WHAT NOW, WEDNESDAY: A War Far Away Has a Way of Showing Up at Dinner

TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 1 April) — We Filipinos are good at filing away distant wars under the category of ‘Nakakaalarma, but not yet my problem.’

Until diesel goes up.

Until the tricycle fare feels heavier.

Until the vegetables look the same but cost more.

Until a mother or father standing at the palengke does quick arithmetic in the head and quietly puts one item back.

That is how a war in the Middle East stops being foreign news and becomes household news.

This is why the Iran war, and especially the threat to the Strait of Hormuz, should not be treated as just another grim international spectacle. The Strait is one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints. About 20 million barrels a day passed through it in 2025, roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, and about 80 percent of those shipments were headed to Asia. 

Which means this is not mainly a Gulf story.

It is an Asian story.

And for countries like the Philippines, it is a kitchen-table story.

We sometimes talk about oil as if it were a concern mainly for car owners, as if the whole drama begins and ends at the gasoline station. But diesel is not just for motorists with a full tank and a bad mood. Diesel moves trucks. Trucks move rice, fish, vegetables, medicine, construction materials, deliveries, and all the invisible cargo of everyday life. Once fuel becomes more expensive, transport follows. Once transport becomes more expensive, food eventually follows. That is the real route by which geopolitics enters the Filipino home. 

And we are not watching this from a safe distance.

CNA quotes energy analyst Putra Adhiguna saying that 98 percent of the Philippines’ crude imports come from the Middle East. On March 26 that the Philippine government activated a 20-billion peso emergency fund to strengthen fuel security, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the country had about 45 days’ worth of oil supply. Those are not ceremonial numbers. They are warning labels with official formatting. 

So let us stop pretending the sequence is hard to understand.

First comes fuel.

Then transport.

Then food.

And after that, the old familiar household visitors begin arriving one by one: deferred purchases, smaller portions, postponed plans, more careful commuting, less room for error.

This is the quiet brutality of modern conflict. The missiles may land there. The anxiety lands here.

The broader point is even more unsettling. Asia built much of its prosperity on imported energy moving through narrow, fragile sea lanes. It worked wonderfully when the world was merely tense. It looks much less clever when the world becomes openly dangerous. The problem is not only this war. The problem is a region, and a country, still too vulnerable to every shock that passes through an oil chokepoint. 

So yes, the war is far away.

But by the time it reaches us, it will no longer look like war.

It will look like a receipt.

It will look like another increase at the pump.

It will look like a vendor explaining why prices had to change.

It will look like a family adjusting yet again to a crisis they did not create.

And because this is Holy Wednesday, perhaps that is the reminder worth keeping close: before the silence of Good Friday and the glory of Easter Sunday, there is first the quieter reckoning — the sober moment when we are asked to see clearly what suffering costs, who carries it, and how often the innocent pay for the sins of the powerful.

That lesson, too, is arriving at our door.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Marriz B. Agbon is a Mindanawon now based in Taguig City, a chamber executive and development professional who previously led agribusiness promotion initiatives in government, working with private sector groups and chambers of commerce to strengthen regional economies. A graduate of the SBEP program of the University of Asia and the Pacific, he has spent much of his career at the intersection of business, policy, and enterprise development. In recent years, he has turned increasingly to writing — reflecting on aging, endurance sports, family history, and the quiet lessons of everyday life. He writes another column for MindaNews — “South of the 8th Parallel” — every Sunday.)