Dr Peter Alexander

Yes, it is a very stark warning and I think largely it is justified.

I mean, the global food system is very dependent on inorganic fertiliser.

that's produced from natural gas and a large percentage of it is, you know, passes through the Straits of Hormuz, something like 30%.

So, you know, that has potential to really disrupt food production, particularly if farmers choose to fertilise yet less or to not establish crops and not plant crops.

And that has, you know, the potential to sort of lock in future reductions in supply of food.

which we in the UK and Ireland would experience primarily, in my view, through higher food prices, greater food price inflation.

Obviously, the rest of the world, you know, people on lower incomes would be less able to afford the food that they need for healthy and nutritious diets with sort of health and nutritional consequences that flow from that.

So, yeah, the situation is potentially pretty serious.

Yeah, I mean, the cereal crops are very dependent on them.

You know, since the 60s, you know, we've gone through this green revolution where we've had this very dramatic increase in yields, sort of like three or four fold kind of increase in yields.

that's underpinned by many things, but very strongly by fertilizer use.

And those fertilizers are produced as a product of the fossil fuel sector, and therefore they're tied to energy prices, and therefore they're tied to the supply chain that we know so well, both from the war in Ukraine and now the war in Iran.

So, yeah, it's problematic, you know.

Yeah, I mean, that's a much more localised issue in terms of packaging and so on.

So, yeah, that could play a role, but I think that's likely to be kind of smaller, at least from a sort of nutritional perspective.

Right.

So in sort of high income countries like we both are in, yeah, in my view, it's likely to be felt through prices rather than for shortages in supermarkets.

But that still has very real world consequences for people on the lowest incomes, both in countries like ours, but even more so in sort of

lower income countries where people who have lower incomes tend to spend more of that income on food and energy as well.

And obviously they have less capacity to afford those food prices.