When the Gas Runs Out, So Does the Food

In the previous part, we saw how global logistics and manufacturing collapse when energy costs explode and software-chemical paralysis sets in. The shutdown of vehicles and factories, however, is only the visible surface of the economy. When energy supplies contract drastically, the crisis spreads relentlessly to the most fundamental and most vulnerable layer of human society: food production.

To understand the process, we must trace the path of energy with objective logic — from the natural gas molecule, through fertiliser and farm machinery, all the way to the family dinner table — while asking once more the question that matters most: who stands to benefit?

1. The Fertiliser Shock: When a Shortage of Natural Gas Causes Famine

On the face of it, the gas shortage is a heating-season problem. In reality, natural gas is the single most critical feedstock for global food production. Modern agriculture rests on nitrogen-based fertilisers, produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which combines hydrogen extracted from natural gas (methane) with atmospheric nitrogen to yield ammonia. Natural gas prices alone account for the lion's share of fertiliser production costs.

Historical precedent shows exactly what the current Hormuz shock entails. When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out in 2022 and gas prices jumped, Norway's Yara, one of Europe's largest producers, cut more than half of its European capacity, while Nitrogénművek, Hungary's nitrogen fertiliser producer, was forced to halt production temporarily because of prohibitive operating costs. But the crisis, compounded by the loss of Qatari LNG, is not temporary: European fertiliser production becomes permanently uncompetitive and collapses.

2. The Harvest Trap: The Conflict Between the Present and the Future

A closer look at the timing reveals a paradox. If the crisis escalates in early spring, autumn-sown grains (such as Hungarian winter wheat) are already in the ground, and their top-dressing can be carried out from accumulated winter stocks. Does this mean the summer harvest of that year is safe? Decidedly not.

Agriculture is, in fact, utterly dependent on diesel. At the summer harvest, combine harvesters, tractors and the lorries hauling the crop to the silos need enormous quantities of fuel, along with the AdBlue additive examined in an earlier part of this series. If diesel prices are astronomical and AdBlue is physically unavailable because of the chemical-industry shutdown, the crop may rot in the field, as harvesting and logistics grind to a halt.

As for spring-sown crops (maize, sunflower), sowing and basal fertiliser application are either missed altogether or drastically reduced, sealing the fate of that autumn's harvest and the next year's.

3. Who Stands to Benefit? Food as a Geopolitical Weapon

The Cui bono question — who stands to benefit? — takes its most brutal geopolitical form in agriculture. While Europe's own fertiliser production is wiped out by the gas shortage, two global powers emerge as the conflict's beneficiaries, reaping enormous strategic gains: Russia and China.

In the modern economy, control over fertiliser equals control over food. Having already lost its industrial edge, Europe is now forced to hand the security of its own food supply to the Eastern bloc on a platter. Whoever supplies the food and the fertiliser dictates the rules of the new world order.

4. From Macro to Micro: The Individual Level and Time Preference

What does this monumental shock to capital structure and supply chains mean for the ordinary citizen, at the level of the individual? The calculus of rational choice shifts. When the present — bare survival, heating, daily sustenance — is endangered, people abandon long-term planning. Savings and long-term investments are abandoned; every spare penny goes on staying alive.

The population's consumption basket is distorted beyond recognition within weeks. In normal times, much of household income goes on services, travel, loan repayments or durable goods. Under energy-shock conditions, the lower tiers of the hierarchy of needs — food and utilities, the energy and heating bills — devour the entire disposable income.

5. The Annihilation of the Service Sector and the Fall of the Middle Class

This radical reallocation of household budgets hits not only those who buy food at higher prices; it also sets off a fatal chain reaction in the domestic labour market. As the middle class is impoverished, the service sector — the engine of modern Western economies — is annihilated.

• Restaurants empty out: input costs are unaffordable for the owner, and the customers have no discretionary income left to dine out.
• Tourism, marketing agencies, the beauty industry and the luxury goods market collapse within days, wiping out tens of thousands of domestic jobs.
• The workers laid off from the service sector thus end up as consumers in the market for basic foodstuffs, where prices are already astronomical and scarcity rules, further accelerating the spiral of social decline.

Bridge to Part 4

The paralysis of agriculture, the drastic rise in food prices and the collapse of the service sector generate societal tensions of historic proportions. In such a critical situation, governments do not sit on their hands; fear of an explosion of social unrest leads to immediate government interventions, often based on faulty logic.

In the concluding Part 4 of the series (Government Responses and the New World Order), we analyse, drawing on the economic evidence, how Western states and central banks further distort a market already under strain. We set out the consequences of price caps right through to empty supermarket shelves, the inflationary money-printing that sham subsidies trigger, and finally trace how the Hormuz shock permanently redraws the economic and political map of a deglobalising world.