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.
The situation in Bangladesh represents one critical dimension: the disruption to irrigation.
One-fourth of the world’s cropland is irrigated, and that land produces 40 percent of the world’s food, according to one estimate. Irrigation systems powered by electricity are generally better for the environment, and less susceptible to ruptures like the closure of the strait.
But many countries still rely on diesel.
In the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nigeria and Ethiopia, nearly all irrigation pumps are powered by diesel, according to a recent study published by the American Geophysical Union. Eighty-three percent of pumps in Bangladesh rely on diesel.
Experts concur that such systems should be augmented by solar-powered operations to limit costs and the emissions driving climate change. And in many places, pumps are depleting groundwater.
Yet for the moment, growing food for hundreds of millions of people depends on diesel.
“It’s still the lifeblood,” said Sattar Mandal, an economist and former vice-chancellor of Bangladesh Agricultural University. “You can’t stop it immediately or you have an issue with food security.”
In Bangladesh, 15 million households whose lands are smaller than three acres collectively produce some two-thirds of the nation’s rice — the staple crop. Given the centrality of small farms, any hit to the economics of agriculture can have potent consequences.
Even in the best of times, growing food requires hope. Farmers are accustomed to risks and variables, from ill-timed rains to heat waves. Still, the war — now in its fifth month — has added geopolitical troubles alongside the mysteries of the heavens.
“Our whole life has changed,” said Mr. Hossain’s neighbor Nazrul Islam. “I don’t know these countries that are fighting. They are far away from me. Why am I awake all night with worry? Nothing is under my control.”
The Energy Shock
Even before the war, Bangladesh — home to 178 million people — was contending with enormous challenges.
A popular uprising two years ago ended the dictatorial reign of Sheikh Hasina. But the country has struggled with the transition to the next era. An interim government followed by an elected administration inherited a banking system laced with corruption and an economy dominated by monopolistic conglomerates.
A central bank subject to political manipulation has kept interest rates low to spur economic growth. The result has been high inflation, now running above 9 percent.
Last year, President Trump imposed tariffs of 37 percent on Bangladesh, later reducing the duties to 20 percent. That spelled danger for the country’s textile and garment industry, the source of some four million jobs.
Then came the conflict in the Persian Gulf.
The war shut down construction and tourism from Dubai to Doha — critical centers of employment for migrant workers from South Asia. That imperiled the $28 billion a year sent home by Bangladeshis.
The conflict also made energy more expensive and hard to secure. Bangladesh relies on natural gas — much of it imported from Qatar and Oman — to generate two-thirds of its electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. The shutdown of the strait blocked that flow.
Faced with a resulting shortage of electricity, the government has prioritized urban zones like the capital city of Dhaka, home to 25 million people, while administering rolling blackouts in rural areas.
Bangladesh depends on imports for more than 80 percent of its diesel. Most of that supply is shipped from Singapore and Malaysia, where refineries rely heavily on crude oil from the Middle East.
“We are really quite fragile,” said Fahmida Khatun, an economist who oversees the Center for Policy Dialogue, an independent research institution in Dhaka. “Our economy is dependent on the Middle Eastern countries.”
In the lush terrain surrounding the city of Rajshahi, where Mr. Hossain grows rice, a local government entity, the Barind Multipurpose Development Authority, operates a network of irrigation channels powered by electricity from the national grid. It offers subsidies, charging about one-third the price of water pumped by diesel.
But higher electrical costs have damaged the authority’s finances. Mustafizur Rahman, 57, who oversees the district, fretted about his ability to pay staff and maintain his irrigation works.
If the system deteriorates, farmers are likely to shift from growing rice to crops that require less water, like wheat and corn. That would expose them to new risks, given that the agricultural supply chain — from fertilizers to pesticides — is set up for rice.
“If farmers cannot grow rice,” he said, “then the overall financial stability for local communities is eroded.”
