Hormuz closure strains Comoros, stokes unrest far away

As the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the price shocks rippling through oil and food markets are turning into street-level unrest—starting with Comoros and spreading across parts of Africa, with humanitarian warnings of a broader agrifood crisis.

For a country like Comoros—an island nation of less than a million people more than 3,000 miles away from Iran—the Middle East war can feel impossibly remote. Donald Trump has never publicly mentioned it. Comoros is neither an ally nor a target of the Iranian regime.

But last month. the government tried to raise gasoline prices by 35 percent anyway. blaming the price shock on the Iran war. It didn’t land softly. Protests broke out. Roadblocks formed in the capital. Clashes with security forces followed, and one person was killed. The government suspended the fuel price increase in response.

That sequence is becoming familiar in places far from the Strait of Hormuz. where the closure has turned energy costs into a political fuse. Protests have broken out in several African countries in recent weeks. sparked by increases in the price of fuel caused by the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Experts and humanitarian organizations are also warning that food prices are likely to rise substantially in the coming months.

In Kenya, four people were killed in May during protests sparked by rising fuel prices. In Mozambique, bus drivers in Maputo—the capital—have gone on strike over a 46 percent increase in diesel prices, grinding the city to a halt.

None of those protests were primarily about the war itself or Iran’s blockage of the Strait. People were protesting their own governments.

The immediate trigger is economic. The consequence, if the crisis deepens, is political instability—and potentially a new set of security problems that Washington will have to confront long after the first headlines fade.

The warning isn’t abstract. Nearly a third of the trade in global fertilizer normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz. A closure raises the price of fertilizer itself, and rising fuel prices ripple through food costs via transportation and irrigation. “Energy is kind of the master cost in the economy that determines virtually every downstream cost. ” said Cullen Hendrix. a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Hendrix also pointed to timing: the full impact may not be felt for months. and may already be baked into the economy of the near future because the spike in prices happened during planting season for farmers in the Northern Hemisphere. “I’m very concerned for later this year and the first quarter of 2027. because at that point we will know what the fall harvest looked like in the Northern Hemisphere. ” Hendrix added. “That could spell a really significant crisis coming in 2027.”.

The fear is not only that prices will climb—it’s that people will reach the breaking point together. “You’d be hard pressed to find instances where discontent and protest doesn’t take place. ” said Caitlin Welsh. director of the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Security and International Studies.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the closure of the Strait is “not a temporary shipping disruption but the beginning of a systemic agrifood shock that could trigger a severe global food price crisis within six to 12 months.” The World Food Program expects that if oil prices stay around $100 per barrel through the end of the month. an additional 45 million people could fall into acute food insecurity.

In the United States and other developed countries, the most visible fallout could be higher food prices for families already struggling to make ends meet—and trouble at the ballot box for incumbent politicians. In poorer regions, the consequences can be more dramatic and more deadly.

Food prices can turn unrest into conflict because they don’t just squeeze budgets; they expose what is already strained. Years of research has shown that when global food prices increase. low-income countries are far more likely to experience multiple forms of political instability—anti-government demonstrations and riots. and violent conflict ranging from civil wars to interstate wars.

Rabah Arezki. an economist and senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. put it plainly: price rises alone are unlikely to translate into unrest. They become dangerous when they land on top of existing economic and political crises. “It is more of a trigger,” Arezki said. “Food price increases in richer countries don’t have the same effect as in a country where unemployment is high. and where grievances are also high.”.

A country such as Kenya has been dealing with protests against corruption and economic mismanagement for years, including a deadly round of clashes in 2024. When the daily cost of living jumps sharply, people who are already angry can quickly find their way into the streets.

Rami Zurayk, a professor of agriculture and food sciences at the American University of Beirut, described the mechanism as more than a number on a grocery bill. “When food and energy become unaffordable, they expose the fractures of society.”

The relationship has been argued for generations—from the 1789 French Revolution to Egypt’s 1977 “Bread Intifada.” In modern times. two events often come up because they mirrored the sequence of rising costs and popular revolt. In 2008. the price of commodities such as wheat. rice. corn. and soybeans more than doubled due to environmental and economic factors. fueling food riots and protests in more than a dozen countries across Africa. Asia. the Middle East. and Latin America and the Caribbean.

The 2011 Arab Spring is even more widely remembered. Global food prices rose more than 40 percent in the months leading up to the uprising. and many Middle Eastern and North African countries were heavily dependent on imported food. The protests were ultimately rooted in long-standing grievances against corrupt autocratic regimes. and it would be “reductive and unfair” to say food prices alone caused the uprisings. Still, the heightened costs acted as a trigger that turned 2011 into a year of mass uprisings.

This time, forecasters say the shock is hitting at particularly difficult moments. The World Food Program’s budget was slashed by around 40 percent this year. largely due to cuts in aid from the United States. which previously provided more than half its budget. A paper published in Science found “significant and sustained increase in conflict” in the months following the Trump administration’s USAID cuts in the countries previously most dependent on that aid.

Then there’s the weather risk. Forecasters say this summer’s El Niño climate event could be especially severe, with droughts in some regions and excess rain in others—conditions that can further stress food supplies.

Food crises have become more frequent and severe in recent years after decades of decline, driven in large part by a rise in the number of international conflicts.

A central question now is how long the destabilizing effects could last. Arezki called it a “peculiar crisis” that started from “a war of choice” and argued it “could be resolved.” In theory. the crisis could ease once Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz. though the ripple effects of the closure would still be felt in energy and food markets for months.

The timing is unclear. Iran views the costs it is imposing on the international economy as its main leverage against its adversaries. Yet the fallout is not evenly distributed. As an oil- and gas-producing country with abundant domestic food supplies. the United States is relatively insulated from the impact of the Hormuz closure. Israel has little reliance on Gulf oil.

The pain is being felt more acutely in poor countries that “have had nothing to do with the war.” Iranians themselves are also struggling under heavy sanctions and blockade with skyrocketing food prices. Another mass public uprising in Iran seems unlikely during the war. but the 2019 protest movement—triggered in part by an increase in fuel prices—looms as a reminder of how quickly domestic economic shocks can become political ones.

As for the United States, the stakes are entangled with how leaders prioritize the suffering of others. The account here is stark: given that Trump has said he’s not particularly concerned about Americans’ cost of living when it comes to his decision-making in Iran. it’s hard to imagine the struggles of countries in Africa or Asia are high on his agenda. The argument follows that if food insecurity in the developing world were a major priority for this administration. it would not have spent much of its first year cutting funding from programs meant to address it.

In the longer run, the economic damage may also feed military decisions. The upheavals of the Arab Spring set conditions that led to the US military intervention in Libya in 2011 and the operation to combat ISIS in Syria and Iraq three years later. The United States is currently conducting a growing but little discussed air campaign to combat al-Shabaab in Somalia. where a years-long hunger crisis has been a humanitarian disaster and a significant driver of conflict. Millions also face food insecurity in conflict-wracked Northern Nigeria. where the US has been stepping up operations targeting Islamist militants accused of violence against Christians.

Put together, the sequence suggests a hard reality: unstable regions tend to pull outside attention and resources. Americans could end up paying for the economic impact of this war far beyond a shock at the gas pump or the grocery checkout aisle.

Strait of Hormuz Iran war Comoros fuel price protests Mozambique diesel strike Kenya fuel protests global food crisis fertilizer prices UN Food and Agriculture Organization World Food Programme acute food insecurity El Niño