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plant lover, cookie monster, shoe fiend
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It’s a busy Saturday at FreshCo on B.C.’s northern Sunshine Coast, and Laurance Playford-Beaudet is stocking up on a week of essentials. He has two goals: keep his bill as close to $100 as possible, and prioritize calorie-dense foods, as he’s got a tree-planting contract coming up on Texada Island, where he lives.
“I’m trying to get cheaper meals and staples,” he says, standing in front of the eggs. FreshCo used to have a well-priced carton of 18 eggs, he says, that were good, with rich, orange yolks, but they don’t carry them anymore. He settles for a dozen large brown eggs and moves on to the canned food aisle, where he gets just one can of tuna — too expensive to buy more, these days — and some canned ham.
Playford-Beaudet, who works at the qathet Resource Recovery Centre and does trash collection on Texada, is on a tight budget. He earns about $40,000 per year and spends between $400 and $600 per month on groceries for his one-person household. It’s increasingly difficult to make ends meet, he says.
Playford-Beaudet is not alone. Since COVID-19 hit in 2020, grocery prices have skyrocketed, even in comparison to inflation.
Laurance Playford-Beaudet is shopping for cheaper meals and staples.
Photo for The Tyee by andrea bennett.
If you look at the consumer price index, says Iglika Ivanova, co-executive director of BC Policy Solutions, grocery prices in B.C. increased 24 per cent between December 2021 and December 2025. That’s nine points higher than general inflation, which rose a total of 15 per cent over the same period. And prices keep rising: in December alone, food prices were up 6.2 per cent in Canada — twice the rate of the United States, and three times the rate of France and Germany.
Certain staples, such as coffee, are even worse. A bag of beans was up 31 per cent in December 2025 compared with the previous year.
In part, Ivanova says, especially when you’re looking at a weather-sensitive crop such as coffee, this is due to climate change, other pressures such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and war.
“The war in Ukraine caused high energy costs and spikes in the price of wheat and some other things that were coming out of that region,” she says.
She adds that those have since come down. (The United States’ war against Iran is now expected to push the cost of oil and food up again.)
Even taking geopolitical trends and climate change into consideration, Ivanova says, the biggest single contributing factor pushing prices up is “market power” and the concentration of power in the food industry.
“Five players control a big chunk of it,” she says, referring to the large companies that control the grocery business in Canada. “But it’s not just the grocers. Meat processing and other kinds of intermediary steps in that supply chain are also very highly concentrated.”
What’s bad in big cities is even worse in B.C.’s rural and remote communities, where groceries cost more, according to BC Centre for Disease Control food costing reports.
When people are food insecure, experts told The Tyee, every little bit helps — like the federal government’s recently announced increased Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, formerly known as the GST credit. But to meaningfully address the problem, bigger and better solutions are needed.
‘I start every month in the red’
Grace Chaster, the community house co-ordinator for LIFT, a non-profit society serving Powell River, sees the grocery affordability crunch up close. She experiences it herself as a single mom with three kids at home, and sees the struggle her clients face as she tries to help them access housing, mental health and food supports.
“I start every month in the red,” she tells me, describing her finances, as she pulls a pan of chicken thighs out of the oven.
Chaster’s kitchen fills with the smell of lemon and herbs. Her two teen boys come in to make a plate, while her youngest sends in a parade of robotic dinosaurs. (He’s more of a snacker, and ate earlier.)
Grace Chaster prioritizes feeding her kids healthy, nutritious meals. But the math on her earnings, rent and groceries increasingly doesn’t add up.
Photos for The Tyee by andrea bennett.
Chaster prioritizes feeding her kids hearty, nutritious meals. The oldest two will eat a second dinner later, she says. Still, some grocery items are so costly these days that when they’ve run out, they don’t buy more until the next paycheque. Cheese, for example.
Chaster estimates that she earns about $56,000 a year, spending $1,500 minimum per month on groceries and $3,000 on rent. Increasingly, she says, the math just doesn’t add up.
Her clients are struggling, too. More people are coming in to ask for grocery cards. LIFT’s free food shelves are very, very busy. People are moving in with family members, or having family move in with them. It’s harder for single parents, Chaster says, which is reflected in Statistics Canada data — single-parent families are by far the most likely to be food insecure.
