A2 · Elementary
8 min
food securitygeopoliticsglobal trademiddle east
The Strait and the Bread: How War Reaches the Table
El Estrecho y el Pan: Cómo la Guerra Llega a la Mesa
Marco Rubio announces the end of Operation Epic Fury and the ceasefire in the Strait of Hormuz appears to be holding. Fletcher and Octavio dig into what happens when one of the world's most critical food transport corridors becomes a war zone.
Marco Rubio anuncia el fin de la Operación Epic Fury y el alto el fuego en el Estrecho de Ormuz parece mantenerse. Fletcher y Octavio hablan de lo que ocurre cuando una de las rutas más importantes del mundo para el transporte de alimentos se convierte en zona de guerra.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| abastecer | to supply, to provision | El barco abastece la ciudad de comida. |
| bastante | enough, quite a lot | Tengo bastante arroz en casa. |
| reservas | reserves, supplies | Qatar tiene reservas de comida para muchos meses. |
| precio | price | El precio del pan sube cuando hay problemas. |
| desierto | desert | En el desierto no hay mucha agua para cultivar. |
| importar | to import | Los Emiratos importan mucha comida de otros países. |
Marco Rubio stood at a podium yesterday and announced that Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.
military campaign against Iran, is over.
And I keep thinking about it not from a military angle, but from a grocery store angle.
Sí.
Yes.
El Estrecho de Ormuz es muy importante para la comida.
The Strait of Hormuz is very important for food.
Very important is doing some heavy lifting there, Octavio.
About a fifth of the world's traded food passes through or near that strait.
When it closes, or even threatens to close, the consequences are immediate.
Los países del Golfo no tienen mucha comida propia.
The Gulf countries don't have much food of their own.
Right, and that's the part of this story that doesn't get enough attention.
The UAE imports roughly ninety percent of what it eats.
Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, similar numbers.
These are wealthy countries sitting on oil that can't feed themselves without the ships.
En Dubai, la fruta viene de muchos países.
In Dubai, the fruit comes from many countries.
El arroz viene de la India.
The rice comes from India.
And the ships that carry that rice have to go through a channel that is, at its narrowest, about thirty kilometers wide.
That's not wide.
That's the distance between Austin and Round Rock.
Treinta kilómetros.
Thirty kilometers.
Es muy poco para el mundo.
That is very little for the world.
It's almost absurd when you put it that way.
So talk to me about what actually happened in the markets, the food markets, during the worst weeks of the Hormuz crisis.
Los precios suben mucho.
Prices rise a lot.
La gente compra mucha comida rápidamente.
People buy a lot of food quickly.
Panic buying.
It happened in about forty-eight hours.
Supermarkets in Abu Dhabi were reporting empty shelves for rice, flour, cooking oil.
The things people reach for when they're frightened.
El miedo y la comida están muy conectados.
Fear and food are very connected.
Deeply.
I covered the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003 and you could track the anxiety of a population by what disappeared from shop shelves.
Sugar goes first.
Then cooking oil.
Then flour.
It's almost like a seismograph for social fear.
En España, la gente también compra mucho cuando hay problemas.
In Spain, people also buy a lot when there are problems.
It's universal.
But here's what makes the Gulf situation historically unusual.
This dependency on food imports is extremely recent.
Fifty years ago, the UAE didn't exist as a country.
The land that is now Dubai was fishing villages and date palm groves.
Los dátiles son muy importantes en la cultura árabe.
Dates are very important in Arab culture.
They are, and that's a real thread worth pulling.
The date palm was essentially the tree that made Gulf civilization possible before oil.
You ate the fruit, you used the wood, you fed the seeds to camels.
It was complete.
And then oil arrived and changed the entire food logic of the region within a generation.
Ahora la gente compra la comida en el supermercado.
Now people buy food at the supermarket.
No cultiva.
They don't grow it.
Not just that they don't grow it, they can't.
The UAE gets about seventy-eight millimeters of rain a year.
Texas, where I live, gets about eight hundred.
You simply cannot feed a modern urban population of ten million people on that land without extraordinary intervention.
El desierto no es bueno para la agricultura normal.
The desert is not good for normal agriculture.
Although, and this is where it gets interesting, the Emiratis have been investing heavily in what they call food security infrastructure.
Vertical farms, hydroponics, desalination-fed greenhouses.
They know this vulnerability exists and they've been trying to engineer their way out of it for about twenty years.
Las granjas verticales son modernas.
