Conflict in the Persian Gulf is disrupting fertiliser supplies, and Africa’s food systems stand to lose.

Agrifood systems (the activities that connect the people, investments and decisions involved in producing and delivering food and agricultural goods) rely on a steady flow of inputs like fertiliser, along with markets, infrastructure and policy and trade decisions.

These food systems can absorb shocks and find new ways to keep supplies flowing under pressure. But they are also sensitive. A disruption in one part of the system has an impact on others, as the conflict in Iran that erupted in late February 2026 shows clearly.

Read more: Iran has a powerful new tool in the Strait of Hormuz that it can leverage long after the war

This is how the war on Iran affects sub-Saharan African farmers and food systems: the Gulf countries (which include Iran) are the biggest exporter globally of fertiliser ingredients. Iran alone is the fourth biggest global exporter of urea, a key ingredient in fertiliser - and one of the cheapest suppliers. Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Kenya, Tanzania and North Africa all buy urea from Iran.

Qatar is another key urea producer and exporter but stopped making urea in early March 2026 because it needs gas to do so - and its gas plants were hit by Iranian missiles.

Shipping in the narrow Strait of Hormuz shipping channel next to Iran is down by 95% since the start of the war. This means the fertiliser that is still being made in Gulf countries has been prevented from leaving the region.

This is bad news for sub-Saharan Africa which imports about 80% of the fertiliser it uses. This comes from countries including Russia,, Europe, Ukraine, India, China and the Gulf states. Malawi, for example, imports 52% of its fertiliser from the Gulf. Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa also import ingredients from the Gulf states and use it to make fertiliser that they export.

Read more: Has the Strait of Hormuz emerged as Iran’s most powerful form of deterrence?

Fertiliser prices have already increased. And, unlike oil, there is no internationally coordinated strategic reserve for fertiliser. When the supply is disrupted, it stays disrupted.

I am a researcher and practitioner who looks at how evidence and policy can be used to make better decisions in food systems and agriculture. Recently, I was part of a team that investigated how to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition through changing the agrifood system so that nutritious food becomes more available, affordable, or accessible to poor and often rural communities.

We are especially interested in the kinds of interventions that attract investment from both the private and public sectors.

Read more: Africa’s superfood heroes – from teff to insects – deserve more attention

Our research found that food in Africa is often available but not affordable, safe, or diverse enough to make up healthy diets. For example, over the past 50 years government policies have pushed subsidies, price incentives and procurement programmes towards growing staple crops (maize, wheat, rice). But on their own, these crops are not very nutrient-dense. Focusing mainly on them means that more nutrient-dense foods have been crowded out.

Our research found a number of ways that Africa’s agrifood systems can provide more nutritious foods in future. This can also happen when fertiliser supplies are limited. We highlight some of them below.

From pandemic to war to Hormuz: Africa’s fertiliser shocks

Fertiliser disruptions and the damage to agrifood systems in Africa have happened before.

Between 2020 and 2024, fertiliser supply chains were strained by COVID-19 and then the war in Ukraine. African farmers absorbed those shocks through reducing the amount of fertiliser they used on their crops. But this led to lower yields, lower earnings and tighter household budgets.

Read more: Russia’s war with Ukraine risks fresh pressure on fertiliser prices

It’s important to remember that fertiliser supplies are entangled with decades of subsidy policy, public investment and debates about what kind of agriculture African governments should be promoting. They’re highly contested and politicised, shaped by history and power as much as by agronomic evidence and household economic choices.

The current threat of shortages is only part of the picture.

Ten ways for African countries to cope using less fertiliser

The food systems in Africa that survive the fertiliser crisis linked to the Iran war will be those that put in place nutrition-focused programmes and continue investing in innovations that reduce dependence on fertiliser.

Our report identifies ten high-impact interventions that improve nutrition and dietary outcomes. Several are particularly relevant right now:

• Farmers should start growing fruit, vegetables and pulses, and farming with trees (agroforestry). This improves the health of the soil and produces nutrient-dense food.

Read more: Indigenous trees might be the secret to climate resilient dairy farming in Benin, says this new study

• Home gardens can improve diets and household food security, if people get training and nutrition education.

