Breaking the Cycle of Energy Dependency: A Strategy for Economic Resilience

A February 28 strike on Iran has made the Strait of Hormuz inaccessible, and the disruption now rippling through Dhaka's garment factories and Karachi's spinning mills was not born this year. It was built, year after year, through policy choices that treated energy as a revenue line rather than a public foundation.

The architecture of vulnerability

What we are watching in Bangladesh today is not a sudden supply failure; it is a long-standing exposure finally forced into the open. For decades, cheap domestic natural gas powered textiles, ceramics, steel, and fertilizer plants. That advantage has been systematically hollowed out. Investment in gas exploration stalled. Production from existing fields has declined. Power generation capacity expanded while the fuel to run those plants was never secured. Imported LNG filled the gap — expensive, volatile, and hostage to every geopolitical tremor from the Gulf to Eastern Europe.

The same playbook produced parallel vulnerabilities across the global periphery: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and every developing economy that priced its industrial competitiveness against the assumption of permanently cheap hydrocarbons. When price-sensitive LNG spot markets spike — as they do every time a chokepoint closes — those economies absorb the shock through shuttered production lines or costlier substitutes. Either path bleeds capital and narrows the margin for development.

The bill that arrives at the doorstep

The cost does not stay in the factory yards. When diesel, gas, and electricity prices rise, transportation, irrigation, industrial inputs, and food logistics all inflate. Consumers pay the difference at the market stall and the kitchen table. For Bangladesh specifically, the timing could hardly be worse: the country is approaching graduation from Least Developed Country status, which means export competitiveness will soon rest on productivity, technology, and energy efficiency — not merely cheap labor. An economy structurally hooked on imported fossil fuels cannot meet that bar.

What the rhetoric misses

In Nigeria this week, Delta State's governor offered the right framing — people, not oil, must power the energy future. The diagnosis is correct. The treatment is harder. Energy security for a country in Bangladesh's position means diversified generation backed by real fuel supply, transmission systems that actually carry what is produced, and a renewable build-out at a scale that displaces LNG rather than supplements it.

Until extraction and import contracts are unwound in favor of sovereign control over diversified generation, every headline about an "energy crisis" is shorthand for the same diagnosis: this is what systemic dependency looks like when the leverage is finally pulled.