Tea shipments were stranded in Kenyan ports and petrol shortages were spreading across Ethiopia on Saturday as the maritime disruption caused by the Iran war continued to fracture global agricultural supply chains, with analysts warning of a potential food security crisis if shipping disruptions extended into the planting season. The developments were part of a widening picture of economic dislocation across Africa and Asia that had received relatively little international attention compared with the military and diplomatic dimensions of the conflict, but which was being felt acutely by hundreds of millions of people in developing nations whose economic lives depend on functioning international trade.

Kenya’s tea industry, which produces approximately eight percent of the world’s tea and is the country’s single largest export earner, had been accumulating unsold inventory at the port of Mombasa since the third week of the war. The bottleneck was not a shortage of buyers — global demand for Kenyan tea remained robust — but rather a breakdown in the shipping logistics that move bulk agricultural cargo through the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf corridor. Several of the major container lines that normally carry Kenyan tea to buyers in Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Egypt, and the Gulf states had suspended or severely curtailed their East Africa services, citing war risk insurance costs that had made the routes economically unviable.

The Kenya Tea Board estimated that more than 40,000 metric tons of processed tea were sitting in warehouses at Mombasa, a figure that represented roughly six weeks of normal export volume. Beyond the immediate financial impact on tea companies and the farmers who supply them, the accumulation of inventory was creating practical storage problems and quality concerns, as improperly stored tea deteriorates relatively quickly. Small-holder tea farmers, who constitute the majority of Kenya’s tea production, had begun receiving delayed or reduced payments from processing cooperatives that themselves lacked the cash flow to maintain normal operations.

In Ethiopia, a different dimension of the supply chain crisis was playing out. The country, which is not a major oil producer, depends heavily on imported petroleum for transportation, agriculture, and industrial activity. The disruption of tanker routes through the Persian Gulf and Red Sea had dramatically reduced the volume of fuel arriving at Ethiopian ports, which in any case transit through Djibouti in a logistically complex arrangement. Fuel queues stretching for blocks had been reported in Addis Ababa and several secondary cities, and the agricultural sector was experiencing shortages of diesel that threatened to delay mechanized farming operations ahead of the main planting season beginning in April.

The agricultural implications of fuel shortages in East Africa were potentially severe. Ethiopia is one of Africa’s largest grain producers and an important source of food security for a region that has experienced repeated drought-related crises in recent years. Delays or reductions in mechanized plowing and planting, combined with elevated fertilizer prices — themselves driven partly by energy cost increases — could meaningfully reduce harvests later in the year. The World Food Programme had already placed the region on a heightened monitoring alert, and humanitarian planners were quietly gaming out scenarios in which a below-average harvest compounded ongoing displacement and conflict-driven food insecurity across the Horn of Africa.

Across South and Southeast Asia, similar disruptions were being reported with varying degrees of severity. Sri Lanka’s tea industry faced the same shipping problems as Kenya’s. Bangladesh’s garment sector was experiencing container shortages that slowed exports to European and American markets. Vietnam’s seafood and agricultural exporters had seen freight rates rise sharply, compressing already thin margins. In each case, the specific mechanism was different but the underlying cause was the same: the Iran war had disrupted the dense network of maritime trade on which developing economies depend for both their export earnings and their import of essential goods.

The shipping industry’s response to the crisis had been commercially rational but collectively damaging. Carriers had shifted capacity to less risky routes, imposed war surcharges that priced out lower-value cargo, and prioritized higher-margin loads over the bulk agricultural commodities that represented the lifeblood of developing economies. The resulting triage effectively meant that wealthy consumers in developed markets experienced modest price increases, while agricultural producers and food importers in developing nations bore a disproportionate share of the disruption. Several development economists described this dynamic as a familiar but troubling pattern in which the costs of geopolitical crises in one part of the world were exported to poorer nations that had no role in causing the conflict.

The International Monetary Fund, in a brief note distributed to member governments on Friday, estimated that the war-related trade disruptions were shaving between 0.5 and 1.2 percentage points from GDP growth projections for sub-Saharan Africa in 2026. The estimate was described as preliminary and subject to significant uncertainty, but even at the low end it represented a meaningful setback for economies that had been slowly recovering from the overlapping shocks of the COVID pandemic, the previous global energy crisis, and the disruptions caused by earlier Red Sea security incidents. For nations already carrying heavy debt burdens, the additional growth shortfall translated directly into tighter fiscal constraints and reduced capacity to fund public services.

International shipping associations called on Saturday for the establishment of protected maritime corridors for food and agricultural cargo, similar to arrangements that had been negotiated in previous regional conflicts to maintain humanitarian supply chains. The International Maritime Organization said it was consulting with member governments on the feasibility of such corridors but acknowledged that the security environment made any formal arrangement technically and politically complicated. Without effective convoy protection, commercial insurers would be unlikely to reduce the war risk premiums that were the primary driver of shipping companies’ route decisions.

Kenya’s government issued a formal appeal to major shipping lines on Saturday asking them to restore East Africa services and promising to work with international partners on risk mitigation. The Kenyan foreign ministry also contacted the United States and European Union trade representatives, arguing that the humanitarian and economic consequences of maritime disruption for African nations should be explicitly factored into diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. The appeal reflected a broader sentiment among African governments that the continent’s interests were being inadequately represented in international deliberations about the war and its consequences.

Development organizations working in the region said they were particularly worried about the intersection of supply chain disruption with the upcoming agricultural calendar. Planting seasons across East and West Africa begin between April and June, and any significant shortfall in fuel, fertilizer, or seed availability during that window could reduce harvests in a way that would be felt for an entire year. Farmers who could not afford elevated input costs, or who could not access fuel for irrigation or mechanized land preparation, would plant less or not at all. The resulting production shortfalls, unlike a shipping disruption, could not be quickly reversed when conditions improved.

The tea stranded in Mombasa’s warehouses served as a vivid symbol of a broader pattern. Global trade had become so finely calibrated, with goods moving through complex just-in-time supply chains that depended on reliable shipping, insurance, and logistics infrastructure, that a conflict in one region could rapidly transmit economic harm to producers and consumers in places entirely disconnected from the military action. Resolving the war would eventually restore those supply chains, but for the farmers, traders, and food-insecure communities absorbing the costs in real time, the eventual return to normalcy offered limited comfort for the losses accumulating day by day.