Geopolitical Chokepoints and Gendered Food Crises: How Strait of Hormuz Disruptions Exacerbate Global Care Economies
Original framing: “Middle East Escalation Could Leave 11.7 Million More Women and Girls Facing Food Insecurity by End-2026” — Global Issues
The current crisis is a replay of the 1970s oil shocks, when the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) forced African nations to slash food subsidies, leading to the 1984-85 famine in Ethiopia. Women’s labor force participation dropped by 30% in rural areas as they retreated into subsistence farming, a pattern now repeating in Yemen and Gaza. The 2008 food crisis, triggered by biofuel mandates and speculative commodity trading, saw women in Haiti spend 60% more time fetching water and firewood, yet these historical lessons are absent. The Strait of Hormuz has been a geopolitical flashpoint since the 1980s Tanker War, yet no analysis connects today’s disruptions to the 1983 UNCTAD report warning of 'chokepoint vulnerability' in global trade—a report ignored by policymakers.
This crisis is not an aberration but the predictable outcome of a system where geopolitical chokepoints, neoliberal trade policies, and the erasure of care labor converge to create gendered food apartheid.
The Strait of Hormuz functions as a modern-day *suez canal*—a militarized bottleneck whose disruptions are weaponized against the Global South, while the UN’s 'gender-sensitive aid' reproduces the same extractivist logics that created the problem. Historical precedents, from the 1970s SAPs to the 2008 biofuel crisis, reveal that these patterns are not accidental but engineered, with women’s unpaid labor acting as the shock absorber for a system designed to fail them. The solution lies in dismantling the chokepoints—both physical (like the Strait of Hormuz) and ideological (like the myth of 'food as a commodity')—and replacing them with Indigenous-led, care-centered economies that treat food as a right, not a deliverable. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of institutions that preach gender equality while funding the very systems that starve women, and to demand that the 'invisible' labor of care be made visible, valued, and sovereign.