War, climate and disrupted supply chains are exposing the fragility of how we grow food. Perhaps resilience begins by making better use of the biological resources already available to us.

“Food security cannot depend indefinitely on everything going right at the same time. We need agricultural systems capable of functioning when things go wrong.” – Roy Henderson, CEO, Green Cell Technologies®

The modern food system is an extraordinary feat of global co-ordination.

Energy is produced in one part of the world. Fertiliser in another. Crops somewhere else. Ships move between them. Farmers plant according to relatively predictable seasons, and global supply chains keep the inputs moving.

Until they don’t.

In 2026, several pressures that would normally be considered individually are occurring simultaneously.

Conflict is disrupting energy and fertiliser production. Critical shipping routes are under pressure.  Fertiliser prices have risen sharply. El Niño presents additional risks to agricultural production. And farmers must somehow absorb all of this while continuing to produce affordable food.

The question is no longer whether any single shock can be managed.

It is how many shocks the global food system can absorb at the same time.

Fertiliser has become a geopolitical vulnerability.

The scale of the world’s dependence on a small number of trade routes is striking.

According to the International Energy Agency, more than 30% of globally traded urea passes through the Strait of Hormuz, together with approximately 20% of traded ammonia and phosphate and around half of global seaborne sulphur – all important to fertiliser supply chains.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently reported that tanker movements through the Strait had fallen by more than 90%, with an estimated 1.5–3 million tonnes of fertiliser trade being delayed each month.

FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu has warned that fertiliser scarcity resulting from the disruption could translate into “lower yields and tightening food supplies” through the latter part of 2026 and into 2027.

The economics are already changing.

The World Bank forecasts fertiliser prices to increase by approximately 31% in 2026, driven partly by a 60% increase in urea prices. The International Energy Agency reports that urea prices doubled between January and May.

For farmers, particularly in import-dependent economies, fertiliser is therefore becoming not merely an agricultural input.

It is becoming a geopolitical risk.

And then there is climate

Layer climate volatility over these disruptions and the vulnerability becomes more apparent.

The World Bank has identified the potential combination of El Niño, elevated energy and fertiliser costs, biofuel demand and trade restrictions as significant risks to global food markets during 2026.

This does not mean the world is inevitably heading towards a global famine. On paper, global cereal stocks remain relatively comfortable by historical standards.

But global availability is not the same as food security.

Food has to be affordable, accessible – and able to move from where it is produced to where it is needed.

That distinction is particularly important for Africa and the Middle East. 

Russia and Ukraine together account for around one-third of global wheat trade, much of it traditionally moving through Black Sea ports. Ukraine alone has historically been a major source of affordable grain for countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

So grain sitting in a silo in Ukraine or Russia does little for a food-importing country if Black Sea routes are constrained, shipping costs soar, fertiliser prices rise and another critical route through the Red Sea or Strait of Hormuz is simultaneously disrupted.

The World Food Programme now describes these simultaneous pressures across the Black Sea, Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz as a potential “triple chokepoint” for global food security.

The danger, therefore, is not simply that the world runs out of grain.

It is that food and the inputs required to produce it become increasingly expensive, inaccessible or stranded in the wrong place – while the populations most dependent upon imports are least able to absorb the shock.

That should make us think differently about resilience.

If fertiliser becomes significantly more expensive or difficult to obtain at precisely the moment crops are experiencing greater heat, drought, salinity or other environmental stresses, simply trying to maintain the existing agricultural model becomes increasingly difficult.

Perhaps the question shouldn’t only be: Where will we get enough fertiliser?

It should also be: How can we help plants make better use of the resources available to them?

Looking to the sea

This is where seaweed becomes interesting.

Seaweed-derived agricultural bio-stimulants are attracting increasing scientific attention because of their ability to influence plant growth, nutrient-use efficiency and responses to environmental stress.

They are not replacements for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

NPK fertilisers provide essential plant nutrients.  Bio-stimulants work differently.

Research published in the Journal of Biotechnology describes seaweed-derived bio-stimulants as containing diverse bioactive compounds – including polysaccharides, proteins, polyphenols and vitamins – associated with improved plant growth, stress tolerance and soil health.

Other research points to seaweed polysaccharides that can support water retention, nutrient uptake and plant performance under conditions including drought, salinity and extreme temperatures.

In other words, fertiliser feeds the plant.

Bio-stimulants can potentially help the plant use what it has more effectively and cope better when conditions become difficult.

In a world of increasingly expensive inputs and climatic stress, that distinction matters.

From Sargassum problem to biological resource

Then consider Sargassum.

Enormous seasonal influxes of the seaweed have created environmental and economic problems across parts of the Caribbean and Atlantic. The conventional starting point is understandable:

How do we get rid of it?

But what happens if we ask a different question?

What value does it contain?

Recent research has already investigated Sargassum-derived agricultural products. A 2026 study of a Sargassum-based liquid bio-fertiliser used on tomatoes found increased availability of several soil macronutrients during the study.

Importantly, the research also illustrates why processing matters.

Raw Sargassum can contain high levels of salt and potentially concerning trace elements, including arsenic.  It cannot simply be collected from a beach and spread indiscriminately across agricultural land.

The resource must be understood, undesirable components must be identified, and the valuable components must be recovered safely and effectively.

The processing method must be designed around the chemistry of the resource.

That is Value Recovery in practice.

GCT’s role: recover more from what already exists

At Green Cell Technologies, we see two opportunities emerging from this changing food-security landscape.

The first is agricultural resilience – using technologies such as the Disruptor® to process seaweed and other biological resources differently may enable greater recovery and availability of useful compounds for bio-stimulant applications.

That could include cultivated seaweeds, existing marine biomass and, where appropriate and properly characterised, problematic biomass such as Sargassum.

The objective is not to claim that seaweed can replace conventional fertiliser. It is more interesting than that:  Can biological inputs help farmers make every kilogram of fertiliser, every litre of water and every hectare of productive land work harder?

The second opportunity is on the other side of the farm gate – it is meaningful nutrition.

Food security should not be measured solely in tonnes or calories.  Our crops, food-processing streams and agricultural by-products contain proteins, fibres, micronutrients and functional compounds that conventional processing does not always fully recover.

Value Recovery asks how we can retain and recover more of that nutrition from resources already being produced.

Put simply:

Help the plant derive more from its environment.

Then help humanity derive more from the plant.

Resilience through value

None of this means that conventional fertiliser is unnecessary.

Nor does it mean that a single technology can insulate agriculture from war or climate change.

The challenge is larger than that.

Indeed, in August, the World Bank and other multilateral development institutions called not only for stronger fertiliser supply chains but also for improved fertiliser-use efficiency, diversified nutrient sources, healthier soils and more resilient food systems.

That is the direction in which we need to move.

The current crisis should not be welcomed.  Fertiliser scarcity threatens farmers, yields and ultimately food affordability.

But it does expose something we can no longer ignore.

A food system dependent upon concentrated sources of energy, fertiliser, favourable weather and uninterrupted global shipping is vulnerable when several of those assumptions fail simultaneously.

Resilience will require diversification.  It will require better soil management, smarter use of fertiliser and new biological inputs.  And it will require us to look much more carefully at resources we already have – on farms, in oceans and within existing food-production systems – and ask:

What value is already here that we haven’t yet learned to recover?

Because the answer to food insecurity cannot always be to produce more.  Sometimes resilience begins with getting considerably more from what we already have.

Roy Henderson is CEO of Green Cell Technologies® (GCT®), a biotechnology company developing and licensing processing technologies centred on Value Unlocking and Value Recovery.