September 2026: the world today, as seen by one Polish guy

Scroll to follow one closed strait into fuel pumps, harvests, bond markets and my own country’s winter heating. By Tom Wojcik · Figures as of 26 September 2026 I am a Pole. My country borders Europe’s largest war since 1945, heats itself with coal and imported gas, and arms itself on borrowed money. From here the news does not arrive as separate stories. Every generation believes it is living through the end of something. What is different in 2026 is that the crises have stopped arriving one at a time. A war in the Gulf becomes the price of my diesel, smaller harvests from Sudan to Yemen and a half-empty gas cavern in Bavaria. The world is not ending. But for thirty years we swapped buffers for dependencies, because a supplier is cheaper than a stockpile and a guarantee is cheaper than an army. When a dependency failed, we did not rebuild the buffer. We found another dependency. Every swap worked for as long as the thing at the other end was there. This year, several of those things were tested together. One strait, three crises Start about 4,000 kilometres south-east of Warsaw. US and Israeli military operations against Iran began in late February. Since March, Iran has kept the Strait of Hormuz closed with drones, missiles, mines and small boats. Tanker traffic through it has fallen by more than 90 percent. The International Energy Agency calls it the largest supply disruption the oil market has ever seen. What follows is that closure travelling in three directions at once: into fuel, into food and into this winter’s heating. Markers on the chart open when you hover over or tap them. A ceasefire that did not hold A fragile ceasefire pulled prices back to pre-war levels in early summer, then broke down. By early September Brent crude was near $97 a barrel, up 19 percent in a month, by mid-month it was around $105, and on 24 September it touched $108. On 22 September Iran handed Washington a written road map: a regional ceasefire of up to 60 days, a phased reopening of the strait and an end to the American naval blockade. Washington rejected it, and by one report the president expects to resume bombing after the November midterm elections. The detour around the Gulf runs through the Red Sea’s own chokepoint, the Bab al-Mandab, where Houthi forces seized a key Yemeni port this month. Somebody is getting rich A chart doing the rounds on investing forums this month shows a tanker-shipping fund going parabolic. It is real. The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF, which tracks the cost of hiring a crude tanker, rose more than 600 percent in the first two months of the war and was up more than 2,300 percent for the year by early September. Day rates for some supertankers went from under $100,000 before the war to a record of about $860,000 on 10 September. Shipping stocks+68% Tanker stocks+120% Tanker freight ETF+2,300% Gain in 2026 to early September, drawn to the same scale. The fund is tiny, and its own manager says rates will fall if the strait reopens. But the same closure that empties a granary fills somebody’s brokerage account. The war next door is burning the same fuel Ukrainian drones have hit Russian refineries at least 70 times this year, roughly once every four days by the IEA’s count, pushing Russia’s refining output to a two-decade low. Half of its six biggest diesel plants cut or halted output this month, and Moscow has restricted fuel exports. US diesel passed $6 a gallon for the first time on 10 September. The American president has phoned Kyiv to ask it to stop hitting diesel targets. France: a run on the pumps A viral post in mid-September declared that France was running out of fuel. The official data is less dramatic and more instructive. On 20 September, 15 percent of stations had run out of petrol or diesel, up from 11 percent two days earlier. In Grand Est it was 20 percent. The government rules out a shortage. About nine in ten of the dry stations belong to TotalEnergies, which caps petrol at €1.99 a litre, and drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. The official count also understates the gaps: a station is listed only when it is out of every petrol grade or out of diesel. A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps. Diesel moves food, and Hormuz moves what grows it The strait normally carries up to 30 percent of internationally traded fertiliser. