As tensions in West Asia once again draw attention to the Strait of Hormuz, most discussions in India have focused on oil. That is understandable. Nearly a fifth of the world’s petroleum passes through this narrow waterway. But there is another, less visible story unfolding. The Strait of Hormuz is not just an energy chokepoint. It is also a fertilizer chokepoint.

India is the world’s second-largest importer of finished fertilizers, and of the raw materials needed to make them domestically. The majority of it routes through West Asia and the Red Sea corridor.

Sometime in late April, a cargo ship carrying urea moved slowly through the Persian Gulf. Freight costs had climbed for weeks. Global urea prices followed. A 45-kg bag of urea landed at an Indian port cost the equivalent of roughly ₹3,600 wholesale. A farmer who walked into his cooperative the next morning paid ₹242. The same price he has paid since April 2018.

The number on the bag has not moved in eight years. The number on the subsidy line has never stopped moving.

India’s fertilizer subsidy for FY27 was budgeted at ₹1.71 lakh crore before the Strait situation tightened – a figure that already exceeded the ₹1.33 lakh crore the Union Budget set aside for agriculture and farmers’ welfare in the same year. The Department of Fertilizers’ own revised estimate now puts the FY27 outgo at around ₹2.3 lakh crore. More than double India’s entire health budget.

The root of this is not simply a fiscal problem. It is a soil problem that has, over time, expressed itself as a fiscal one.

Urea is, chemically, little more than solidified natural gas. India imports roughly a fifth of its urea outright, and a significant share of its domestic production runs on imported LNG. We also import over 60% of DAP, another widely used fertiliser. Every rise in global gas prices passes almost directly into the cost of production, and with the farmer’s price held steady, almost the entire increase lands on the subsidy bill.

But here is the more persistent loop, and one that belongs at the centre of any World Environment Day conversation. Plants take up only 35 to 40 per cent of the nitrogen applied to a field. The rest escapes as ammonia into the air and as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 273 times more potent than carbon dioxide, or washes into groundwater as nitrates. The more fertilizer a field receives, the faster it loses the organic matter that allows soil to hold water and nutrients. Lower organic matter means lower natural fertility. Lower natural fertility means the farmer must apply still more fertilizer merely to hold the same yield. Each cycle makes the next one harder.

In other words, a significant share of India’s fertilizer subsidy ultimately finances pollution rather than production. This is where geopolitics meets ecology.

The temptation on World Environment Day is to frame this as a question of values, of choosing the planet over convenience. But this is, at its core, a question of economic design. India’s farmers are not irrational. They grow what procurement reliably supports. They apply inputs whose price has been held steady for eight years. The system is generating the outcome; the farmer is responding to it.

Which is also why the opportunity is real. States like Sikkim and Andhra Pradesh have demonstrated that lower input costs and competitive yields can coexist at scale. It has a Dalhan Aatmanirbharta Mission, launched in October 2025 with ₹11,440 crore, that could put pulse rotations back into the cropping calendar; pulses fix their own nitrogen from the air, needing a fraction of what a cereal demands. The transition away from chemical dependency is not a future aspiration. It is already happening, in patches, across the country.

The answer is not to eliminate chemical fertilizers overnight. That would be both unrealistic and harmful. But the current geopolitical uncertainty offers a genuine opening to shift from a strategy centred on fertilizer consumption to one centred on nutrient efficiency and soil health. Every major crisis reveals a hidden dependency. The oil shocks of the 1970s transformed energy policy across the world. The disruptions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz should prompt a similar rethink in agriculture.

The Strait of Hormuz will reopen. Prices will ease. The pressure will lift, for a while. But the underlying reality, a food system dependent on a waterway it does not control, and soils caught in a cycle of diminishing returns, will remain. This World Environment Day, we should ask a simple question: why are we discussing the security of fertilizer shipments instead of the security of soils?

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