April 08, 2026
It's not just your cooking gas; the war may also affect the Kharif crops
India's farms run on fertilisers. Those fertilisers run on gas. That gas comes through the Hormuz Strait — now blocked by war.
Image by Deepak kumar on Unsplash
What's happening?
India imports LNG from Qatar — the raw material for making fertilisers domestically — and finished fertilisers from Gulf nations, all through the Hormuz Strait. Both are now disrupted.
GAIL (the state gas supplier) has cut LNG supply by 40%, forcing two National Fertilizers plants in Punjab to halt operations. A plant in Gujarat has also cut urea production.
The government says India has 18 million tonnes of fertiliser in stock. The problem: kharif season demand is 39 million tonnes — more than double.
Farmers in Punjab are already panic-buying. "Neither the government nor cooperative societies seem prepared," one farmer told Scroll.in.
Why should you care?
Kharif crops — rice, pulses, cotton, soybean — are major food crops. Fertiliser shortages mid-season mean lower yields, which means higher food prices at your local market.
But there's the climate angle too: synthetic fertilisers are a major source of nitrous oxide (N₂O) — a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than CO₂. India's farms are already overusing them; studies show 55% of rice farmers apply more nitrogen than their soil needs. Could this be an opportunity to nudge farmers towards a more measured approach towards fertiliser application?
This is also a revelation of our food system's high dependence on fossil-fuels, which often remains unseen.
While we may need to solve this by finding alternative sources to fertilizers in the short term, the long-term fix experts recommend — crop diversification, soil health, precision farming — is exactly what climate-resilient agriculture looks like too.