• Sustainable aquaculture (fish) and livestock farming, including poultry, boosts production and protein consumption.

• Bio-fortified crops, such as high-iron beans grown in Rwanda and vitamin A-rich, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes in Mozambique, build nutrition directly into the crop during production. Because they contain more nutrients, they don’t waste as much fertiliser.

• Storage and distribution infrastructure reduces spoilage of food. It also improves the quality of food.

Read more: Scientists are breeding super-nutritious crops to help solve global hunger

• Foods can be fortified (have essential vitamins and minerals added) when they are being processed. These improve nutrition without requiring any changes in how food is grown.

• Food and agricultural handling practices must be introduced to keep crops safe to eat.

• Nutrition education helps people make better everyday food choices so that, when food is available, people eat more varied and nutritious diets.

• Social protection programmes, such as cash transfers and food vouchers, help families during times when prices rise.

• Providing school meals specially designed to be nutritious offers a high return on investment.

What needs to happen next

Our research emphasises that these interventions can only work as a bundle or package of support. Gender matters too; our research found that women don’t always get to eat nutrient dense food even when there is more available at home.

These interventions represent what we know works today. But governments and researchers should look beyond these too. For example, scientists at the Centre for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (including scientists at Cornell University) are engineering specialised plants known as “reporter” plants. A reporter plant is typically placed strategically in a field of crops to act as an early warning system.

They have developed a tomato plant, for example, that turns vivid red when soil nitrogen levels drop to critically low levels. This plant gives farmers precise, real-time information about what their fields need.

Tools like these could transform that relationship farmers have with fertiliser: reducing waste, cutting costs, and building a form of fertiliser intelligence into the farming system itself.

Jaron Porciello receives funding from BMZ Germany and Gates Foundation.

The boom in data center construction is taking up much of the supply of high-tech components, especially processor and memory chips. This demand is squeezing consumer device makers, which are having trouble acquiring enough chips.

This is happening even though data center servers and smartphones use different types of chips. The key distinction between consumer electronics and data centers is what they need chips to be optimized for. Smartphones and PCs require low power use, thermal efficiency and tight integration. Data centers that run AI systems such as large language models, or LLMs, require maximum compute power, memory bandwidth and storage throughput.

To meet these needs, consumer devices tend to rely on systems-on-a-chip – chips that combine processing and storage – with dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and NAND, a type of nonvolatile memory. In contrast, AI servers rely on graphics processing units, or GPUs, or other accelerator processors combined with high-bandwidth memory chips.

I study global supply chains and how businesses respond to market constraints within these supply chains. The reason for the consumer electronics supply crunch has to do with the nature of the chip market: its concentration and high costs and how it responds to boom-and-bust cycles.

AI is not replacing consumer electronics; it is reorganizing the chip market around new priorities for specific chip characteristics. Data centers are pulling capital and scarce memory capacity toward the production of accelerator processors and high-bandwidth memory and the data handling and electronics equipment that surround them.

A winner-takes-most industry

Chip manufacturing behaves less like a competitive commodity market and more like a layered oligopoly. Scale matters because the leading firms can reinvest in research, improve yields, secure equipment and deepen customer relationships. In the case of graphics processor chips, designers such as NVIDIA, which has 85% market share, depend on advanced semiconductor foundries such as TSMC, which has more than 70% market share, to manufacture chips using extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from ASML, a monopoly.

A small number of producers both design and manufacture memory chips. Currently, three companies – Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix – hold a majority market share in the memory chips market. Long development cycles, extremely high fixed costs and the need for technological leadership reinforce concentration over time.

Consumer electronics firms such as Apple, along with other technology firms such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Xiaomi, increasingly design their own processor chips, because these chips shape the user experience, AI performance, power efficiency and system-level differentiation. Manufacturing memory chips, by contrast, is extraordinarily capital-intensive; requires high precision, efficiency and production line utilization; and is dominated by a few incumbent suppliers.

