Crises within Crises

In the context of Trump's extractive, transactionalist approach to humanitarian aid, what will the Hormuz crisis bring?

May 4, 2026

Mercy Corps has a new report about the stark, rapidly emerging global humanitarian consequences of Trump’s misadventure in Iran.

From Hormuz to the Frontlines of Hunger details the likely impact of the Iran war on “six fragile contexts,” Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Myanmar and Lebanon, places where conflict, high inflation, drought and other preexisting crises mean that they may “have already exhausted their ability to absorb additional shocks.”

These are examples of the larger problem to come. Most Strait of Hormuz stories focus on oil, but other commodities are also being held up by the tit-for-tat blockades. More of the world’s fertilizer than its oil traverses the Persian Gulf, and in much of the northern hemisphere, planting season is already underway. Sulfur is shipped around the world through the Strait, and its scarcity will impact mining and make virtually everything in our electronic world more expensive. Alongside the effects of rising oil costs, rising costs of shipping insurance will also have an effect. As harvests are impacted by fertilizer shortages, the rising cost of getting what produce there is to market, too, will worsen scarcity, food costs, and hunger.

From Hormuz details risks for a few locations, but provides insights into the pain that this war will inflict on vulnerable communities worldwide:

The economic harm from this war is already being transmitted to households miles from the fighting – and much of it is now locked in regardless of how the political situation resolves. Harvests will be smaller where farmers reduce fertilizer use, switch crops or plant less, food will cost more, and the people least able to absorb those shocks are already at the limit of what they can withstand.

… The human cost is already concrete and measurable. In Sudan, Somalia and Myanmar, the transmission has moved beyond prices into the systems through which food reaches people: transport, market access, cash-transfer adequacy and agricultural production. In Sudan, the Strait of Hormuz disruption is adding pressure to cash-transfer adequacy through higher import costs, tighter dollar availability and exchange rate divergence. It is doing so in a context where purchasing power had already collapsed: by March 2026, before the Middle East war began, a transfer sized to the April 2025 food basket had lost 41 per cent of its value because of Sudan’s civil-war economy. In Sudan’s conflict-affected Darfur and Kordofan regions, fuel and transport costs are reaching levels at which some food movements are no longer commercially viable, with Ayin Network reporting transport fees of Sudanese pound (SDG) 1 million to SDG 1.2 million against some cargo values as low as SDG 100,000. This reflects the Middle East war adding pressure to an already constrained market system. In Somalia, markets in Mogadishu reportedly began refusing the national currency altogether in mid-April, demanding dollars or mobile money instead. In Myanmar, WFP data indicate that diesel prices surged by more than 160 per cent nationwide by the last week of March. The shock is affecting transport, irrigation, milling and humanitarian delivery in a country heavily dependent on diesel-powered agricultural and logistics systems. This means higher diesel prices can raise the cost of producing, processing and moving rice and other staples at the same time as households are already facing elevated food prices.

… The contraction in humanitarian aid budgets [which began in 2024] is structural, not cyclical – the international system was already failing these populations before the war began, and the conditions driving that contraction will outlast the conflict itself.

Thomas Byrnes, a humanitarian aid expert, had an interesting take on the report in his piece “The System is Inside the Crisis”:

Most humanitarian crises I have worked on in 15 years shared one structural feature. The system stood outside the problem and delivered into it. Typhoon in the Philippines, teams fly in from hubs that are functioning. Famine in the Horn, food moves through supply chains that are intact. Refugee crisis in Greece, the money comes from economies that are growing. The system works best when it occupies a different economic space from the people it serves.

The shortages that Mercy Corps says will deepen every local crisis are already beginning to impact the entire world. Will we, those of us who constitute the system and reside at the inside edge of the crisis, show up for those in its middle?

We may not. A sense of scarcity tends to burn through altruism. But what comes next may also be even worse than just indifference to the suffering that Trump’s war is exacerbating.

I have written in the last couple of months of the transactionalist approach to restoring U.S. humanitarian aid being pursued by the State Department. So far, this has been concentrated in the healthcare sector. The Administration has approached various governments in the Global South with proposals for aid packages with strings attached. By and large, the deal has been that we will provide medicine and funding for national healthcare systems, and in exchange, they will give us data, the black gold of the information economy, on patients in the systems we are supporting.

That kind of might look reasonable if you squint just right: perhaps that data will fuel research that improves healthcare options for those nations, and the world. But greed is a progressive disease. When the Administration made its proposal to Zambia, the quid pro quo was no longer health data but minerals, the very wealth that the Global North has long extracted from Africa and the Americas, making the gulf between nations, between wealthy former colonizers and the burgled former colonized, so agonizingly vast. There is no built-in rationale for the deal put on the table in Lusaka. It is just, simply, you have something we want. We can save your lives only if you give it to us.

Thirty-two countries have accepted these “America First” aid deals, 23 African nations and also Tajikistan, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Cambodia, Panama, Papua New Guinea, and Bolivia. The transactionalist humanitarianism seems to be fully entrenched in the Trump Administration’s approach to alleviating suffering in the world.

Now, as the shocks from bombing in the Middle East begin to ripple across the world, will the Administration see opportunity in the waves of crisis that are emerging?

It was only two months ago that someone in the State Department wrote a memo suggesting that choking off AIDS medication to a country where 6% of the population is HIV positive would be a good strategy to force them to reach a deal on mineral rights. Now, fragile countries around the world are bracing for the same shocks we all are – higher costs, possible shortages of food and critical equipment.

For the aid scheme Marco Rubio is running, this is an opportunity, not a crisis. It seems certain at least that someone in the Administration is thinking about how growing humanitarian need around the world, most especially food shortages, creates an opportunity for more extractive U.S. aid deals where our grain commands a high price in terms of recipient country privacy rights, mineral resources, and whatever else they have that we want.

On the other hand, maybe the approach the Administration takes will simply be to let them die. Severe cuts to foreign aid, more than $12 billion, mark a 32% reduction from 2026 levels. It could be that letting die is the preference of a domestically focused, inward-looking, profoundly racist and xenophobic emerging autocracy. That is what I would have thought in 2025. But in 2026, I wonder if perhaps these cuts are not a matter of reducing supply to drive a higher price through demand. If we have less to go around in a world that needs more, cutting a deal with Rubio and his emissaries becomes all the more urgent.

Alongside the report, Mercy Corps is asking people to sign a petition demanding that Congress resist the cuts: https://www.mercycorps.org/petition/tell-congress-reject-cuts-life-saving-aid

Beyond this, we must make sure that the aid budget, hopefully restored to at least this year’s level, does not become a tool for a new kind of colonialist extraction of resources from the Global South.

A side note: I am going to add a paid option for Every Effing Day. I’m doing this to chase the algorithm, not your money (though I will admit that doing this every effing day does cost me a bit). Nothing I publish here will ever be behind a paywall, and if you find that anything is, please tell me: I will correct it immediately.