When people talk about an energy shock, they usually mean the price of oil. The 2026 US/Israel–Iran war also began for markets as an oil story. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed, Brent quickly moved past $100, and then rose to $126 per barrel.
But oil is not the only thing that passes through Hormuz. It is one of the main hubs of global trade in energy commodities, gas, petroleum products, fertilizers, chemical feedstocks, sulfur, and metals. So the real question was not only how much a barrel would cost. More important was something else: which chains would withstand the shock, and which would begin passing it on to food, aviation, industry, construction, transport, and consumer prices.
By June, an important pattern had become clear. The most alarming fears proved less severe than expected. There was no global food crisis. Nor was there a mass shutdown of aviation due to a physical shortage of kerosene. Instead, less visible links were hit harder: fertilizers, petrochemicals, aluminum, and freight. Where there were no strategic reserves, where capacity is concentrated in one region, and where recovery takes months or even years, the cascades proved more robust under these conditions.
Hunger: fear proved stronger than fact
In March, the World Food Programme warned that if the conflict dragged on and oil remained above $100 per barrel, tens of millions more people could face acute food insecurity. The figure quickly spread across global media and became one of the crisis’s main humanitarian symbols.
The risk was real. High oil prices increase the cost of fuel, logistics, fertilizers, greenhouse production, and processing. For poor countries dependent on imports of food and fuel, such a shock quickly turns into higher prices and reduced food affordability.
But by mid-June, the global food scenario had turned out milder than the most severe forecasts. The FAO Food Price Index rose by 2.4% in March, to 128.5 points. This is a noticeable increase, but not an explosion. In spring, prices remained significantly below the March 2022 peak. The increase came mainly through vegetable oils, sugar, and certain energy-linked commodities, rather than through a full-blown collapse in grain markets.
The reason is simple: the world entered the crisis with relatively comfortable grain stocks and a strong harvest from the previous year. In addition, food markets respond not only to energy, but also to harvests, weather, currencies, trade restrictions, and government behavior. Therefore, the forecast of a sharp rise in hunger was not a “mistake,” but a conditional warning: if the conflict drags on, if fertilizers remain expensive, if farmers reduce fertilizer application, then the impact will be felt in the harvests of subsequent seasons.
The war’s main risk to food supplies was not in bread today, but in fertilizers and next season’s harvest.
Fertilizers: the cascade that really worked
If the food crisis did not materialize in direct form, fertilizers worked almost by the book. More than 30% of global urea trade, a significant share of ammonia and phosphates, and about half of seaborne sulfur trade pass through the Strait of Hormuz. For the global agricultural system, this is a critical link: without nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, the next harvest becomes more expensive and weaker.
Unlike oil, the world has no full-fledged equivalent of strategic fertilizer reserves. Governments can release oil from stockpiles, but they cannot just as quickly bring urea, ammonia or sulfur to market. Production depends on gas, plants, ports, ships, contracts, and payments. If this chain breaks, it is harder to restore.
Urea prices rose sharply in the spring, in some market segments to levels not seen since 2022. But then part of the price spike was offset. Farmers in the Northern Hemisphere managed to secure part of their fertilizer supplies in advance, some shipments were rerouted, and weaker demand limited further increases.
Nevertheless, this does not mean the risk has disappeared. Fertilizers are a delayed cascade. They hit not only the current price of food, but also the future harvest. If farmers cut back on fertilizer use, switch to less intensive crops, or reduce the area under cultivation, the consequences appear later: in yields, production costs, food inflation, and budget expenditures on agricultural support.
Aviation kerosene: price and profitability instead of a physical shutdown
Aviation kerosene was the second major concern after food. The logic was straightforward: the Persian Gulf is an important source of petroleum products, including middle distillates. If supplies fall sharply, Europe and Asia could face a shortage of aviation kerosene.
In April, the head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe might have only a few weeks’ worth of aviation kerosene reserves left if the blockade persisted. This was a strong signal to the market: airlines, airports, insurers, and governments began preparing for a scenario of restrictions.
But here, too, the physical catastrophe did not fully materialize. Kerosene rose sharply in price, deliveries became costlier and more difficult to secure, some carriers adjusted their schedules, but there was no mass shutdown of European aviation due to a lack of fuel. Stockpiles, rerouted supplies, reduced activity, hedging, and airlines’ commercial adjustments kicked in.
In the end, the “kerosene shortage” became above all a problem of price, margins, and schedules, rather than a total physical shortage. This is an important distinction. For passengers, it may look the same: tickets become more expensive, there are fewer flights, and service deteriorates. But for forecasting, these are different processes. A physical shortage breaks the system. A price shock compresses it and forces participants to change their behavior.
The pattern repeats itself. Where there are inventories, alternative supplies, and the ability to curb demand, the loudest fears play out less severely.
Petrochemicals: the shock almost no one expected
The most underestimated cascade of the war was petrochemicals. Before the crisis, 2026 was often described as a year of excess petrochemical capacity. Margin pressure, weak demand, and competition among producers were expected. But the war changed the picture.
