Halder sets her alarm for 1am not to get ahead of the workdayangladesh-Dhaka, but because that’s the only hour when Dhaka’s gas pressure runs strong enough for her to actually cook for her family. That single detail captures something larger than one exhausted bank employee’s routine: a war between the US and Iran, fought thousands of miles from Bangladesh’s border, has reached directly into the kitchens, factories, and farms of a country of roughly 170 million people – exposing just how exposed energy-import-dependent economies have become to a conflict over a strait most Bangladeshis will never see.
Bangladesh’s current energy emergency didn’t originate domestically, but it has been made significantly worse by decisions and vulnerabilities that predate the war. The country produces very little energy of its own, relying on imported gas from the Middle East for close to half of its total energy supply. When the US-Iran conflict closed off the Strait of Hormuz to normal shipping, it cut directly into the corridor Bangladesh depends on for liquid natural gas imports – LNG shipments fell by a staggering 83% between July and August alone, a collapse severe enough to instantly outstrip the country’s ability to substitute supply from anywhere else.
The numbers illustrate just how thin Bangladesh’s margin already was before the war intensified the shortfall. Daily gas demand runs between roughly 107 and 113 million cubic metres, against an available supply of only about 74 million cubic metres – meaning the country was already operating with a structural deficit even in ordinary circumstances, before losing the majority of its LNG import capacity to a conflict over a waterway on the other side of the Indian Ocean. A fire that knocked out one of Bangladesh’s two floating LNG terminals on July 21 compounded an already dire situation, adding an acute domestic failure on top of the external supply shock.
The timing has been especially brutal for Bangladesh’s political transition. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party government took office in February, following mass protests in 2024 that ousted the Awami League after 15 years in power amid accusations of political repression, corruption, and economic mismanagement. Within weeks of the new government settling in, the Iran war broke out and the Hormuz closure began disrupting gas shipments – leaving a newly installed administration, still finding its footing after a period of interim government, to manage an energy crisis whose root cause sits entirely outside its control.
The government’s response has been rationing rather than resolution, since there’s little else available when the underlying supply simply isn’t there. Shops, markets, and shopping centers have been ordered to close by 8pm, an hour earlier than before. Illuminated billboards must switch off by 7pm, with exemptions carved out only for hospitals, pharmacies, food shops, and emergency services. Centre for Policy Dialogue research director Khondaker Golam Moazzem frames the deeper problem clearly: the war’s disruption has layered onto longstanding frailties in Bangladesh’s energy system caused by mismanagement of public utilities – meaning even once the external shock eases, the underlying vulnerability that made Bangladesh this exposed in the first place will likely remain.
While Dhaka’s darkened streets have become the crisis’s most visible symbol, the situation outside the capital is measurably worse. In August, rural Bangladeshis went without electricity for up to 16 hours a day, and national load-shedding – the formal term for deliberately cutting power output to manage shortages – exceeded 3,000 megawatts at the worst point of the shortage, according to government data. That scale of sustained rural power loss has direct agricultural consequences: farmers unable to secure fuel for irrigation are watching their fields dry out, a slow-moving secondary crisis layered on top of the immediate energy shortage, with implications for food production that will likely outlast the acute phase of the gas shortfall itself.
The human toll of the crisis is already measurable in food security data. Almost 3 million more people are expected to face food insecurity in the final months of the year – an 18% increase from the summer figure of 15.3 million, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global malnutrition monitoring body. That’s not a projection built on abstract economic modeling; it’s a direct consequence of energy-driven price increases and disrupted production rippling through household budgets that had little slack to begin with.
Bangladesh’s energy-intensive industries – textiles, ceramics, glass, steel, transport, agriculture, fisheries, and general commercial activity – have all been forced to scale back, according to Moazzem, who describes almost all economic activity as operating at significantly lower levels of usable capacity because of the crisis. For a country whose textile sector in particular represents a major share of export earnings and employment, sustained operation at reduced capacity isn’t a temporary inconvenience; it threatens the competitiveness of an industry that depends on reliable production schedules to serve international buyers and hold onto market share against manufacturers in other countries less affected by the energy shortfall.
For ordinary residents, the crisis has meant constant, exhausting recalculation of routine. Ahmed, who runs an electrical workshop in central Dhaka but lives on the city’s outskirts for cheaper housing, now dreads his own commute – darkened streets have turned an ordinary journey home into a calculation about the risk of robbery, made worse by scarcer and more expensive transport once his shop closes for the night. At 50, he says he’s occasionally thought about leaving Bangladesh altogether, before concluding he lacks the money to actually do it – a stark illustration of how the crisis has narrowed options even for people actively looking for a way out.
At Dhaka’s Krishi vegetable market, 41-year-old Aleya Begum described the same underlying scarcity in economic terms that need no statistics to convey: she used to fill a shopping bag with vegetables without spending much, and now she can spend a full bag’s worth of money and still not fill it. She’s cut back on fish and chicken and thinks twice before buying eggs – ordinary household choices reshaped entirely by an energy shock she had no part in causing and no ability to influence.
Begum’s own framing of the situation cuts through the layers of geopolitics, supply chains, and government policy debates entirely. She says she doesn’t track the debate over how much of the current crisis the government inherited versus how much stems from events abroad, and she doesn’t need elaborate promises from officials – she needs prices to come down and her family’s daily life to become manageable again. That’s the plainest possible statement of what a war over a shipping lane thousands of miles away has actually done: it has made the ordinary act of feeding a family in Dhaka measurably harder, regardless of whose conflict originally caused it.
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