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns that scarcity will cut yields and tighten food supplies through late 2026 and into 2027. The damage is delayed. Fertiliser that arrives late cannot recover lost yield, and because people keep eating grain planted before the disruption, the system looks fine until the smaller harvests come in. The baseline was already grim 2025 was the first year in the history of the Global Report on Food Crises with two confirmed famines, in Gaza and Sudan. Funding for food assistance fell an estimated 59 percent between 2022 and 2025. The World Food Programme estimates that sustained high oil prices could push up to 45 million more people into acute food insecurity. The harvest at home Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season. Last year there was a glut across the continent; in Poland alone growers lifted about 7 million tonnes, 18 percent more than the year before, and by spring farmers were selling below cost. So growers in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany planted 14 percent less. Then came five heatwaves and a drought. Their growers’ organisation now expects a harvest down 25 percent, one of the smallest in a decade, and in Belgium the price of potatoes for processing went from €10 to €150 a tonne within days. Grain is dearer too. Milling wheat on the Paris exchange has gone from €191 a tonne in January to about €245, a rise of 28 percent, and maize is up 36 percent. At Polish purchase points wheat has gone from 778 zloty a tonne to about 900, and maize from 748 to over 930. Back in May, traders were already pointing to frost and drought here, drought in France and America, and record energy prices. Self-sufficient, and paying anyway By Credit Agricole Bank Polska’s count, on FAO data, we are the most food self-sufficient country in the EU, covering our own needs in seven of nine food groups, everything except fish and vegetable fats. In a normal year we grow about a fifth more grain than we use, and we are among the world’s ten largest food exporters. If any country should be insulated from a food shock, it is this one. It is not, because self-sufficiency is counted in tonnes and prices are set elsewhere. Polish grain buyers follow the Paris exchange with a lag of three to seven days. When the world pays more, our grain can simply leave, so the price at home has to match. And the harvest itself is made of things we do not control: diesel at a record, fertiliser that has to sail through Hormuz, and water that the Vistula no longer carries. Poland can feed itself. It cannot price itself. We traded one dependency for another After 2022 we Europeans replaced Russian pipeline gas with liquefied natural gas (LNG) bought on a global market, and Qatar, shipping close to a fifth of the world’s LNG through Hormuz, was one of that market’s pillars. QatarEnergy declared force majeure in March. Drone damage at Ras Laffan has taken about 17 percent of capacity offline, with repairs estimated at three to five years. In August roughly one Qatari cargo made it through the strait, against a pre-war flow of some 6.5 million tonnes a month, dozens of cargoes. Gas storage is at a record low for the date EU storage67% Germany56% Share of capacity filled, mid-September. Dashed line: the EU’s 90 percent target, which countries may undershoot by up to 10 points in difficult market conditions. The summer heat that drove up cooling demand also forced nuclear plants to curtail output, and wind generation was weak. The new dependency ran through a chokepoint about 39 kilometres wide at its narrowest. Poland made the same swap, with oil After 2022 we stopped buying Russian crude, and Saudi Aramco became the main supplier to Orlen, Poland’s state-controlled oil refiner, at about 40 percent. That oil reached us without passing Hormuz, through a 1,200-kilometre pipeline across the Arabian desert to the Red Sea. On 10 September drones shut that pipeline. Aramco cancelled late-September cargoes and has reportedly told its European buyers to expect none in October. The pipeline restarted on 22 September at a trickle, with no date for full flow. Orlen is buying on the spot market from Norway, Britain, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and the Americas, and a new deal with Equinor covers up to a quarter of its refining capacity. Orlen says its refineries are being supplied without disruption. But an energy journalist, Jakub Wiech, writes that a pump price starting with a nine, 9 zloty a litre, is no longer out of reach. We have been burned on the spot market before Orlen set up a Swiss trading arm in 2022 to find oil that was not Russian, and gave it $600 million to work with. In November 2023, during a brief easing of US sanctions, that unit agreed to buy six million barrels of cheap Venezuelan crude. Within days it wired a $230 million advance to a Dubai intermediary, with no collateral and no bank guarantee. According to a Financial Times investigation, most of the money was turned into Tether, a crypto token pegged to the dollar, and handed over on USB sticks to brokers in Caracas hotels and restaurants. One cargo worth about $29 million arrived. Chartered tankers waited off Venezuela for months, at a cost of some $72 million. The state now puts the total loss at about 1.6 billion zloty, or $424 million. In August, Warsaw prosecutors charged three former managers, who deny wrongdoing and face up to 25 years in prison. It is worth remembering now, with the company shopping in a hurry again. A country that loses