Every day, billions of people light a stove to cook a meal — an act so routine it barely registers. But in 2026, that ordinary moment has become the fault line of an extraordinary crisis. The conflict engulfing the Middle East has already stripped global oil markets of more supply than the two major oil shocks of the 1970s combined. Now its shockwave is reaching something far more fundamental than fuel prices or trade balances: the ability of families in the developing world to simply feed themselves.
A chokepoint that feeds billions
Liquefied petroleum gas isn’t just another commodity. For around 3.4 billion people across the developing world, it’s the fuel that lights the stove every morning. In Asia alone, nearly 2.4 billion people rely on it as their primary cooking fuel. The scale is difficult to grasp — and so is the vulnerability that comes with it.
That vulnerability runs through a narrow strip of water. As of 2025, 30% of all seaborne LPG exports passed through the Strait of Hormuz. For countries like India and Indonesia, the exposure cuts even deeper: roughly two-thirds of India’s LPG consumption transited the strait in 2025.
The dependence isn’t accidental. Both countries built landmark clean cooking programs on LPG, collectively shifting more than 800 million people away from wood, charcoal, and kerosene since 2010. Today, 90% of Indonesian households cook with LPG, as do 80% of households in India. Neither country produces enough to meet its own needs — they’re net importers, and the Middle East is their primary supplier.
That structural reality has now become a structural crisis.
When the tap runs dry: supply collapse in Asia
The numbers from March 2026 are stark. LPG flows through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed by roughly 80%, falling from 1.5 million barrels per day to just 0.3 million barrels per day. The volumes lost were not an abstraction — they were sufficient to meet the cooking needs of 820 million people.
India bore the sharpest impact. Imports dropped by more than half in the first two months of the conflict, a loss of around 430,000 barrels per day. The government moved quickly, ordering domestic refineries to maximize LPG output — adding an estimated 180,000 barrels per day — and securing supplementary supply from alternative sources. A vessel from the United States takes roughly 40 days to reach Mumbai. From the Strait of Hormuz, the same journey takes four or five.
India’s strategic LPG storage covers just over 10 days of consumption. That buffer, always thin, has proved inadequate.
The social consequences have been immediate. Commercial consumers have been cut off from pre-conflict volumes, and prices on unregulated markets have surged. Local media have reported a striking pattern: people moving from cities back to rural areas, where wood and charcoal remain accessible. Decades of clean cooking progress, compressed into a single, desperate reversal.
Africa’s clean cooking gains are under threat
The disruption didn’t stop at Asia’s borders. LPG prices surged 90% above their 2025 average in India and East Africa, and 70% above in West Africa — even though West Africa sources almost none of its LPG from Gulf producers. The spike there reflects something important: LPG is a global market, and supply shocks travel fast regardless of geography.
The human cost in sub-Saharan Africa is measurable. According to IEA estimates, 45% of LPG-cooking households in the region are now spending at least one percentage point more of their income on cooking fuel than before the crisis. For the poorest households — many of them recent adopters of cleaner fuels — the burden is heavier still. One in eight households has seen LPG consume at least an additional 10% of their income.
For many, a return to charcoal or wood isn’t a choice but an inevitability. Before the crisis, LPG was the most cost-effective clean cooking solution for over 60% of sub-Saharan African households. That advantage has been severely eroded.
Governments scramble: rationing, subsidies, and electric stoves
Governments across the affected regions have responded quickly, if unevenly. Policy measures range from price caps and direct subsidies to outright rationing — Nepal supplied half-filled cylinders to consumers; the Maldives limited sales to 50% of normal volumes for a week. The Philippines suspended excise taxes on LPG for three months. Thailand froze cooking-gas prices.
The more structurally significant shift is toward electric cooking. India deployed 500,000 induction cooktops through a government-backed program run by EESL, while Cambodia and Tanzania reduced import duties on electric appliances. Tanzania also removed VAT on LPG cylinders and bulk storage facilities.
The IEA responded at the institutional level as well. On March 11, it launched the largest-ever release of emergency oil stocks by member countries, boosting available supply including LPG, and published its Sheltering from Oil Shocks report, outlining specific measures governments could take to protect household cooking fuel access.
One structural barrier remains stubborn. While around 80% of LPG-using households in Africa already have electricity access, only about one-third have a reliable supply — and reliability is a prerequisite for households to trust electric cooking as a permanent switch.
Building resilience before the next shock
The crisis has made one thing clear: energy security and development goals are no longer separate conversations. Expanding strategic LPG reserves, diversifying supply routes, and reducing the upfront cost of cleaner cooking equipment are now being treated as security imperatives rather than development line items.
The IEA has developed an analytical tool to help governments navigate these decisions — specifically, how tax and tariff reforms affect both household affordability and public finances. Applied to Tanzania, the analysis found that zero-rating VAT on clean cookstoves could enable up to 1.5 million additional people to make the transition, at a fiscal cost of just USD 0.7 million in foregone revenue. A meaningful ratio of impact to cost.
On July 9–10, 2026, the IEA will host a second Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa in Nairobi. The first summit mobilized USD 2.2 billion in commitments, of which USD 470 million has already been disbursed. The upcoming summit aims to build on that foundation — securing new commitments and advancing the policy frameworks needed to make clean cooking resilient to future shocks.
What happens next will depend on how quickly supply routes can be diversified, how effectively governments can expand storage capacity, and whether the international community treats cooking fuel access as the energy security issue it has always been. The 2026 crisis didn’t create these vulnerabilities. It simply made them impossible to ignore.
