The US-Israeli war on Iran could plunge more than 30 million people into poverty, the head of the UN Development Programme has warned.

“It’s development in reverse,” Alexander De Croo tells AFP on the sidelines of a G7 development meeting in Paris. “It took decades to build stable societies, to develop local economies, and it took only several weeks of war to destroy that.

“We did a study after six weeks of war and estimated that even if the conflict ended at that point, 32 million people would be pushed into precarity in 160 countries,” De Croo says.

The war has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows in peacetime. A shortage of supplies and high prices has led to countries imposing a range of measures that include fuel rationing and shortening the work week to reduce consumption.

The UNDP says the war will have a profound impact on Sub-Saharan African countries as well as certain countries in Asia, such as Bangladesh and Cambodia.

High “energy costs, a lack of fertiliser, will have an enormous impact in the months to come” on people in these countries, says De Croo, a former prime minister of Belgium.