ICC warns on fertiliser supply and trade fragmentation at Milken Global Conference

ICC Secretary General John W.H. Denton AO has warned of growing risks to global food security and the multilateral trading system, speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles and in a live interview with Bloomberg on the sidelines of the event.

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Addressing the panel Tradewinds: Navigating Economic Uncertainty, Mr Denton cautioned that while tariffs have dominated public debate, the more consequential threat to global trade stems from structural uncertainty and the disruption of critical supply chains, in particular, fertiliser flows through the Strait of Hormuz.

"We are looking down the line at a very significant food crisis," he said, "because the whole discussion on Hormuz is obviously shrouded in the behaviour of the combatants and overwhelmed by oil and gas. What's unfocused on is fertiliser."

A price shock and a supply shock

Mr Denton noted that farmers in Africa and Latin America are already responding to the combination of rising costs and supply shortfalls by reducing or abandoning planting. "You've got a perfect storm, a price shock and a supply shock which is about to create a huge cataclysmic problem in the real economy, but in particular on food," he told Bloomberg.

He also warned that the consequences for yields could become visible within months, drawing a parallel with the 2008 global food crisis and its role in the political instability that preceded the Arab Spring.

ICC is engaged with the UN Secretary-General's Strait of Hormuz Task Force, working to develop a mechanism to restore fertiliser shipments through the corridor, building on ICC's role in the Black Sea Grain Agreement in 2022.

The cost of uncertainty

On the broader trade environment, Mr Denton pointed to recent ICC and Oxford Economic analysis showing that policy uncertainty is acting as a significant brake on global economic activity, at a cost of approximately US$250 billion last year and potentially US$380 billion looking ahead.

"That's opportunities to employ people that's not happening," he said. "There are real consequences in the real economy."

Reflecting on the state of multilateral trade governance, Mr Denton said the failure of MC14 in Yaoundé confirmed that consensus-based multilateralism is no longer functioning effectively, with plurilateral arrangements increasingly filling the gap.

"The biggest challenges we're confronting are going to require the private sector to really step up," he told Bloomberg.

"What we see here is probably the biggest gathering of private capital, which will actually be incredibly important if we're ever going to fix some of the problems we've got."