A producer with asymmetric exposure.
Iran sits at the intersection of three pressure regimes: sanctions on its primary export, structural inflation on its food imports, and a geographic exposure that magnifies any Persian Gulf incident.
Iran is a producer first and an importer second, but the producer side is the one under acute pressure. Crude exports have fallen from a 2025 peak of 2.1 mb/d to 1.6 mb/d at the latest reading — a contraction that reflects three rounds of secondary sanctions on petrochem subsidiaries and a re-routing of shadow-fleet capacity to other lanes.
The wheat exposure is the one that surprises analysts new to the file. Iran imports roughly 2.1 Mt of wheat a year — about a quarter of domestic consumption — almost entirely from Russia and Kazakhstan. The currency stress and inflation regime have compounded the cost of this import dependency, and the food-security score has slipped to 62 / 100 on the GFSI methodology.
In a Persian Gulf disruption, Iran's exposure runs in both directions — as a producer constrained by physical routes, and as an importer whose food costs spike with insurance.
Our scenario HORMUZ-2026 places Iran at the centre of the cascading risk, but the country's own vulnerabilities are not symmetric to the wider region's. A five-day tanker disruption would push Iranian export utilisation to near zero within forty-eight hours — Iran has limited overland alternatives — while the import bill for wheat and basic inputs would rise on insurance premia and lane re-routing costs.
The geopolitical inputs to the v3.2 stress index — sanctions intensity, capital controls, refugee flows, militia activity — push the composite reading to 0.91, a level held only by three other countries in our forty-seven-country panel.[1] The methodology document is here.