Since 2000, the memory chip industry has moved through repeated cycles of overcapacity and undersupply: the post-dot-com collapse, the 2007-09 glut, the tighter 2010s after consolidation, the severe 2022-23 downturn, and the AI-driven tightness of 2024-25. This has led to high levels of concentration in the industry and chipmakers that are hesitant to add capacity. Producers often operate chip fabrication plants, or fabs, at or near capacity due to high fixed costs. The risk of having expensive facilities go underused keeps chipmakers from bringing new fabs online in lockstep with demand increases.

Consolidation has reduced the number of major suppliers, who now increasingly direct investment toward higher-margin products rather than broadly adding capacity. That shift is important for understanding why AI demand is tightening chip supplies even as demand for consumer electronics continues to grow.

How the AI data center boom redirects capacity

The AI boom has changed memory demand from a broad consumer cycle into a more segmented market centered on high-bandwidth memory chips. In 2023, Micron cut capital spending and the company’s fabs operated below levels needed to justify their cost. By 2026, however, Micron was reporting strong AI demand, record data center DRAM revenue and rapidly rising high-bandwidth memory sales.

This shift matters because the market for supplying memory cannot respond quickly. Opening new fabs requires years of planning, large capital commitments and investments in advanced process equipment and skills. Memory chip manufacturers are likely to remain cautious about expanding capacity even as their profitability improves, with 2026 spending focused more on technology upgrades and high-value products than on large increases in chip supply.

In practical terms, AI is not simply lifting all memory demand equally; it is redirecting scarce capacity toward massive, or hyperscale, data centers and server markets first.

Can consumer electronics catch up?

Consumer electronics can catch up, assuming the manufacturers can weather the cost increases from tariffs and geopolitical pressures. One way they could is by making investments to enable small AI language models to run on consumer devices, a move analysts expect the companies to attempt.

Apple shifted a growing share of U.S.-bound iPhone production out of China to India and moved much of its iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and AirPods assembly for the U.S. market to Vietnam to lower the company’s tariff burden. Yet relocation does not eliminate cost pressure. Manufacturing iPhones in India still costs roughly 5% to 8% more than in China, and in some cases closer to 10%, because supplier ecosystems, logistics and production efficiency remain stronger in China.

Rising geopolitical tensions between the United States and China led to supply constraints and export controls on critical minerals and chip components, raising input costs for consumer electronics manufacturers. This led to higher total import costs and reduced margins for firms unable to pass costs fully to consumers, leading to further consolidation in supply.

Consumer devices do not need to replicate data center infrastructure to offer AI on their products. Their opportunity lies in running small language models on-device for summarization, rewriting, search, assistance and lightweight reasoning. Doing so, however, creates a distinct hardware requirement. Phones and laptops need to incorporate multiple functions on the same chip, combining processing capability with fast local memory and enough storage to keep on-device AI responsive. Apple’s current device requirements for the company’s AI, Apple Intelligence, also show that older phones often lack the compute power and memory needed for useful on-device AI.

To adopt AI, device makers need to redesign their products with higher-end chips – both processors and memory – that can piggyback on the AI model-oriented growth in the chips market driven by the data center boom. Such a shift by the device makers could also provide a useful backstop for the memory chipmakers in case the projected AI and data center growth does not materialize in the medium to long term, a boom-and-bust cycle that memory chipmakers have had to endure many times in the past.

What this means for the wider economy

The AI and data center boom is redistributing capital, supplier attention and pricing power across the broader economy. Sectors with limited purchasing leverage are especially vulnerable when chip supplies tighten. For example, medical technology accounts for less than 1% of the overall chip market, leaving essential equipment manufacturers exposed during shortages.

In contrast, sectors linked to power delivery and digital infrastructure may benefit from the boom because they try to keep up with demand for cloud services and electrification. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers consumed about 415 TWh of electricity in 2024 and notes that AI is accelerating the deployment of high-performance servers, which implies stronger demand for the grid, storage, cooling and networking equipment around them.

For the consumer electronics industry, the strategic task is not to try to match the AI data centers chip for chip but to build differentiated, energy-efficient, on-device AI services while managing higher supply chain and tariff risks.

And for consumers looking to buy phones, games and laptops, because of high demand from data centers, the next few years are likely to bring higher prices, shortages and delayed product releases.

Vidya Mani has received funding from LMI. I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue and a member of GRI