensilp, president of the Thai Farmers and Agriculturists Association, says calls from villages now carry the same themes: debt, depression, desperation. His advice is painfully thin because the options are thin: “I ask them to try to keep going. Just to keep going”.
Even a quick reopening of the Strait of Hormuz would not immediately solve the problem. Goyal says cargo would still take one to two months to reach destinations and markets would need time to stabilise; the longer Middle Eastern production plants stay shut, the longer they will take to restart. “This problem builds in a nonlinear fashion”, she said. For farmers whose planting window is measured in days and weeks, a supply chain that recovers in months has already failed them.