The New York Times reports:

For three days, he waited at the gas station in a crush of hundreds of villagers, as the temperature rose to 104 degrees. People tried to cut the line, and fights broke out, drawing police officers wielding batons. This, Dulal Hossain endured for the chance to buy diesel fuel.

He was tormented by worries about his rice plants, the source of most of his livelihood. The diesel he eventually carried home by bicycle, in a jerrycan strung from the handlebars, would fuel the pump that bathed his fields with groundwater. The pump was empty.

It was late March, the dry season in western Bangladesh, and a month after the United States and Israel unleashed war on Iran. Around the globe, energy prices were soaring as shipping was halted through the Strait of Hormuz. In South Asia, diesel was scarce. So crops were deprived of water.

For six weeks, Mr. Hossain, 68, pedaled between the gas station and his fields, bearing replenishment for his pump. He inspected his rice plants like a parent attending to an afflicted child. Their leaves were turning yellow. Stems drooped toward cracked soil.

He could not stave off calamity. When he harvested his rice last month, he wound up with barely one-fourth the usual volume. That was enough to feed his family, but left him nothing to sell. Short of cash, he cut back on meat and fish. He resorted to borrowing to buy seeds for growing vegetables.

“I’m going backward,” he said.

As the war in the Middle East limits the supply of energy worldwide, millions of farmers are contending with scarcity and higher prices for fuel, threatening their access to irrigation and menacing the food supply. Faced with depleted harvests, many rural households in Asia and Africa are borrowing to cover the costs of cultivation, challenging their ability to produce future crops.

In much of the world, the closure of the strait has blocked shipments of food and fertilizer, making prices much higher.

Countries like Somalia and Sudan are suffering extreme hunger and even famine, as the crisis lands atop drastic cuts to the international relief system.

Yet even in countries that have enjoyed improving living standards and a relative abundance of food, a reversal of fortune is now unfolding. Experts worry that higher costs of irrigation could dissuade some farmers to plant.

“If this diesel crisis continues, farmers might not be interested in continuing to invest,” said Zakir Hossain Khan, an economist and co-founder of Change Initiative, a global research institution focused on sustainability.

The war has thrust on scores of countries a profound shock — one now gaining fresh momentum as the widening conflict between the United States and Iran has again choked off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. [Continue reading…]