The 2026 Strait of Hormuz Shipping Disruption: Empirical Assessment of Maritime Transit Collapse, Food Price Dynamics, and Multimodal Logistics Resilience

Abstract

Maritime shipping carries over 80% of global merchandise trade, making strategic chokepoints critical for food-importing regions. The 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis triggered an acute shipping disruption threatening Persian Gulf food import corridors. Combining daily AIS data across 28 chokepoints with monthly FAO food prices and freight futures (2019–2026), we apply local projections and IMO GHG accounting. Daily Hormuz transits fell 95.1% during the March–May 2026 peak, with dry bulk transits down 88.8%. However, local projection impulse responses indicate that food price impacts remain statistically indistinguishable from zero (all p > 0.05), with 57.5% of historical placebo estimates matching or exceeding the actual estimate in absolute value. Because the crisis occurs late in the sample, direct evaluation is limited to horizons h = 0 to 3. Multimodal scenarios show overland rerouting increased ton–kilometer costs 2.4- to 4.2-fold and CO2 emissions 1.47- to 3.54-fold, yet overland door-to-door costs were lower than direct shipping with war-risk surcharges. These findings suggest that crisis transmission cannot be statistically distinguished from background volatility under available data, exposing a trade-off between resilience and decarbonization for import-dependent regions under Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2 and 12.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Sustainability, 2026 · DOI ↗