His purview is the 30 percent of farmers in his domain of 720 square miles who receive water via his network of channels and tubes. But that leaves out the 29,000 diesel-powered pumps used by farmers whose land lies beyond reach. Farmers like Dulal Hossain.
Irrigation and Upward Mobility
Mr. Hossain lives in the village where he was born and raised. He cultivates the same seven-acre parcel where his father grew rice.
As a child, Mr. Hossain lived in a mud-wall hut with no electricity or plumbing, taking bodily relief in the surrounding fields. His family lined up at a village well for drinking water. He never went to school.
Today, he and his wife, Kamala Begum, four of their six grown children and 15 grandchildren reside in a brick house with a porcelain toilet. A tap in their front yard provides drinking water. His eldest son finished college. All of his children completed high school.
Mr. Hossain can identify precisely when his village was refashioned — in June 1993, when the government extended its electric-powered irrigation system. Before that, his family could produce only one rice crop a year. They lived at the mercy of the rains. When the skies were stingy, they subsisted on a single meal a day.
The arrival of irrigation banished hunger. Most of Mr. Hossain’s land received water from the Barind authority’s pipes. They were soon harvesting four times as much rice from the same acreage.
Then, 17 years ago, Mr. Hossain and three of his neighbors pooled their funds to invest in a diesel-powered pump that allowed them to cultivate earth beyond the confines of the electrical system.
They were able to grow a second rice crop, in the so-called boro season — January to May, the driest months of the year. They added a third seasonal crop, growing tomatoes, cucumbers and bitter gourds. The proceeds from the boro harvest paid for seeds, fertilizer and day laborers.
But this year, the economics were undone by the war in the Middle East. This was how Mr. Hossain found himself jostling with the hordes at the gas station.
The Unraveling
The gas station sat across the street from a brick factory, on a highway traversed by belching trucks, buses and rickshaws — a staccato chorus of honking horns.
Mr. Hossain wore a cotton head scarf to fend off the merciless sun. When night fell, he unrolled his head covering and laid it on the ground, snatching fretful hours of sleep.
As some tried to hoard and resell fuel at 40 or 50 percent more than the regulated price, the station limited purchases to small volumes — only enough to power pumps for a day or two.
Every few days, as a truck pulled in from a depot bearing fuel, the crowd surged. Within two hours, the tanks were empty again.
In Bangladesh as a whole, the prioritization of electricity for public irrigation systems has prevented a major dip in rice harvests. Yet in villages like Mr. Hossain’s, the scarcity of diesel has spread pain.
Mr. Islam, Mr. Hossain’s neighbor, borrowed for the first time, taking a loan of 50,000 Bangladeshi taka (about $400) from a local firm that dispenses small amounts of credit.
He used the money to plant jute, whose fibers are used to make clothing and bags. As his August harvest approaches, he worries that the proceeds of his depleted crop will not cover diesel for his boro rice later this year. He worries about the cost of fertilizer, another commodity made scarce by disruption in the Persian Gulf.
And he worries about his 100-year-old mother, left to the swelter when blackouts stop his ceiling fans from turning.
“I am always tense,” he said. “No matter how much I work, I’m not making any money.”
As farmers avail themselves of credit, the costs transcend finance, entailing uncomfortable scrutiny.
Sazzad Hossain (no relation to Dulal Hossain) borrowed 30,000 taka (about $240) from a cooperative in his village to buy fertilizer. He has fallen behind on his monthly payments.
The members of the cooperative are his neighbors, people he encounters at the market, where he feels compelled to buy less food. “I feel shame,” Mr. Hossain, 40, said.
Two months ago, during Eid, an important Muslim holiday season, he dispensed with the usual practice of buying new outfits for his two sons.
“This is the worst thing we’ve ever experienced,” he said.
At his own home, Dulal Hossain recently took a loan from his eldest son as he prepares to hire laborers to harvest his vegetables.
“I used to give money to my children,” he said. “Now, I need to borrow from them. It’s not a good feeling.”