The Loop program has been a help, Chaster says. Every week, she picks up groceries, fruits and vegetables from local stores that are still good but, for whatever reason, aren’t saleable. Food from the program is used by LIFT’s Community Resource Centre to cook a daily hot lunch. Chaster distributes the rest to families in the community. If there’s a surplus, staff take some home. Chaster was hoping to make dinner tonight with food from Loop, but there wasn’t any meat today.
When I ask Chaster if she thinks the increased Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit will help in a meaningful way, she takes a moment to mentally crunch the numbers. Everything helps, she says. But it could be better. And for families like hers, the low-income benefits cutoff could be higher. The government is missing a lot of people on the lower end of middle class who are struggling, she says.
Ivanova echoes Chaster’s sentiments. In short, every bit helps.
“But the amount’s not enough to take most people out of poverty,” Ivanova says. “They're not high enough to really cover much of the grocery bill.”
And there’s another issue. “It doesn’t tackle the root causes,” Ivanova says.
“It’s not going to do anything for market power. If you think about it, [the benefit] subsidizes profits for grocers. A transfer says, ‘It’s OK to keep prices high, we'll just give people some government money,’ right?” she says.
“In that way, it needs to be combined with some other measures that are aimed at breaking up that market power, or at least breaking up the profiteering from the market power.”
The impacts of food insecurity on health
Though the consumer price index is useful for a big-picture idea of grocery affordability trends, it doesn’t tell the whole story in places like the northern Sunshine Coast, which is a long drive and a ferry ride away from Victoria, or two ferries away from Vancouver — meaning grocery staples have farther to travel before they hit the shelves.
In 2022, the most recent year it was completed, the BC Centre for Disease Control’s Food Costing report estimated food costs for a family of four in Vancouver Coastal Health’s geographic area at $1,311. The same cart of groceries cost $1,441 in Powell River, and $1,480 in Bella Coola.
Laurance Playford-Beaudet shops with a basket instead of a cart in order to help keep his grocery bill down.
Photo for The Tyee by andrea bennett.
When The Tyee asked if the BC Centre for Disease Control would be replicating and updating this report, a spokesperson told The Tyee by email that the centre is “reviewing how it reports on food costing in B.C. and looking at other data sources that may help monitor food security throughout the province going forward.”
Those data sources, the spokesperson added, include Statistics Canada’s Food Price Data Hub and Market Basket Measure.
Health Canada’s nutritious food basket, which was developed by the federal government and is used to create food costing reports, also has its drawbacks.
It contains mostly unprocessed food that takes time to prepare. And while the BC Centre for Disease Control’s 2022 report adds five per cent to the basket to “account for miscellaneous foods such as coffee, tea, herbs, spices and condiments,” the nutritious food basket doesn’t include snack food or treats like chocolate or chips — items most people do need to build into their diets in moderation in order to avoid eschewing their “healthy” packed lunch for takeout. The 2022 report acknowledges a few more drawbacks: the basket also doesn’t consider cultural preferences, dietary restrictions, allergies or special diets.
“The food basket is not a shopping list, nor is it intended to be a recommendation for a nutritious diet,” says Gerry Kasten, a retired honorary lecturer in food, nutrition and health at the University of British Columbia.
“What the food basket is is a tool — so that we have a standardized food list that can be priced over, time and again.”
We’ve known for a long time that food insecurity has significant health impacts, Kasten says, pointing to the University of Toronto’s PROOF project, which studies food insecurity as a public health problem, and the federal government’s “Key Health Inequalities in Canada” report.
Diabetes, for example, is almost twice as high in the lowest income quintile as in the highest income quintile, Kasten says.
While the factors are a bit complex, Kasten says — highly processed foods tend to be more affordable than nutritious foods, for example — the fix is not that complicated.
“Dietitians and people working in social services have met with politicians over the years,” Kasten says, and the message has remained the same. “If we spent more money on assuring that people had sufficient income, the health costs would drop dramatically enough to pay for that added expense.”
