MARCH 21 — After the debacle in Ukraine in February 2022, leading to all forms of global shortages, the world is entering a dangerous phase of economic stress again.
Ramifications from a protracted war in the Gulf and Iran, one of the most strategic regions in the world, are rapidly inducing inflation everywhere else.
What is now unfolding is not just another oil shock. It is a cascading disruption across energy, shipping, agriculture, logistics, tourism, aviation, and household consumption. Asean and China, Japan and South Korea combined, which is the largest market in the world, will all feel the acute stress.
Yet the latest reports show that the war involving Iran has already triggered consequences far beyond West Asia, from shrinking restaurant menus in India and flight cancellations in Thailand to fuel rationing in Sri Lanka and rising jet-fuel costs in South Africa.
The effect is no longer theoretical. It is immediate, transnational, and deeply regressive for the developing world.
The clearest warning has come from the International Energy Agency, which has described the present disruption as the largest supply shock in the history of the global oil market. The war is entering only the third week.
Reuters further reported that Brent crude settled above US$112 a barrel on March 20, 2026, its highest close since July 2022, amid severe interruptions around the Strait of Hormuz and damage to regional energy infrastructure.
That matters because oil is never just about oil.
When fuel prices rise sharply, every other sector begins to tremble.
Transport costs increase. Electricity generation becomes more expensive in many countries.
Airlines add surcharges. Shipping lines pass costs on to importers. Trucks carrying food, feed, and fertilizer become costlier to operate.
Factories that depend on gas or oil-based inputs reduce production or raise prices.
Governments then confront an ugly dilemma: subsidize more and strain public finances, or let prices rise and risk social anger.
This is why the present moment demands not panic, but preparation.
The next major shock is fertilizer.
Reuters reported on March 20 that the conflict is threatening a fresh food-price surge across the developing world because the Strait of Hormuz, which handles roughly 30 percent of global fertilizer trade.
Urea prices have reportedly jumped by 30 to 40 percent, and unlike oil, there are no meaningful global fertilizer stockpiles that can be released quickly to calm the market. This is a strategic vulnerability of the first order.
If fertilizer becomes scarcer and more expensive, farmers do not merely pay more. Many will use less. When they use less, yields decline. When yields decline, food supplies tighten.
When food tightens, prices climb not only for grains and vegetables but also for poultry, eggs, dairy, and meat because animal feed itself becomes more expensive. In other words, the present war is not only threatening what people put in their cars. It is threatening what they put on their tables.
That is why the phrase “fuel, food, fertilizers and animal feed” must be understood as one integrated chain rather than four separate problems.
In India, restaurants are already reducing operating hours, cutting menus, and removing slow-cooked dishes because commercial LPG supplies have become strained.
In Thailand, the tourism economy has been hit by mass flight cancellations and fears of being stranded.
In Sri Lanka, the government has reverted to QR-based petrol rationing, a painful reminder of its 2022 crisis.
These examples matter because they show how quickly an external war can mutate into domestic austerity for ordinary citizens.
Asia is especially exposed.
Many Asian economies are heavily dependent on imported oil, gas, and fertilizers.
Some are major food importers. Others rely on tourism, export manufacturing, or energy-intensive industries.
Even where governments have foreign reserves or subsidy mechanisms, sustained disruptions can exhaust the fiscal room.
China, according to Reuters, may even see its long-running deflationary pressures flip into what economists call “bad inflation” driven by rising input costs rather than healthy consumer demand.
That is one of the worst forms of inflation because it hurts production while failing to revive confidence.
For Malaysia, the lesson is sobering.
Malaysia may gain some temporary relief from being a net energy exporter in selected categories, and the ringgit can sometimes benefit from stronger commodity prices.
But no country in Southeast Asia is insulated from imported inflation when shipping costs jump, fertilizers tighten, aviation fuel rises, and global food prices begin to follow.
If the conflict persists, even relatively resilient economies will face a squeeze between subsidy burdens, food import costs, and slower regional demand. That is particularly true when households are already sensitive to the cost of living.
This is not a time for triumphalism over commodity gains. It is a time for disciplined contingency planning.
Malaysia, Asean, and their dialogue partners should immediately begin thinking in terms of resilience corridors.
Fertilizer supply chains need diversification. Emergency stockpiles of key food staples should be reviewed.
Shipping routes and port readiness should be stress-tested. Public communication must be calm, transparent, and frequent.
Intra-Asean cooperation on food logistics and energy substitution should be accelerated, not discussed endlessly in seminars while markets move faster than ministries.
The world should also resist the fantasy that all this can be solved by markets alone.
Markets can price scarcity, but they cannot feed the poor, calm the anxious, or stabilize fragile societies by themselves.
Once fertilizer prices rise enough to affect planting decisions, the eventual food shock becomes harder to reverse.
Once airlines cut routes, tourism-dependent households lose income immediately. Once fuel queues return, political trust starts to erode.
Inflation is never merely statistical. It is psychological, social, and political.
Hence the title: brace, brace, brace.
Not because collapse is inevitable, but because complacency would be unforgivable.
The world now faces a chain reaction in which war has begun to penetrate the most ordinary aspects of life: cooking gas, bus fares, rice prices, poultry feed, vegetable yields, and the weekly household budget.
That is how global disorder enters the home. It does not always arrive first as missiles.
Sometimes it arrives as a higher fuel bill, a smaller meal, a delayed shipment, or a farmer using less fertilizer than the soil requires.
The wisest governments will not wait for the full storm to land before acting.
They will prepare now for a prolonged period of elevated costs in fuel, food, fertilizers, and animal feed. They will coordinate. They will conserve where necessary.
They will protect the most vulnerable. And above all, they will understand that the inflation now gathering force is not an abstraction. It is the economic face of geopolitical failure.
