The Supreme Court’ s February ruling struck down the IEEPA tariffs.[1] Within days, alternative statutory authority reimposed them.[2] The structural pressures on global supply chains did not pause for either event.
Read also: US Tariff Refunds Expected to Begin in May 2026 After Supreme Court Ruling
The past six weeks have exposed what was always true. The vulnerability was never primarily about tariff rates. It was about how little most organisations know about the first mile of their supply chains – where production occurs, what condition it is in and what signals are already forming that will determine price and availability months from now.
The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since February 28.[3] Around 25% of the world’ s seaborne oil and 20% of its LNG transit that chokepoint, alongside roughly one-third of global fertilizer trade, including 46% of the world’ s seaborne urea.[4][5] Since the closure, urea prices have risen from $475 to $680 per metric tonne and European and Asian gas prices are up more than 50%.[6] The two-week ceasefire has not restored normal passage. The agricultural consequences are direct: higher input costs translate into reduced planted area and yield compression, none of which will appear in official statistics for months.
That is one chokepoint. The regulatory and environmental pressures are structural and permanent. The EU Deforestation Regulation requires plot-level deforestation evidence for all affected commodities entering EU markets, effective December 2026.[7] The Bank of England’ s SS5/25 requires banks to submit physical climate risk compliance plans by June 2026.[8] And cocoa prices rose nearly 300% through 2024 and into 2025,[9] driven not just by weather & climate volatility but by Cacao Swollen Shoot Virus, which impacted 81% of Ghana’ s crop[10] and has spread across 11 of Côte d’ Ivoire’ s 13 southwestern growing regions.[11] Biological and environmental stresses compound each other in ways that historical price models cannot anticipate.
Around 60% of supply risk originates at the first mile – where crops are grown, where land conditions shift, where yield trajectories form – and it remains the least visible part of the system. Most organisations can trace a commodity to a country of export. Far fewer can trace it to a plot and fewer still can tell you what condition that plot is in this week, whether planted area is contracting or yield stress is building weeks before harvest. This is not a labelling problem. It is an intelligence problem. The question is not where a commodity originated. It is what condition the source is in today, and whether that intelligence reaches decision systems before prices move.
Without first-mile visibility, organisations misprice risk, misallocate capital and react too late. EUDR compliance makes the cost explicit: companies without plot-level deforestation evidence face market access risk, not just compliance cost. JP Morgan’ s Dr. Sarah Kapnick concluded in January 2026 that “environmental threats and shifting trade dynamics are fundamentally changing the risk landscape for agricultural commodities” and that relying on historical patterns is no longer sufficient[12] – a conclusion reached with the benefit of field-level data that most supply chains do not have.
The capability to close this gap exists. Near real-time satellite signals, AI models and phenology-aware forecasting now deliver plot-level intelligence on yield trajectories and production area shifts weeks ahead of official reporting cycles. What supply chain professionals need is not a new tariff framework. It is data infrastructure that surfaces conditions at the source before they become a price shock, a compliance failure or a sourcing crisis.
First-mile intelligence is not a resilience initiative. It is the foundation of decisions made with confidence in a world that no longer behaves predictably.
Jonathan Horn is CEO of Treefera, the AI–native first–mile intelligence platform for global ag and soft commodities.