“Food insecurity cannot be addressed with food. It must be addressed via income,” Kasten says.
“We can't ‘food bank’ our way out of food insecurity, we can't ‘decrease food waste’ our way out of food insecurity, we can't ‘smart shopping’ our way out of food insecurity,” he says.
Basic income, windfall taxes, grocery controls
So, what should Canada be doing differently?
Both the 1970s basic income experiment out of Dauphin, Manitoba, and the more recent basic income pilot project in Ontario have shown that basic income “makes an enormous difference to health,” Kasten says.
Canada could also consider grocery price control tools.
One place to consider looking to is France, where legislation ties food prices to food production costs — meaning the cost of goods decreases when the cost of agricultural commodities such as grains and sugar goes down.
Last April, just ahead of the election, then-leader of the NDP Jagmeet Singh vowed the party would “move fast” to bring down grocery prices.
“If the grocers won’t play fair, we’ll legislate,” he promised.
The NDP proposed introducing “emergency price caps” on grocery essentials, and a windfall tax on grocery profits. It cited France, and Greece, which has combated what its prime minister has referred to as “greedflation” with profit caps on basic grocery staples, and fines for exceeding those caps.
The NDP then suffered a historic loss as voters shifted their vote to the Liberals, considering Mark Carney the best bet to stand up to Donald Trump.
But government intervention on grocery prices might be more popular than the NDP’s election results would imply. A recent Nanos Research poll showed grocery prices were the “primary concern” for 52.3 per cent of Canadians when saving money this year.
Most of the time, Laurance Playford-Beaudet chooses grocery items based on price.
Photo for The Tyee by andrea bennett.
In 2023, Canadian public policy expert Vass Bednar argued for “a temporary price ceiling on a selection of core grocery goods,” again citing policies adopted by Greece and France.
And Carney’s announcement about the GST credit increase and rebranding did include other grocery affordability promises.
He promised the creation of a national food security strategy that “strengthens domestic food production and improves access to affordable, nutritious food.”
The strategy, Carney said, would “include measures to implement unit price labelling and support the work of the Competition Bureau in monitoring and enforcing competition in the market, including food supply chains.”
But that promise, Ivanova points out, rings a bit hollow — he’s cutting staff from the Competition Bureau, she says, and it’s unclear how the bureau will carry out more work with less staff.
Kasten points out there are precedents in Canada for measures like grocery caps.
“I’m so old that I remember Trudeau the elder implementing wage and price freezes. And that included things like rent freezes,” Kasten told The Tyee.
“So governments do have those tools,” Kasten said. But, he added, “in this neoliberal, conservative world, I cannot picture those being used.”
‘I’m basically working all the time’
Back at the FreshCo, Playford-Beaudet is running out of space in the basket he uses instead of a cart — it helps him keep from overspending.
He’s picked up a pork shoulder, some bacon, some turkey, some eggs and some ham. Nutella, peanut butter, coffee creamer, bagels, ice cream and onions. Frozen corn dogs, potato patties, perogies, dish detergent. Most of the time, he’s choosing items based on price. Except for the tomato paste. The Mutti brand is just much better than the alternatives, and it’s worth the extra cost.
It’s increasingly difficult to make ends meet, says Laurance Playford-Beaudet.
Photo for The Tyee by andrea bennett.
Playford-Beaudet’s modest basket of groceries comes out to $126.62, close to, but over, what he was hoping to spend. In February 2020, the butter in his basket would have cost $4.65, according to the consumer price index. Today, it’s $5.99. That’s a 28.8 per cent increase, common for so many of the other staple items in his basket.
It's been “pretty hard” to afford everything, Playford-Beaudet says.
“I’m basically working all the time. I never pass up on an extra shift,” he says. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png)
The subpoenas are necessary to allow companies to disclose documents to the Committee without interference by foreign governments. Since the subpoenas were issued, the technology companies have produced to the Committee thousands of internal documents and communications with the European Commission and EU Member States pursuant to the Committee's subpoenas.
In light of this reporting, the Committee has reiterated that its subpoenas to the technology companies are "continuing in nature" and require the companies to preserve and produce relevant communications, including these auto-deleting messages, with foreign censors.
