India’s food prices fell 2.71 per cent in December 2025, according to the Consumer Food Price Index released by the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). That was the headline. Three months later, production lines at packaged food companies have ground to a halt, LPG supplies are being rationed, and commercial gas supply has been disrupted as domestic cooking fuel is prioritised. The numbers that looked reassuring at the end of last year are now being rewritten by a conflict most people associate with oil prices and geopolitics, not with biscuits or cooking oil.
The connection between a missile strike near the Strait of Hormuz and a Rs 30 pouch of refined oil in a Chennai kirana store is not abstract. It runs through specific, traceable mechanisms: energy costs, fertiliser supply, petrochemical packaging, and the logistics of a food system that was never designed to absorb simultaneous shocks across all four.
The philosopher Simone Weil, writing about affliction and necessity, argued that what appears to be fate is usually the working out of material conditions in human life. People do not choose to go hungry. They are made hungry by systems whose design choices are invisible until something breaks. The West Asia conflict is breaking enough to make those choices visible.
India’s crude oil import dependence stood at 87.7 per cent in FY2023-24, a record high, according to the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell under the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. A large share of that supply flows through or originates in West Asia. When conflict disrupts shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, the effect reaches diesel prices within weeks, touching irrigation pumps, cold storage facilities, and the trucks that move grain from mandis (wholesale markets) to mills.
Agriculture in India is far more energy-intensive than its ‘traditional’ framing suggests. When diesel gets expensive, so does every calorie produced using it.
What is less visible is the LPG link. India imports large volumes of LPG from Gulf suppliers, and the packaged food manufacturing sector depends on LPG-fired production lines. Conflict-driven shipping disruptions reduce that supply. The resulting shortage extends to piped natural gas, raising fuel procurement costs for food manufacturers at the same time as raw material and packaging input prices climb.
India’s agricultural productivity depends on imported fertilisers. According to the Department of Fertilisers under the Union Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers, India imports potash entirely and meets a large share of its phosphatic fertiliser requirement through imports, much of it sourced from West Asia and surrounding regions. When input availability tightens and prices rise globally, India’s fertiliser subsidy bill absorbs part of the shock, but the rest reaches farmers as delayed supply, reduced availability, or higher procurement costs compress margins before a single crop is harvested.
According to the First Advance Estimates published by MoSPI in January 2026, agriculture and allied sectors account for approximately 18 per cent of gross value added at current prices in FY2025-26. The exposure is not symmetrical. Large farms with financial reserves and access to credit manage input shocks. Small and marginal farmers, who grow most of India’s food, do not.
The packaging cost link is almost entirely absent from public discussion of food inflation. Every pouch of instant noodles, every Rs 5 snack, and every wrapper on a low-cost biscuit packet is made from polyethylene or polypropylene, derived from crude oil via naphtha and ethylene. Packaging regularly accounts for 15 to 30 per cent of the production cost of a low-value processed food item.
When crude prices rise through conflict-driven supply disruption, packaging input costs follow. Manufacturers face a choice: absorb the margin hit, raise prices, or reduce grammage. Most choose grammage reduction, what the industry calls shrinkflation. The Rs 10 packet still costs Rs 10. It now contains less. This mechanism escapes CPI measurement almost entirely while being immediately legible to anyone shopping on a fixed income.
The GST Council’s rationalisation of rates on packaged food items, effective September 2025, was designed to improve affordability. That policy intent is now being undercut by input cost inflation driven by a conflict and a supply chain that were never insulated from each other.
The households most affected are not buying premium packaged goods. They are buying atta (whole wheat flour) in 5-kg packets, cooking oil in pouches, biscuits sold loose by the piece. According to the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey 2023-24, published by MoSPI, food accounts for over 46 per cent of total household consumption expenditure in India, with the share higher for rural and lower-income households. Low-cost packaged staples now sit at the centre of caloric access for a large share of the urban poor.
These products carry the least pricing cushion and the highest share of packaging and transport cost relative to caloric value. A 10 per cent increase in the price of a branded cooking oil tin is inconvenient for a middle-income household. A 10 per cent increase in the price of a loose oil pouch is a budget crisis for a daily-wage household spending well over half its income on food.
This is where Weil’s point about necessity bites hardest. Necessity, in her framing, is the force that acts on human beings through material conditions without asking their consent. The daily-wage worker in Dharavi or Pallavaram did not choose to be exposed to Brent crude fluctuations. That exposure was built into the system on their behalf, by decades of policy that prioritised agricultural productivity without ever asking what would happen when the inputs stopped being cheap.
India’s post-Green Revolution food system was built on the assumption that inputs would remain accessible and affordable. Fertilisers, pesticides, diesel, mechanisation, and petrochemical packaging all scaled together, and agricultural productivity increased. But this productivity is input-intensive, which means it is also exposure-intensive. When global input markets are disrupted, Indian agriculture does not have the flexibility to quickly substitute.
India exported $11.8 billion of agricultural and food products to West Asia in 2025, accounting for 21.8 per cent of the country’s total agri-food exports, according to data compiled by the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority under the Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry. The conflict does not only threaten what India imports. It threatens what India sells. Rice exports to the region reached $4.43 billion, making up 36.7 per cent of India’s total rice exports. Banana shipments sent 79.6 per cent of India’s total banana exports to West Asia. Dairy, meat, and seafood face the same disruption simultaneously.
The policy response follows a familiar pattern: export bans, import duty adjustments, emergency buffer releases. These are tools for managing symptoms. They treat each shock as a temporary external disruption to an otherwise sound system. They do not address the question of why the system was built to be this exposed in the first place.
Hannah Arendt wrote that the most insidious form of injustice is the kind that presents itself as the natural order of things. Food price inflation is routinely framed as the natural consequence of war, weather, or global commodity cycles. What that framing conceals is that the degree of exposure, how deeply a conflict in West Asia reaches into the diet of a daily-wage household in Tamil Nadu, is a political outcome. It reflects choices about trade policy, agricultural infrastructure, and the absence of any insulation between global commodity markets and the food budgets of the poor.
The kirana store down the street is not a local economy. It is the downstream end of a supply chain that runs through refineries, fertiliser export terminals, shipping lanes, and the balance sheets of food manufacturers now rationing LPG. The conflict made that chain visible. The question is whether that visibility produces any reckoning with how the chain was built.
Sagari Gupta is a public policy researcher with over eight years of experience in social development, governance reforms, and data-driven policy analysis in India.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth