The closure of the Strait of Hormuz in March 2026, triggered by the war in the Persian Gulf, exposed a fact that contemporary geopolitics continuously reaffirms: approximately 80% of world trade moves by sea and depends on a small set of critical passages: Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, Suez, Malacca, the Bosphorus, Gibraltar, and the Panama Canal.

These chokepoints, however, are not merely commercial arteries; they are zones of geopolitical contestation, flanked by military bases, traversed by great-power rivalries, and permanently subject to the logics of containment and power projection. When one of these passages is disrupted, the effects cascade across energy, food, and input markets worldwide, and the line between commercial crisis and security crisis dissolves rapidly. For Brazil, the world's largest exporter of agricultural commodities and, simultaneously, its largest importer of fertilizers, understanding this geography and these dynamics is a matter of national strategic interest.