Read the letter to Alphabet here.
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Read the letter to Apple here.
Read the letter to Meta here.
Read the letter to Microsoft here.
Read the letter to OpenAI here.
Read the letter to Reddit here.
Read the letter to Rumble here.
Read the letter to TikTok here.
Read the letter to xAI here.
Jonathan Moore: If we have to ask that question, we have failed. Instead of fighting over who gets to catch the remaining fish, B.C.'s salmon-reliant people should unite and fight for salmon and salmon habitats
At international and regional levels, different groups that rely on salmon are eyeing the size of their piece of the salmon pie. At the international level, Canada and the U.S. are in negotiations over fisheries allocations as part of the renewal of the Pacific Salmon Treaty. Within B.C., the salmon allocation policy is under review and recreational fishing organizations have been raising concerns they might no longer be given priority over commercial fisheries for coho and chinook.
There are indeed important and hard decisions to be made about which sectors and groups should be prioritized in salmon fisheries. Since the 1980s, commercial salmon fisheries in B.C. have had their catches reduced by 70 per cent to protect salmon stocks. Over the last 50 years, some Indigenous communities have had their harvests of salmon drop by 80 per cent — fisheries that are culturally essential and constitutionally protected. Recreational sectors have had reductions in fishing opportunities such as to decrease conflicts with southern resident killer whales.
Allocation decisions such as these become infinitely harder as salmon populations decline. These challenging conversations about salmon allocation should not lose sight that all salmon fisheries are united by a need for healthy salmon populations and ecosystems.
There are no silver bullets in salmon fisheries management. Catch-and-release in ocean fisheries sounds like an easy compromise, but a recent study found that even if coho salmon were released in good condition, they suffered 17 per cent post-release mortality. Hatchery propagation may support some fishing opportunities, but also can harm wild stocks due to competition and genetic effects.
The salmon fisheries of the future will need to be different than those in the past. Strong salmon returns are increasingly uncertain and unpredictable. Fisheries and their management will need to be resilient and responsive to these swings, but this requires robust information on stock status, migration routes, and timing. This understanding comes from counts from creek-walkers, catch records from anglers, and cutting-edge genetic tools. Cuts in monitoring means that fisheries managers are increasingly operating in the dark. Shifting some fisheries from the ocean to the rivers will lower risks of accidentally harvesting non-target stocks and facilitate higher and more sustainable harvests. Fisheries will be able to sustainably harvest more salmon if different groups work together to collect and share data, plan fisheries, and manage fishery risks.
More broadly, I worry that if salmon-reliant peoples focus on fighting over who gets to catch the remaining fish, the bigger picture will be missed. Recent analyses by the Pacific Salmon Foundation found that 70 per cent of B.C. salmon populations are in decline. Aggressive forestry leads to landslides and flooding. Poorly regulated mines pollute waters. The federal government recently passed legislation that can fast-track major projects and bypass environmental assessments, and are also talking of more pipelines. Continued inaction to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is making the ocean increasingly inhospitably warm for salmon. Provincial and federal budgets are failing to sufficiently invest in salmon monitoring and rebuilding and watershed health.
If fishing sectors are concerned with their lack of access and the size of their piece of the pie, perhaps they should also lobby to address these root causes of salmon declines to protect and rebuild the total size of the pie.
“Who gets to catch the last salmon?” is the wrong question, of course. If we have to ask that question, we have failed. People who value salmon fisheries should unite and fight for salmon and salmon habitats so that we never have to ask that question.
Jonathan Moore is a professor of aquatic ecology at Simon Fraser University, holds the Liber Ero Chair of coastal science and management, and is the lead of the salmon watersheds lab.
Cuba’s electrical grid suffered a total collapse on Monday, the country’s power operator said, marking the latest nationwide blackout in recent years, and the first since the US effectively shut off the flow of oil to Cuba.
Efforts are underway to restore power across the Caribbean island, the state-owned operator said.
Nationwide power outages have been reported frequently over the past few years. Cuban officials have previously attributed them to US economic sanctions, though critics have also faulted a lack of investment in the island’s ailing generation system.
Cuba heavily relies on oil for electricity generation. The effective blockade of fuel shipments has worsened the country’s energy crisis, causing intermittent power cuts, a rationing of medical supplies and a decrease in tourism, officials have said. Fuel prices have skyrocketed so much that it can cost up to $300 in the unofficial market to fill up a car’s gas tank.
CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Friday that no oil had been delivered to the island in the last three months. He also said on Friday that Cuban officials have held talks with the United States to “identify the bilateral problems that need a solution.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
President Donald Trump has scored another victory for himself and his base that is sure to hurt people of color and those who were already struggling to afford daily necessities. About 200,000 immigrant truck drivers are losing their commercial driver's licenses, thanks to a new rule from the Trump administration that takes effect March 16. It's sure to put the already-struggling trucking industry in an even more dire situation as energy costs surge thanks to the President's ill-advised war with Iran that he cosigned with Israel. Things are bleak, friends.
The rule is just about as nonsensical as nonsensical gets. It bars immigrants who are asylum seekers, refugees or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients from obtaining a CDL, according to The Washington Post. That's right, people who are here legally are barred from getting a license to drive a semi-truck because of, well, racism. Those who currently have a valid CDL will lose their privileges as their licenses expire, not immediately.
The Trump administration will point to high-profile fatal crashes involving immigrant truck drivers last summer as a reason for the ban, but that's really a load of dogshit at the end of the day. Show me one immigrant-related (legal status be damned) truck crash, and I'm sure there are dozens — if not hundreds or thousands — of REAL PATRIOT truck drivers who have done something similar on the road. In a vile statement, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, "For far too long, America has allowed dangerous foreign drivers to abuse our truck licensing systems — wreaking havoc on our roadways." Of course, a lawyer who is leading a lawsuit against the rule contends that even the Trump administration has conceded that there's no empirical relationship between a person's nationality and their safety behind the wheel.
Those 200,000 drivers make up about 5% of all commercial vehicle licenses, according to The Washington Post. Because of long hours, low pay, dangerous road conditions and extended periods away from home, there's a ton of turnover in the industry. As Americans leave, immigrants have moved in and found worsening working conditions and deregulation.
WaPo spoke with Aleksei Semenovskii, a long-haul trucker from Pennsylvania who has been on the road since 2020. He's now set to lose his license in September despite having no accidents or violations on his record.
"They're roasting me under open fire for not having anything done illegal," the 41-year-old Russian asylum seeker told the Post.
Semenovskii is incredibly nervous over what this new rule means for his ability to support his wife and 14-year-old daughter. Semenovskii — a lawyer by trade — and his family fled Russia for the U.S. in 2019 with three suitcases after he faced threats of a fabricated criminal case related to his opposition to Vladimir Putin's government. During the Pandemic, he took out a near-$200,000 loan for a tractor and a trailer that he's still working to pay back, the outlet reports. For the past four years, he's been transporting heavy machinery, building materials, food and Amazon merchandise across all the Lower 48 states.
"This [rule] is devastating for my family," said Semenovskii, breaking down in tears. "I've built this small business relying on my driving privileges. I didn't think anyone could take this away from me for just being an immigrant."
NPR spoke to Jorge Rivera, who, after being a commercial trucker in the U.S. for over a decade, found out he couldn't renew his CDL. Riviera was brought to the U.S. illegally from Mexico when he was just two years old and is enrolled in the DACA program. It gave him the ability to get his CDL in 2014 and start his own trucking company.
"It was like a slap in the face, because I've done everything the right way," Rivera said. "I've stayed out of trouble. I've been a law-abiding noncitizen, is what I like to say."
[...]
"At this point, I'm just pretty much bracing for the worst," he said.
He told NPR that he doesn't really know what he'll do without a trucking license, saying he's even got his company name tattooed on his body.
As we reported last year, Trump signed an executive order that required truck drivers to speak English... even though it was already a law. Later that summer, cops ticketed two truck drivers for not speaking English at a traffic stop. Now, nearly a year after the executive order, thousands of immigrant drivers have lost their right to drive and about 3,000 driver training centers have had their accreditation revoked for failing to meet these new federal standards.
What might get lost in all of this is the simple fact that having fewer truckers on the road means that the price of everybody's goods is only going to continue to increase. Of course, that's something Trump vigorously campaigned against — not that his supporters will care much. The Post spoke with transportation experts, and, while they don't expect the new rules to have much of an impact on the industry or safety, they could lead to companies charging higher rates as the workforce shrinks. Do you know who ends up footing that bill? You and me, buddy.
"I have not heard any concerns about labor shortages or significant disruption to the supply chain or transportation industry, but this change will be reflected in the cost of doing business," said Gregory Reed, a transportation attorney who specializes in regulatory issues.
When you add in the fact that the average price of a gallon of diesel is now $4.99, according to AAA, things are definitely not going to get cheaper, to say the least. Now, filling up a 300-gallon fuel tank on a tractor-trailer can cost nearly $1,500. Just a month ago, when the average gallon of diesel cost $3.65, that same full tank cost about $1,100.
I'm not really sure how this all ends for immigrant truckers, the Trump administration or for people who rely on the trucking industry (read: everybody in the U.S.), but I do have a real bad feeling that things are going to get much worse before they can get better, and there are going to be a lot of people going without a lot of necessities very soon.
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A senior Iranian official has told CNN that Tehran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz — but only if cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, not US dollars. The condition, if formalised, would represent the most significant challenge to the petrodollar system in its fifty-two-year history, striking at the financial architecture that underpins American global power rather than at US military assets.
Fourteen days into the war that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February, the strategic picture has shifted in ways that no oil price chart yet reflects. While markets have focused on Brent crude’s surge above $100 a barrel and the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding across the Persian Gulf region, a single sentence attributed to a senior Iranian official on Friday may prove more consequential than any of the preceding military exchanges.
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SubscribeIran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz on the condition that the cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, a senior Iranian official told CNN. The official described the potential move as part of Tehran’s plan to manage the controlled reopening of the strategic waterway, which has been effectively closed since March 1 following US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
The financial implications deserve more attention than they have so far received.
The Architecture of American Financial Power
To understand why the yuan condition matters, it is necessary to understand what the petrodollar system actually is. Born from the Nixon shock of 1971 and formalised in 1974, the arrangement under which Saudi Arabia and the broader Gulf agreed to denominate all oil sales in US dollars created a self-reinforcing loop that has governed global finance ever since. Because oil — the world’s most traded commodity — must be purchased in dollars, every nation that imports energy must first acquire dollars. Every central bank holds dollar reserves for precisely this reason. The dollar’s status as the world’s primary reserve currency is not an abstract achievement; it flows directly and mechanically from oil.
Global oil is predominantly traded in US dollars, except for sanctioned Russian oil, which is priced in roubles or yuan. Iran’s proposal would extend that exception to the world’s single most critical maritime chokepoint.
The Strait as a Financial Weapon
The Strait of Hormuz, a major maritime choke point for global energy trade, has experienced ongoing geopolitical and economic disruption since 28 February 2026, following joint military strikes by the United States and Israel on Iran, which included the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
Starting on March 4, 2026, Iranian forces declared the Strait “closed,” threatening and carrying out attacks on ships attempting to transit. The disruption is not marginal. The conflict disrupted approximately 20% of global oil supplies transiting the Strait of Hormuz, causing prices on the Brent crude oil market to rise from around $70 to over $110 per barrel within days.
At least 16 oil tankers, cargo ships and other vessels have been attacked in and around the Strait of Hormuz, the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman since the war began two weeks ago, according to the UK’s maritime agency. War-risk insurance through the strait has become effectively prohibitive for most commercial operators.
The United States has responded to the blockade with escalating military pressure. Trump said the US bombed “every military target” on Iran’s Kharg Island and threatened to attack the island’s oil infrastructure if Iran continues to block ships from traversing the strait.
Iran’s response was not another missile strike. It was the yuan condition.
A Bifurcated Oil Market Takes Shape
What makes the Iranian proposal structurally significant is not simply that it challenges the dollar — de-dollarisation rhetoric has circulated for years without materialising into meaningful change. What is different here is the mechanism. Tehran is not merely proposing that some bilateral trade occur in yuan. It is proposing that access to the world’s most critical energy chokepoint be conditional on currency denomination.
The practical consequence, if even partially adopted, would be a bifurcated global oil market: yuan-denominated barrels flowing through Hormuz for those willing to pay in China’s currency, dollar-denominated barrels rerouted at significant additional cost and time for those who are not. The war premium that Western energy importers are already absorbing would become structural rather than temporary.
This is not hypothetical infrastructure. Since 28 February, between 11.7 and 16.5 million barrels of Iranian crude have transited the Strait to China via shadow fleet under IRGC protection while every other nation’s shipping is locked out. China pays in yuan. China’s tankers move freely. The architecture for a parallel yuan-denominated energy corridor already exists and is already operating.
On March 5, the IRGC announced that Iran would keep the Strait of Hormuz closed only to ships from the US, Israel and their Western allies. On March 13, Turkey’s transport minister said that Iran approved the passage of a Turkish ship through the strait. It was also reported that two Indian-flagged gas carriers and a Saudi oil tanker with one million barrels for India were allowed to pass.
Selective passage is already the reality. The yuan condition would formalise the criteria.
Washington’s Dilemma
The United States faces a set of choices, none of them comfortable. Forcing the Strait open militarily — the option Trump has repeatedly signalled — would require sustained naval operations against an adversary with mines, shore-based missiles, submarines and drone swarms in confined waters. The Congressional Research Service, in a report delivered to Congress on 11 March, noted that while there had been consensus among analysts that the US military has the capacity to counter Iran’s forces and restore the flow of shipping, such an effort would likely take some time — days, weeks, or perhaps months — depending on what forms an Iranian attempt to close the Gulf to shipping might take.
Every week of delay is a week in which energy-importing nations confront the practical reality of the yuan alternative. India, which received Iranian assurances of safe passage directly from Tehran’s ambassador, is already navigating that calculus. So are Turkey, and the Gulf states now diverting oil through the East-West pipelines to Yanbu and Fujairah — pipelines that cannot absorb the full volume that previously transited Hormuz.
The capacity of these pipelines is unable to match the amount of oil shipped through the strait, with a deficit of about 12 million barrels per day. The arithmetic of energy desperation is working in Iran’s favour.
The Longer Game
It would be analytically premature to conclude that the petrodollar system is imminently at risk of collapse. The dollar remains the world’s primary reserve currency, underpinned by the depth and liquidity of US capital markets, decades of institutional trust, and the absence of any credible single alternative. China has sought for years to expand the use of yuan in oil transactions, but the dollar remains the world’s primary reserve currency.
What the Hormuz crisis does represent, however, is the most operationally specific challenge to dollar energy dominance since the system was established. Previous de-dollarisation discussions were theoretical. This one comes with a chokepoint, a shadow fleet, an operational payment system, and a geopolitical crisis that has already lasted two weeks with no clear resolution in sight.
The bombs are visible. The financial architecture being renegotiated behind them is not.
FAQs
What is the petrodollar system and why does the yuan condition threaten it? The petrodollar system refers to the post-1974 arrangement under which oil is priced and traded globally in US dollars, creating structural global demand for dollar reserves. Iran’s condition that Hormuz passage be paid in yuan would, if adopted by energy importers, redirect a portion of that structural demand away from the dollar and toward China’s currency, weakening one of the foundational pillars of dollar reserve dominance.
Has Iran actually closed the Strait of Hormuz before? Iran has previously threatened closure but never fully implemented it at this scale. The February-March 2026 conflict represents the most severe disruption to Hormuz traffic in the waterway’s modern history, with tanker traffic dropping to near zero following the US-Israeli strikes that began on 28 February.
Could the yuan realistically replace the dollar in global oil trade? Not quickly, and not fully. China’s CIPS payment system has expanded significantly, and yuan-denominated oil trades already occur with Russian and Iranian crude. However, the dollar’s reserve currency status is reinforced by capital market depth, liquidity, and institutional inertia that no single crisis is likely to dissolve. The more likely near-term outcome is a fragmented market with parallel pricing systems rather than a clean currency transition.
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