Same Crisis, Different Experience.

There is a conversation happening in Western media about what conflict in the Gulf means for energy prices, insurance costs, and supply chain disruption. It is a legitimate conversation. But it is only half the story — and perhaps the less important half.

For every pressure that a Western motorist feels at the pump - which is meaningful - a smallholder farmer in East Africa feels at an entirely different order of magnitude. It's not the same event wearing a different hat it is a categorically different experience of the same upstream signal. One is challenging for many people certainly - the other is the difference between a viable harvest and a failed one. Between getting to market and not. Between a year that works and a year that doesn't.

This distinction rarely makes it into the analysis. It should.

The conflict now unfolding around Iran is doing what Gulf crises have always done — sending pressure along the arteries of the global system. And there will without doubt be second, third and fourth order consequences that are not yet fully foreseen across the world. Many of these will become evident some time out.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea corridor have become front of mind across the world the past few weeks, but they are not abstract geographical names. These are the routes through which a huge share of the world's oil, gas, fertiliser precursors, and grain move. When those routes become contested, the first signal isn't the disruption. It's the cost. Insurance premiums rising. Shipping routes getting longer. I have long said that most all of the challenges of the Global South are downstream from being able to accurately price risk. The converse is true for global shipping routes - the risk is priced in before a single container ship changes course. That both oil and food are equally hostage to the same chokepoints says something significant about the architecture of the system we have built.

For a European household, that clogging shows up as a fuel bill that is harder to absorb this quarter than last. For an African economy running on imported fuel, imported fertiliser, and imported grain, it shows up as the entire cost base of the economy shifting. These are not comparable experiences. i say this not to minimize the challenges being caused across Europe and North America, but to contextualise that this is a global challenge - and in countries starting from a lower base the distance between challenge and disaster is much narrower than in mature economies.

Energy, fertilisers, food, helium for semiconductors and logistics are not separate pressures — they are the same pressure manifesting through different forms. A rise in one does not add to the others; it multiplies them as the costs cascade. What looks like three problems at the point of consumption is, in reality, a single constraint expressing itself repeatedly across sectors.

Alongside energy sits something that receives almost no coverage in Western financial media: fertilisers. It is a mundane topic to be sure, but modern agriculture is, in large part, a business that is simply a function of nitrogen. And nitrogen fertiliser is itself a function of natural gas. When the regional gas market tightens — and current players positions within that market means it has and will continue to — fertiliser prices rise with it. When fertiliser prices rise, farmers in environments with thin margins face a binary choice: apply less, or absorb costs they cannot afford. Even in the US this planting season, most will choose the former. The result is not an immediate food crisis. These effects will take three to six months to surface — and when food price spikes arrive later in the year, the originating pressure will likely have receded from the news cycle. The spike will be attributed to weather, or policy, or bad luck — rather than to the constraint that set it all in motion.

This misattribution matters now more than ever as it means the response is going to be local, reactive, and too late.

Then the logistics piece — and this is where the compounding begins to feel less like a list of problems and more like a vice tightening. The Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb are the connective tissue between production and consumption across enormous swathes of the global economy - the number 20% gets spoken about a lot, but that's 20% of the whole and ignores huge domestic consumption in economies like China, India and the US making the true number maybe as high as a third.

When shipping companies reroute to avoid risk every additional day at sea is another day of fuel burn, crew cost, port congestion — all of which lands, eventually, in the price of a bag of wheat flour in Abidjan or Addis Ababa. For East and North Africa in particular — highly dependent on grain imports — the landed cost of food moves in direct sympathy with shipping economics. In economies where a large share of household income goes on staples, even small increases in that cost have outsized impacts on peoples lives.

These households at the bottom of the chain absorb pressure from three directions at once, with none of the financial cushion that absorbs the same pressure higher up the chain or in more mature economies. This is much more of a transformational moment in the world food economy than is immediately evident in all of the talk about oil.

There is a further layer that tends to emerge under sustained pressure: behaviour. Current events are a major shift that further cements the already existing winds of multipolarity. With global supply tightening, as history tells us, countries will begin to prioritise domestic stability over open trade. Export restrictions will appear. Strategic reserves will become bigger. Bilateral agreements will replace multilateral ones. The system already moving that way now firms up into its fragmentation. This is not a new pattern at all it can be seen throughout the past 100 plus years — but recently it surfaced in 2022 around Ukrainian grain and the direct impact of that situation on food security across whole swathes of Africa, and before that in the 2008 food crisis — each iteration leaves a residue. Countries that have been burned once do not forget.

This fragmentation at the geopolitical level has its mirror image in Western domestic economies — in shrinkflation, in stagnant wages, in the quiet erosion of purchasing power. Different expressions of the same structural pressure seeing similar behavioural changes across these countries. And over time, these responses accumulate into something more structural than any individual crisis: a gradual decoupling of the global system into distinct, overlapping spheres that trade on political alignment as much as comparative advantage.

I have been watching this structural drift for the better part of a decade — the slow unravelling of a US-led unipolar order into something more distributed, more negotiated, and maybe in many ways more honest about where the axis actually sits. I noticed these things before it was seriously contemplated, before multipolar became a fixture in the vocabulary of foreign policy wonks who had spent the previous decade confident the system would hold and the decade before that thinking we'd reached the end of history. I raise this not as biography but as context, because it shapes my view of moments like this one — not as aberration as it might feel in the eye of the storm, but as acceleration of an existing trend.

What is striking about this particular moment is not that the transition is happening. It is how quickly a single regional crisis can push it forward. Gulf states were already rethinking food security in a serious way, investing in agricultural capacity across Africa and Central Asia, building the bilateral relationships that will matter when the multilateral ones prove unreliable. African nations have been doing the same — diversifying their relationships across a broader set of partners, accessing capital and infrastructure from multiple directions rather than a single dominant axis. The corridors are forming. The architecture of the next era is being assembled. The rate that is happening is gaining ground at an ever increasing clip.

From my discussions with leaders across Africa in the past few weeks, it is a common thread that the repositioning within this emergent system is more active than most commentators acknowledge or understand. They are not simply dealing with the same problems — but with a renewed urgency finding ways to integrate into these new corridors as a source of agricultural production, a participant in alternative trade routes, and how to use a more venn approach to food, trade and border security within a more distributed global network. Integration doesn't eliminate exposure but it changes its form and this will be in ways that change the global landscape irrevocably.

The pressures created by the current conflict are not simply bad news for emerging markets through food, water and energy shocks but they are also accelerants toward the kind of structural diversification that makes those markets more resilient in the long run. The pain is real today and in the coming months. But the reorganisation it is pushing toward was perhaps necessary but was certainly coming anyway.

All of these events, which appear, on the surface, like a series of separate shocks — fuel costs, food prices, logistics stress — are in reality a single system under strain, revealing its architecture and the gaps within them . The question for the countries at the receiving end is not whether they will be affected. They will. It is whether they use this moment to build the relationships, the infrastructure, and the supply chain sovereignty that makes the next crisis less acute.

Current events alone don't create this reality. But they do reveal it — and in doing so, it makes the case more forcefully for rethinking how the Global South connects to the world. Not as a recipient of systems built elsewhere. But as a builder of its own.