India, April 24 -- India's agricultural achievement is one of its great post-Independence success stories. From the brink of famine in the mid-1960s, the country is now among the world's largest producers of wheat, rice, and sugar, with foodgrain output exceeding 330 million tonnes in 2023-24 - more than five times what it was in 1947.

But, a closer examination reveals that India's food security rests on a continuous supply of synthetic fertilisers derived from imported natural gas, phosphate, and potash. The countries that supply these inputs are, overwhelmingly, the same Gulf States that supply India's oil, and the US-Israeli war on Iran has exposed this dependence.

This dependence is not just in India. In a recent essay in the Financ...