The Persian Gulf is one of the key petrochemical hubs. It is linked to low-cost feedstock, large export capacities, Asian processors, and global flows of plastics, methanol, ethylene, polyethylene, and other basic products. When Hormuz was disrupted, the shock quickly spread not only through oil, but also through industrial raw materials.
The ICIS Global Petrochemical Price Index rose by 32.7% month-on-month in March — the largest monthly jump in the index’s history. European ethylene contracts gained a record several hundred euros per tonne. Markets where production depends on feedstock from the Gulf, and where replacing suppliers takes time, proved especially vulnerable.
This cascade was less pronounced than the food and aviation ones, but it proved more severe for industry. Plastics, packaging, construction materials, auto components, household chemicals, pipes, cables, medical devices — all of this depends on the petrochemical industry. So even if consumers do not see a “petrochemical crisis” in the headlines, they later feel it in the cost of packaging, repairs, transport, construction, and everyday goods.
Petrochemicals revealed the main flaw in conventional forecasting: attention tends to focus on the price of oil as a raw material, but not on the production chains where oil and gas are turned into materials.
Aluminum: concentrated production capacity as a source of risk
Aluminum became another underestimated knock-on effect. The Gulf states account for about 8–9% of global primary aluminum production. That is a large enough share for prices to rise sharply if supply is disrupted and capacity is damaged.
The problem with aluminum is that it is an energy-intensive production process. Smelters depend on gas, electricity, stable logistics, and continuous technological operation. Shutting down such capacity is not the same as closing a warehouse and reopening it a week later. Restarting can take a long time, and damage to infrastructure or disruptions in shipments quickly turn into a physical shortage of metal.
Against the backdrop of the war, the price of aluminum on the LME rose to four-year highs, above $3,500–3,600 per ton. The effect then spread into industries where aluminum is a basic material: transport, construction, packaging, mechanical engineering, and power equipment.
And here, it is not only the price of the metal that matters. Concentration matters. If a significant share of output is tied to one region, one type of energy, and one maritime chokepoint, the resilience of the entire chain is lower than ordinary statistics suggest.
Sea freight: a delayed cascade, not an immediate explosion
Ocean freight became the connective tissue of all the cascades. The war hit insurance, routes, delivery times, vessel availability, and carrier behavior. But an important detail: the Drewry World Container Index did not surge immediately from the first day of the war.
At the start of the crisis, the container market viewed the blow as regional. Directly affected were only routes linked to the Gulf, some Middle Eastern ports, and certain fuel and chemicals flows. The global index still did not reflect a full-scale global shock.
In May, the situation changed. Carriers began passing on higher fuel costs, insurance risks, peak season surcharges, expectations of delays, and tighter vessel availability into freight rates. The market was also affected by strain on trans-Pacific and Asia-Europe routes, congestion at hubs, and the diversion of some vessels from their usual routes. That is why the sharp rise in the Drewry index after May 7 is the normal logic of a cascade: first the physical and insurance shock, then the commercial repricing of global logistics.
By June 18, the Drewry World Container Index had risen to $3,969 per 40-foot container, and by June 25 it was above $4,100. This was no longer just about the Strait of Hormuz. It was the sum of several factors: the war, fuel, insurance, peak season surcharges, capacity management, expectations of further disruptions, and shippers’ attempts to advance shipments ahead of time.
Thus, freight rates showed another lesson: cascades do not have to appear immediately. Sometimes a strong secondary effect comes two or three months after the initial blow, when market participants begin to rework contracts, routes, and prices.
Where the system proved fragile
If these stories are brought together into a single line, a common pattern emerges. The system held where there were stocks, alternative suppliers, the ability to reduce demand, or to quickly reroute flows. That is why food and aviation did not collapse as the most severe scenarios had predicted.
But the system broke down where three conditions coincided.
First, there are no strategic reserves. Oil has government stockpiles. Fertilizers, sulfur, certain chemical products, and specialized raw materials have almost no such buffers.
Second, production is concentrated. If a significant share of a commodity comes from one region and through one maritime chokepoint, even a partial disruption quickly becomes a global problem.
Third, recovery takes months or even years. A damaged plant, an aluminum smelter, LNG infrastructure, or a chemical supply chain does not return to normal as quickly as a market price does.
Hence the key takeaway for risk management: cascades matter more than headlines. The loudest fears are useful as a signal, but they do not always reveal the main blow. One should watch not only where there is more media noise, but where there are fewer buffers.
What does this mean for forecasting
The war in the Strait of Hormuz showed that supply chain forecasts cannot be built on a simple formula: “oil prices have risen — everything else gets more expensive.” Real cascades are more complex.
Food depends not only on energy, but also on harvests, stocks and fertilizers.
Aviation kerosene depends not only on supply, but also on inventories, schedules, demand, and hedging.
Petrochemicals depend on feedstock, ports, contracts, and Asian production chains.
Aluminum depends on energy, smelters, logistics, and concentration of production capacity.
Ocean freight depends on fuel, insurance, routes, ports, vessel availability, and carrier behavior.
Therefore, the best forecast is not the one that shouts catastrophe the loudest. The best forecast shows through which link the shock will spread next, where there are buffers, where there are none, and when the effect will materialize.
The materials reflect interim results as of June 17, 2026. The war is not over; the research continues.