The Indicator from Planet Money - A trucker, a farmer, and an entrepreneur walk into a global supply shock

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

The U.S. and Israel war with Iran is causing a shock to the economic system. Gas prices are higher, diesel too, and even fertilizer is being affected. Today on the show, we speak to three people about the economic ripple effects of the conflict: a truck driver, an Iowa corn farmer, and a manufacturer of an alternative to plastics.Come see Planet Money live on stage in April! 12 cities. Details and tix here: https://tix.to/pm-book-tour. Related episodes: A lot of gas trapped, oil reserves tapped, and Live Nation gets a (tiny) capWill Trump’s shipping insurance plan work? How Iran’s flagging economy inflamed its protests For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.  See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from planet money. I'm Daryan Woods. And I'm Ricky Malvey. The U.S.-Israel War with Iran has a grave human cost. And all across the world, there's a growing financial cost, too. Higher gas prices, delayed international flights. This is what economists call a supply shock.

The fossil fuels that power our factories, ships, and planes are suddenly a lot more expensive. So we wanted to hear from the people in America whose economic livelihood, are particularly sensitive to the war in the Middle East. Yeah, oil and gas are inputs into so many things around us. Plastics, fertilizer, even medicines. So today on the show, we'll hear from a truck driver about rising transportation costs. We'll ask an Iowa corn farmer about what he's doing as fertilizer prices shoot through the roof. And we'll speak with an entrepreneur who's got a few words for you, an alternative to plastics.

We're on a tour of economic ripple effects from the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, especially as they touch America. And maybe the side effect that's most in our face when we're driving anywhere is what we see on gas station signs. The price of fuel is particularly important for truckers like Forrest Atkinson. I live full-time out of this truck, so it's my home and I just get to go out and have adventures. When we spoke, she was just delivering some packaging to a factory that makes cheese. And like, can I get you to sign it?

Yeah, or I can be a coffee for you. Okay, like, yeah. And yeah, as she drives around the U.S., Forest is facing higher diesel costs. Diesel prices were up about a third on March 9th compared to a month earlier before the war. And that could mean hundreds of extra dollars each time she fills up her semi-track. Last week, diesel was $4.86 a gallon. Her employer does pick up the tab, but she says when prices get really high, they might become choosy about which stations she's allowed to refuel at.

When things do get really bad, they'll, like, literally, like, send us a message on our, our tablets or e-logs and say, like, you're not allowed to, like, fuel here. Like, you're just not allowed to as a company driver, and you can get in a little bit of trouble if you do do that. As of yet, the company hasn't blacklisted more expensive gas stations. And maybe that's one indicator that energy prices aren't at red alert levels right now. We'll see if that's true. I hope that it is in this case because I do love my job.

I do love long-haul trucking. And I hope that the prices do get lower because if fuel prices rise, the consumers will probably end up eating that bill. Right now, Forrest is relieved. She's an employed truck driver, not someone who owns their own truck and pays for their own fuel costs. There's just too much unpredictability in the trucking world, especially in 2026.

Things are just changing every single week with free patterns and tariffs and now fuel prices. It's definitely probably not a good time to be an owner operator. So higher diesel prices, that's a pretty direct increase in costs from the war. And going down another link in the chain, you get higher fertilizer costs too. Mark Mueller is a corn farmer in Iowa. He uses a lot of fertilizer. It is the single biggest expense I had for raising corn. nitrogen fertilizer is most commonly made with natural gas. And the problem with natural gas,

though, is a lot of it is stuck in the Persian Gulf, which makes 20% of the world supply of liquefied natural gas. That's pushing up natural gas prices, which is pushing up fertilizer costs. Even though the U.S. is a net exporter of natural gas, that doesn't help nitrogen fertilizer prices domestically. Fertilizer is traded globally, so countries like, say, Brazil or India, which might have previously bought from fertilizer plants outside the U.S. would now push up U.S. or Canadian fertilizer prices if they were to buy from North America. And it's bad timing for Mark. Corn planting season starts in a month right when he needs to buy fertilizer.

The price would be cheaper if I'd bought it months ago, but I didn't know that. That leaves Mark with few options. The fertilizers that I need for growing to corn, I can't do without. I'm pretty much a captive audience. Mark says he could just do prefer his spending on big equipment like tractors? In fact, I haven't bought a new tractor in decades. He could also plant soybeans instead of corn.

Soybeans get their nitrogen from the atmosphere, not fertilizer. You can make your money back on soybeans, but then you've got another crop coming from Brazil in six months. Mark reckons that Brazilian competition means soybeans won't pay as much as corn. Plus, you've got all kinds of geopolitics there, too, with China's on-again, off-again demand, depending on how the trade war is going. Along with his own farming, Mark is also the president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association. So he's been monitoring the fertilizer industry as it consolidates. He says when he started farming decades ago, there were about 20 fertilizer companies.

Now, there's four. And he worries that less competition means higher prices. The fertilizer industry has us hostage. They know it. Mark is really squeezed here, and he's seeing other farmers threatened with losing the bank loans. they depend on. Mark's not there yet himself. Maybe I'd choose to retire. I'll tell you right now, I'm 67 years old, and I probably could retire. But up to this point, I've made money farming. I enjoy what I'm doing, and I'm not quite sure

what I would do if I wasn't farming. In contrast to Mark, some people are actually positioned to profit from the turmoil, not because of anything nefarious, just because they're likely to have people wanting more of what they're selling in this crisis. Yeah, so the higher cost of oil is popping up in less obvious ways. One example is plastic. Because most plastic is made from oil, the cost of that is higher. The price of the main plastic we use, polyethylene, shot up about 30% in the war's first couple of weeks. Albert Doer is the chairman and CEO of UBQ materials. Oil in some way or another touches every single facet of our material development. Albert's company makes a plastic alternative.

Mercedes-Benz uses it in its car components. PepsiCo uses the material in its packing crates. And importantly, it doesn't use oil as an input. What we're talking about is a material made out of chicken bones, vegetables, fruit. All of the dirty paper and cardboard that you throw away in your garbage bin, together with all of those mixed plastics that no one knows how to recycle. The process basically slowly melts the garbage and turns it into a plastic-like material that's called UBQ.

A lot of products that we were always used to extracting materials from the planet were now able to make from our own waste. Albert says the material is already cheaper than plastic, but with the spike in plastic costs due to the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, the relative cost looks even better. Clearly, it's made us a lot more competitive. The more that these other materials get expensive, the easier it is from an economic point of view to make this switchover. Albert says he has not had a rush of companies knocking on his door.

You know, there are some downsides to this plastic alternative. Like, it's not as flexible with how you can color it. The company's also relatively young and still scaling up. When companies make a switch to a more affordable alternative, that's called substitution. And the more substitution happens, the more we can adapt to the oil crisis. What we learned talking to Forest, Mark and Albert, though, is that there's not a lot of great short-term options for businesses. You can make some changes. Like maybe a trucker can avoid the priciest refueling station. But if the war drags on over more weeks and months,

the economy will change. A farmer could avoid pricey fertilizer by switching to soybeans. A manufacturer using plastic might substitute to Albert Doer's alternative. Some businesses will even go bankrupt, replaced by firms that have factored in higher energy prices from day one. So when trying to predict how bad the oil crisis will be for the economy, don't count out human ingenuity. This episode was produced by Cooper Katzby Kim with engineering by Robert Rodriguez, who's fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Julia Ritchie edited this episode. Cake and Canon edits the show. The Indicator is a production of NPR.