Opinion | The Iran War’s Alarming Ripple Effects

So, because I like to have very specific things to panic about, you want to just give me some of the lagging downstream things that I should be freaking out about? The thing that’s most distressing, I think, is the fertilizer stuff. I mean, I just saw some recent survey that said that basically 70 percent of American farmers say that they can’t afford fertilizer this planting season. Now, I tend to think that surveys like that usually overstate the panic. But then elsewhere in the world where farmers don’t have nearly the buffer capacity that American farmers do — say, across Africa — there’s going to be real huge consequences to price spikes for fertilizer. And the effects of this war, the downstream effects of this war, are really quite grim. We could be talking about tens of millions of additional people suffering extreme hunger, or being forced into or close to famine as a result of this fertilizer consequence, which, again, isn’t even like on the Trump administration’s radar, as far as I can tell. But there are also a lot more trivial consequences. The world’s biggest condom makers are raising the price of condoms. This is not trivial. No, no. Well, I mean, in a certain way, it isn’t trivial. Like the condom maker that most famously raised the price is also one that donates a huge amount of condoms for the prevention of S.T.D.s in the developing world. So there may be genuine public health catastrophes that come out of this. There’s almost no product that you look at and think: This is completely unaffected by the supply of any of the things that are tied up in the Strait of Hormuz. And that means that to some degree, everything is going to get at least more expensive and maybe somewhat short of supply.