In Bangkok this week, finance ministers and central bankers will gather for the IMF and World Bank annual meetings against a backdrop that the United Nations Development Programme describes in strikingly blunt terms. Oil has climbed back above $100 a barrel since fighting resumed in the Middle East, and the UNDP's administrator, Alexander De Croo, says the world's poorest nations are being pulled apart by forces they cannot control. "Developing countries, their hands and legs are being pulled in different directions: it's truly hard for them," he told reporters ahead of the summit. The numbers behind that warning are laid out in a new UNDP report, No Time to Recover.

Since the conflict involving Iran escalated earlier this year, government subsidies and price controls have protected as many as 130 million of the world's poorest people from the full force of rising fuel costs. But that shield is cracking. Treasuries from sub-Saharan Africa to South Asia have largely exhausted the fiscal space needed to keep absorbing the shock, forcing many to pass costs directly on to households. Meanwhile, scientists are tracking what could be the strongest El Niño weather pattern in roughly a thousand years, threatening harvests from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia just as global bond markets make borrowing punishingly expensive.

That borrowing squeeze is perhaps the starkest figure of all: developing countries are now paying around 9% to issue bonds, a rate De Croo calls "really, really high." Separate research from the campaign group Debt Justice reinforces the point, showing a growing share of low-income nations are classified by the IMF as already in, or at serious risk of, debt distress. De Croo does not expect relief soon. "For each of the three things that we mentioned – fuel prices, El Niño and the bond markets – unfortunately for each of those at the moment, we don't see any light at the end of the tunnel," he said.