Iran war regional impacts: Growing food security risks in Afghanistan
Key takeaways The Iran conflict is disrupting Afghanistan’s supplies of food and other key items, sharply increasing import risks and price pressures.The country’s extreme import dependence magnifies shocks, leaving households highly vulnerable to trade and fuel disruptions.Climate stress and rising returnee demand compound risks, worsening an already severe food security crisis.Now in its ninth week, the Iran war has sparked rising energy prices, heightened shipping and insurance risks, and disruptions along key trade corridors, increasing pressure on global supply chains.
A Narrow Strait, Global Consequences: Hormuz Strait and Fertilizer Markets
Fertilizer markets have entered a phase of heightened uncertainty, where geopolitical risks intersect with highly concentrated production, energy dependence, and fragile logistics. These risks are no longer hypothetical. The Strait of Hormuz represents a critical chokepoint for fertilizer trade, with around 35 percent of global urea flows, over one quarter of ammonia trade, just above 20 percent of phosphates, and roughly 45 percent of global sulfur exports transiting the Strait.
Data in Action: Getting Ahead of Crises
As global food security challenges intensify, using timely and reliable data to forecast food insecurity and malnutrition crises can prevent emerging shocks from escalating into humanitarian crises.This high‑level event brings together the World Food Programme, IFPRI and key partners for the launch of World Food Programme’s next‑generation HungerMapLIVE platform.
The Iran war: Potential food security impacts
The attack on Iran by U.S. and Israeli forces and Iranian retaliation against U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf have roiled energy markets by disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—the Gulf’s only sea passage to the open ocean. About 27% of the world’s oil exports, 20% of global liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, and 20%-30% of global fertilizer exports, including urea, ammonia, phosphates, and sulfur, pass through the Strait.
How natural language processing and AI can help policymakers address global food insecurity
Natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses computational techniques to interpret, analyze, and generate human language, encompasses a range of tasks and techniques. These include the large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots and other types of systems, as well as specific approaches (some employed by LLMs), including information extraction and text mining.NLP offers powerful opportunities to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—including SDG2 (Zero Hunger).
Advancing Poverty Graduation in Fragile Contexts: A New Agenda for Research and Policy
Multifaceted livelihoods interventions that target households in extreme poverty are extremely effective in reducing extreme poverty, with consistent gains in income, consumption, savings, and psychosocial well-being. These interventions, often called graduation models, have been widely evaluated, but most evidence comes from stable rural settings.
Graduation from poverty in a changing and fragile world
The global poverty landscape is increasingly shaped by conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and market disruptions—forces that are concentrating extreme poverty in the most fragile settings. At the same time, humanitarian and development financing is under pressure, heightening the need for scalable and cost-effective approaches to poverty reduction. Graduation models—multifaceted interventions designed to help extremely poor households to “graduate” from poverty—are emerging as a particularly promising response in this context.
Will extreme weather lead to multiple breadbasket failures and threaten global food security?
Currently, 80% of the world’s people rely on just three agricultural commodities as primary food staples: Maize, rice, and wheat. Production of these staple foods is concentrated in a small number of countries and regions, often called “breadbaskets.” At the same time, the incidence of climate-driven droughts, storms, floods, and related shocks is on the rise, creating large-scale threats to agricultural production in these areas. Recent research suggests that climate change will increase both the volatility of agricultural output and correlations across regions.
Worsening food insecurity, waning response capacity: Options for a better way forward
Food crises arise from the complex interplay of conflict, poverty, climate variability, and economic shocks, resulting in acute food insecurity among vulnerable populations. According to the latest Global Report on Food Crises (2025), the number of people facing severe levels of acute food insecurity has tripled over the past decade, rising from around 100 million in 2016 to nearly 300 million people in 2024.
The future of climate change and food system research: 2025 Global Food Policy Report
The realities of a changing climate are becoming increasingly clear, with temperatures rising around the world and extreme weather events, like flooding and droughts, becoming more and more frequent. April 2025 was the second hottest April globally on record, and evidence suggests such anomalous high temperatures could become the norm rather than the exception.