Vertical farms are modern.
Usan mucha tecnología.
They use a lot of technology.
They do.
But when the crisis hit, none of that was enough.
Not even close.
Because the gap between what these countries can produce locally and what they need to feed their populations is enormous, and you can't close it with a greenhouse.
Qatar tiene reservas de comida.
Qatar has food reserves.
Aprenden de 2017.
They learned from 2017.
The blockade.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, they cut off Qatar in 2017.
Overnight.
And Qatar went from having roughly two weeks of dairy supplies to scrambling to airlift cows in from Europe.
Actual cows, on cargo planes.
That is a lesson a country does not forget.
¡Vacas en avión!
Cows on a plane!
Es increíble.
That's incredible.
Four thousand cows.
In six months.
And the Qataris built their own dairy industry from scratch after that.
They now produce enough milk domestically to meet demand.
But it took a crisis to get there.
La crisis enseña mucho.
Crisis teaches a lot.
La gente aprende cuando tiene miedo.
People learn when they are afraid.
That's almost too clean a moral, but you're not wrong.
So now the ceasefire is holding, Epic Fury is officially over, Trump has paused the Hormuz escort operation.
What does normalization actually look like for food supply chains?
Los barcos vuelven poco a poco.
The ships return little by little.
No es inmediato.
It is not immediate.
Slowly.
And that matters because shipping companies don't just flip a switch.
Insurance rates on vessels transiting the Hormuz are still elevated.
Captains have to be willing to go.
Cargo has to be booked weeks in advance.
The physical fact of the ceasefire and the market reality of the ceasefire are two different timelines.
Los precios de los alimentos no bajan rápidamente.
Food prices do not fall quickly.
Prices are sticky on the way down.
Economists have a name for this.
When costs go up, retail prices follow fast.
When costs drop, retailers are in no hurry to pass the savings along.
Someone buying bread in Dubai today is still paying prices set by panic six weeks ago.
El pan es muy importante en la cultura de Oriente Medio.
Bread is very important in Middle Eastern culture.
Deeply symbolic, too.
There's a concept in Arabic, ''aish'', which literally means bread but also means life.
In Egypt, the subsidized flatbread that the government provides is called ''aish baladi'', the bread of the homeland.
When governments can't deliver that bread, they don't last long.
Mubarak knew this.
Every Egyptian leader knows this.
En España decimos ''ganarse el pan''.
In Spain we say ''ganarse el pan''.
Es trabajar para vivir.
It means working to live.
''Ganarse el pan''.
Earning the bread.
It maps perfectly onto the English ''to earn a living,'' but the Spanish version feels more honest somehow.
More direct about what work is actually for.
La comida y el trabajo y la vida.
Food and work and life.
Son la misma cosa.
They are the same thing.
And that's why food crises become political crises so fast.
It's not just hunger.
It's the rupture of a very basic social contract.
This is what I kept thinking about during the worst of the Hormuz standoff: what are the leaders in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi watching most closely?
Not the missile counts.
The grocery prices.
Hay una palabra buena en español.
There is a good word in Spanish.
''Abastecimiento''.
''Abastecimiento''.
Es tener comida para todos.
It means having food for everyone.
''Abastecimiento''.
Supply.
Provisioning.
I want to ask you about that word because you used it naturally just now and I want to get the etymology right in my head.
Is it related to ''basto'', as in rough or coarse?
No, no es ''basto''.
No, it is not ''basto''.
''Abastecer'' viene de ''bastante''.
''Abastecer'' comes from ''bastante''.
Bastante significa suficiente.
Bastante means enough.
Wait, so ''abastecer'' literally means something like ''to make sufficient''?
To ensure there is enough?
Exacto.
Exactly.
''Abastecer'' es dar lo que necesitas.
''Abastecer'' is to give what you need.
Es tener bastante.
It is to have enough.
That's a word that carries its whole meaning inside it.
English ''supply'' comes from the Latin for filling up, which is fine but abstract.
''Abastecer'', to make sufficient, to ensure enough: that feels like a word written by someone who had gone without.
I like that a lot.
El español tiene muchas palabras así.
Spanish has many words like that.
Palabras con historia.
Words with history.
Words with history.
That might be the best description of language I've heard you give.
Anyway.
The ceasefire is holding, the ships are slowly going back, and somewhere in Dubai right now the price of rice is still thirty percent higher than it was three months ago.
''Abastecer'' is not yet done.