Sulfur cost $46 a ton in 2024. By July of this year, it was selling for more than $1,000 a ton. That is not a typo, and it is not irrelevant to what you are paying at the grocery store — it is, in fact, very much the point.
The Gulf War Casualty Nobody's Talking About
Everyone has been watching oil prices. That's the visible part of this crisis. What's been hiding underneath it, quietly detonating, is what the war in the Gulf has done to global commodity supply chains that most people never think about until the bill arrives.
The Strait of Hormuz has been functionally closed to normal oil traffic since the Iran war began. Saudi Arabia tried to route around it using its East-West pipeline, which bypasses the strait entirely. According to NPR's Planet Money, that pipeline was knocked offline last week by drone attacks originating from Iraq. If it doesn't come back online within a month, the Wall Street Journal reports it could lock more than 100 million barrels of oil out of international markets.
And yes, that's an enormous number. But the oil story, as catastrophic as it is, is almost a distraction from what's happening to everything oil touches downstream. Which, it turns out, is everything.
Sulfur: The Word You Need to Learn Today
Here is a supply chain connection most people have never had reason to think about: sulfur is a critical ingredient in phosphate fertilizer. Phosphate fertilizer is how we grow food at industrial scale. Several major sulfur-producing countries, including Iran, are sitting on the wrong side of a closed strait. Russia is also a major producer, and its exports are sanctioned to much of the world.
So global sulfur supply is constrained. And now, as NPR reports citing AgWeb, countries that would normally buy from the Middle East or Russia are flooding into U.S. markets for American sulfur instead. Which means prices for American sulfur producers are spiking too, even though the U.S. produces its own supply. The global market doesn't care about your domestic production when demand suddenly has nowhere else to go.
The numbers are staggering. According to NPR, sulfur was $46 per metric ton in 2024. It hit $180 per ton in 2025. By July of this year, spot prices crossed $1,000 per metric ton. That is a 2,000% increase in under two years. There is no gradual adjustment story here. That is a cliff.
Fertilizer Plants Going Dark in Louisiana
Mosaic Company produces phosphate fertilizer. A spokesman told AgWeb that prices are now so high that phosphate fertilizer use is expected to drop significantly across the industry. Mosaic confirmed directly to NPR's The Indicator that it has already idled two facilities in Louisiana, affecting 300 families.
Think about what that means practically. Farmers who can't afford fertilizer at $1,000-a-ton sulfur prices use less of it. Farmers who use less fertilizer grow less food, or grow it less efficiently. Less food grown less efficiently means higher prices at every step of the supply chain before it ever reaches a store shelf.
Oxford Economics, looking at the combined pressure from higher diesel and fertilizer costs, projects global food prices will rise another 4.8% in 2027. That's on top of whatever food inflation has already done to your grocery bill this year. It's not one big punch. It's a slow series of them, landing every few months, each one a little harder.
The Cushions Are Gone
For more than a year, the economic pain from the Gulf crisis was buffered by stockpiles. Oil reserves, grain reserves, stored fertilizer. The market had shock absorbers, and they were doing their job. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that those shock absorbers are essentially shot.
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level since 1982, according to NPR. Even if global oil flows normalized tomorrow, it would take months or years to refill. Meanwhile, Helima Croft of RBC Capital told CNBC that U.S. refiners are already operating at 98% capacity. That means even if more crude oil became available to process, there is almost no physical capacity in the American refining system to handle it.
The buffer is gone. What we're entering now is the part of the crisis where prices don't just spike and then recover. They reset to a new, higher normal and stay there. The Wall Street Journal is calling it the "Great Fuel Crisis." Oil executives have been warning about it for months. It's here.
This Is Going to Hit Your Kitchen in 2027
The 4.8% global food price increase that Oxford Economics projects for 2027 doesn't capture what happens unevenly. Staple crops that require heavy fertilization get hit hardest. That means grains, corn, soybeans, the feedstock for a huge portion of American diets, including through the meat supply. The pain doesn't distribute equally across your shopping cart.
And unlike gasoline, where you can at least see the price on a sign before you pull in, food inflation tends to sneak up on you. Portion sizes shrink. Cheaper cuts appear. House brands multiply. The price on the shelf moves slowly, and then suddenly it doesn't. By the time people are fully feeling it in 2027, the sulfur price spike of 2026 will be yesterday's news, and nobody will remember to connect the dots.
NPR laid those dots out clearly. The war in the Gulf didn't just raise gas prices. It scrambled fertilizer inputs, took out refining capacity, drained strategic reserves, and is working its way up your food supply right now.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at a 2,000% commodity price increase and think "supply and demand, these things happen." You are not supposed to notice that it's happening to sulfur, which becomes fertilizer, which becomes food, which becomes your grocery bill, at the same time that a war in the Gulf has drained every strategic reserve the U.S. has to its lowest point in decades. You are supposed to treat these as separate stories.
They are not separate stories. This is one story, and the through line is that the American economy has been operating for the past year on a set of shock absorbers that are now destroyed. The oil, the sulfur, the fertilizer, the refining capacity, the strategic reserves: every buffer that existed to cushion a crisis like this has been used up. What comes next isn't buffered. It lands directly.
Three hundred families in Louisiana just had their livelihoods idled by a war most Americans couldn't find on a map six months ago. Global food prices are heading up another 4.8% on top of everything that's already happened. The Wall Street Journal is using the phrase "Great Fuel Crisis" without irony. If you've been waiting for the moment when this stops being a background noise story and starts being a your-life story, NPR's reporting this week suggests you can stop waiting.
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