A2 · Elementary
11 min
foodgeopoliticseconomicshistory
El Desierto que Come: Arabia Saudí y la Comida que Viene de Lejos
The Desert That Eats: Saudi Arabia and the Food That Comes from Far Away
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Elementary level — perfect for beginners building confidence.
So, this week, among everything else happening in that region, something caught my eye that I think most people walked right past.
Iran hit Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline.
Not a refinery, not a military base.
The pipeline.
Bueno, es un oleoducto muy importante.
Well, it is a very important pipeline.
Muy, muy importante.
Very, very important.
And I want to talk about this through a food lens, because that's where it gets genuinely alarming.
Saudi Arabia imports around eighty percent of its food.
Eighty percent.
For a country that rich, that number is staggering.
Mira, Arabia Saudí no tiene mucha agua.
Look, Saudi Arabia does not have much water.
El desierto es muy seco.
The desert is very dry.
Right.
No water, no agriculture.
And the oil money is what pays for everything that arrives by ship.
So when you hit the pipeline, you are not just hitting oil.
You are, eventually, hitting the food supply.
Es que el oleoducto conecta el este y el oeste del país.
The thing is, the pipeline connects the east and the west of the country.
Exactly.
The East-West pipeline, officially called the Petroline, runs about 1,200 kilometers across the Arabian Peninsula, from the Gulf coast to the Red Sea port of Yanbu.
It was built precisely to avoid the Strait of Hormuz.
Saudi Arabia wanted an alternative if Hormuz was ever closed.
Bueno, y ahora el estrecho está cerrado también.
Well, and now the strait is also closed.
Los dos caminos tienen problemas.
Both routes have problems.
That is the terrible irony of this week.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed because of the ceasefire collapse.
The East-West pipeline is damaged by an Iranian strike.
Saudi Arabia's plan A and plan B are both compromised at the same time.
A ver, Arabia Saudí compra mucha comida.
Let me explain, Saudi Arabia buys a lot of food.
Arroz, trigo, carne.
Rice, wheat, meat.
And that food mostly arrives by sea.
Through Hormuz from Asia, or through the Red Sea and Suez Canal from Europe and the Americas.
The Houthis have been making the Red Sea dangerous for months.
So both sea routes are difficult, the pipeline is hit.
I mean, the squeeze is total.
La verdad es que Arabia Saudí tiene mucho dinero.
The truth is that Saudi Arabia has a lot of money.
Pero el dinero no es comida.
But money is not food.
No.
You cannot eat a riyal.
And here is what gets me, this is not a new problem.
Saudi Arabia has known for decades that food dependence is a strategic vulnerability.
They actually tried to fix it.
Sí, intentaron cultivar trigo en el desierto.
Yes, they tried to grow wheat in the desert.
¡En el desierto!
In the desert!
This is one of the wilder agricultural stories of the twentieth century.
Starting in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia pumped water from ancient underground aquifers, water that fell as rain thousands of years ago, to grow wheat in the middle of the desert.
By the 1990s, they were actually exporting wheat.
Exporting it.
Mira, pero el agua desaparece.
Look, but the water disappears.
No hay más agua.
There is no more water.
Fossil water.
Once it's gone, it's gone.
By 2016, Saudi Arabia had essentially stopped domestic wheat production because the aquifers were running critically low.
They had burned through an irreplaceable natural resource to achieve food independence, and it did not last.
La verdad es que es una historia muy triste.
The truth is that it is a very sad story.
El agua es más importante que el petróleo.
Water is more important than oil.
You know, I covered a water summit in Amman in 2003 and a Jordanian minister said exactly that to me.
He said, in fifty years, nobody in this region will fight over oil.
They will fight over water.
I thought it was rhetoric at the time.
I am less sure now.
Bueno, en Arabia Saudí el agua del mar es muy cara de usar.
Well, in Saudi Arabia, using sea water is very expensive.
Desalination.
Saudi Arabia is actually the world's largest producer of desalinated water.
They have massive plants along the coasts.
But desalination runs on energy, and if the energy infrastructure is disrupted, the water supply is disrupted too.
Everything connects.
A ver, Kuwait también tiene problemas con el agua.
Let me explain, Kuwait also has problems with water.
Los iraníes atacan las plantas de Kuwait.
The Iranians are attacking Kuwait's plants.
Right.
Kuwait's desalination plants were hit in the Iranian drone strikes this week.
Which is a category of attack that I do not think people fully appreciate.
Hitting a desalination plant in the Gulf is not a military strike in the traditional sense.
It is an attack on the civilian water supply.
Es que sin agua no puedes cocinar.
The thing is, without water you cannot cook.
No puedes limpiar los alimentos.
You cannot clean food.
And no water means no food preparation, no sanitation, no agriculture.
Even the small amounts of agriculture that exist in the Gulf depend on desalinated water.
So let's come back to Saudi Arabia specifically.
Walk me through what a typical Saudi actually eats.
Bueno, comen mucho arroz.
Well, they eat a lot of rice.
También comen carne de cordero.
They also eat lamb meat.
Rice and lamb.
And neither of those comes primarily from Saudi Arabia itself.
No.
No.
El arroz viene de Asia.
The rice comes from Asia.
De India, de Pakistán.
