War, Drought and Fuel Costs Line Up to Raise Global Food Prices

The United Nations warned on August 5, 2026 that war, drought, and soaring fuel and fertilizer costs could stack up into another global food-price surge, ending a two-year calm that had kept grocery bills in check.

The alarm matters because the danger comes from several shocks feeding on one another, moving from oil wells and gas plants through farms to the supermarket shelf.

Maximo Torero, the chief economist of the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, told Reuters, "I expect that commodity prices will start to increase more now ... and food prices will start increasing by the end of the year, and next year for sure they will increase more."

Food already shows the strain, as the FAO Food Price Index averaged 131.1 points in July 2026, its highest reading since January 2023.

Cereal prices drove that climb with a 3.4 percent jump in one month, while wheat alone rose 5.8 percent.

Vegetable oil prices reached their highest level since June 2022, raising the cost of a cooking staple found in kitchens worldwide.

The first shock begins with energy, since fighting near the Strait of Hormuz threatens the oil and gas that modern farming runs on. 

"The Strait of Hormuz is a problem that affects all the inputs of agricultural commodities, agricultural systems," Torero explained.

He added that Brent crude powers the pumps, packaging, processing, and transport behind every harvest, while natural gas feeds the plants that make fertilizer.

Attacks on Russia's oil and gas sites have also choked exports of diesel and natural gas, two fuels that farms cannot run without.

The World Bank expects energy prices to surge 24 percent in 2026, reaching their highest level since 2022.

Fertilizer forms the next link, because natural gas serves as the raw material for the nitrogen that most fertilizers rely on.

A World Bank analysis warns that costly fertilizer pushes farmers to spread less, switch crop, or plant smaller fields, choices that quietly shrink next year's harvest.

Those choices already reshape the fields, with global wheat and corn planting cut during the first months of the Iran war and some American growers shifting to soybeans that need less fertilizer.

Australia, one of the world's top crop exporters, expects its winter crop to drop 21 percent as fuel and fertilizer costs climb.

Even the United States, which makes most of its own farm supplies, could see growers of nine major crops lose $32 billion in 2027 without federal aid, an industry group estimated.

Weather brings the third threat, as forecasters set the odds of a strong El Nino near four in five for mid-2026 and above 90 percent by November.

The pattern tends to bake much of the planet in above-average heat while draining rain from India, Indonesia, parts of Central America, and the Horn of Africa nations of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya.

India's monsoon has already arrived late and thin, an early warning for the rice crop that feeds much of Asia.

The World Bank cautions that these risks stack up instead of striking alone, noting that its oil and meal price gauge rose 11 percent in the three months after the fighting began.

Higher commodity prices reach shoppers slowly, since the International Monetary Fundfinds that fuel and food shocks take months to pass through to the prices households actually pay.

Nations that import most of their food absorb the sharpest blow, since they lack the cash that lets wealthier producers soften the hit.

The World Bank recalls that the crises of 2008 and 2022 set off waves of export bans, a reaction that magnified price spikes and deepened hunger in nations that buy their food abroad.

The next food shock, forecasters caution, may land not as one dramatic shortage but as many smaller risks arriving at the same time.