From India, from Pakistan.
And how does rice get from India to Saudi Arabia?
Through the Strait of Hormuz, or around the Arabian Peninsula into the Red Sea.
Both of those routes are compromised right now.
The extraordinary thing is that we are talking about the basic staple food of 35 million people being at risk.
La verdad es que Arabia Saudí tiene reservas.
The truth is that Saudi Arabia has reserves.
No hay un problema hoy.
There is no problem today.
That is an important point and I want to make sure listeners hear it.
Saudi Arabia, and most Gulf states, maintain strategic food reserves.
Typically three to six months worth of staple goods.
This is not an immediate famine situation.
But the question is what happens if this goes on.
Wars and blockades have a habit of outlasting the reserves.
Mira, Arabia Saudí también compra tierra en otros países.
Look, Saudi Arabia also buys land in other countries.
En África, por ejemplo.
In Africa, for example.
This is something that gets very little attention in the Western press but is a massive geopolitical story.
It's called land grabbing, or more politely, offshore agriculture.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, they have spent billions buying or leasing farmland in Ethiopia, Sudan, Pakistan, even Ukraine before the war.
They grow food there and ship it home.
Es que eso no es muy popular en esos países.
The thing is, that is not very popular in those countries.
La gente local necesita la tierra también.
Local people need the land too.
No.
It is deeply controversial.
I spent time in Ethiopia in 2009 when some of these deals were being signed, and the communities displaced from that land, they were not compensated meaningfully.
They watched foreign investors grow food on their ancestors' fields and fly it out of the country while they went hungry.
The ethics of this are genuinely complicated.
Bueno, pero Arabia Saudí necesita comer.
Well, but Saudi Arabia needs to eat.
Todos necesitamos comer.
We all need to eat.
True.
And that is the tension at the heart of global food politics.
Everyone has a right to food security.
But when rich countries solve their food security by essentially colonizing the agriculture of poor countries, you have not solved the problem.
You have just moved it.
A ver, en Arabia Saudí hay un plato nacional.
Let me explain, in Saudi Arabia there is a national dish.
Se llama Kabsa.
It is called Kabsa.
Kabsa.
Tell me about it.
Mira, es arroz con carne.
Look, it is rice with meat.
Con especias.
With spices.
Muy perfumado, muy rico.
Very fragrant, very delicious.
Rice, meat, spices.
Every single ingredient in that dish, the rice from Asia, the lamb often from Australia or New Zealand, the spices from India or East Africa, all of it travels by sea.
Kabsa is, in a way, a dish that only exists because of global shipping.
If you disrupt those shipping lanes, you disrupt the culture along with the calories.
La verdad es que no pensamos en eso cuando comemos.
The truth is that we do not think about that when we eat.
We never do.
I think that is probably the most important food lesson there is.
Every meal is the end point of an almost incomprehensibly long supply chain involving ships, trucks, warehouses, refrigeration, fuel.
We eat in complete ignorance of the journey, and that ignorance is a luxury that crises strip away very quickly.
Es que en España también importamos mucho.
The thing is, in Spain we also import a lot.
El café, el cacao.
Coffee, cocoa.
Look, every country does.
There is almost no nation on earth that is truly food self-sufficient.
Even the United States, which is a massive agricultural exporter, imports enormous quantities of fruit, coffee, seafood.
Food globalization is so deep now that autarky, genuine food independence, is essentially impossible at a modern standard of living.
Bueno, los precios del petróleo bajan esta semana.
Well, oil prices are falling this week.
Es bueno para la comida, ¿no?
That is good for food, right?
It should be.
Lower oil prices mean cheaper fuel for shipping, cheaper fertilizer, cheaper mechanized farming.
The Dow surged and oil dropped below ninety-five dollars a barrel after the ceasefire announcement.
But here is the problem.
The ceasefire immediately started unraveling.
Iran closed the Strait again.
The market giveth and the market taketh away.
Mira, la gente pobre paga más por la comida cuando hay guerra.
Look, poor people pay more for food when there is war.
Always.
This is one of the cruelest mechanics of conflict.
The people least responsible for the war pay the highest price for it in food costs.
Bread prices spiked across the Middle East and North Africa after the Russia-Ukraine war disrupted wheat supplies.
The same logic applies here.
A war between Iran and the United States, and it's a family in Cairo or Nairobi that cannot afford flour.
La verdad es que el mundo necesita paz para comer bien.
The truth is that the world needs peace to eat well.
No, you're absolutely right about that.
And I want to leave listeners with that thought because it is not a cliché.
It is agricultural economics.
Peace is literally a food security policy.
The talks in Islamabad between the Americans and Iranians this week matter not just for geopolitics.
They matter for whether food gets onto ships and onto tables.
The stakes really are that basic.
Bueno.
Well.
La comida conecta todo.
Food connects everything.
Las personas, los países, el mundo.
People, countries, the world.
The desert that eats.
That is what Saudi Arabia is.
A country that sits on the world's largest oil reserves and still has to import the rice for its national dish.
It is a reminder that wealth and food security are not the same thing, and that the pipes and ships and straits that carry our food are as important as anything else we have built.
Thanks for listening to Twilingua.
Nos vemos la próxima vez.
Hasta pronto.
See you soon.