Dubai has only ten days of fresh food left after the closure of the Straits of Hormuz has cut the United Arab Emirates (UAE) off from all its imports, including food. In Abu Dhabi, with the prospect of the region becoming unliveable, real estate prices are also collapsing.
As bne IntelliNews reported, the Hormuz chokepoint could kill Dubai, a hub of investment and business in the region. The Gulf countries don’t have any water and don’t produce much food for their combined population of around 60mn people. Fresh products in particular like vegetables and fruit are almost all imported. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) closed the Straits of Hormuz to oil exports on March 2, but the embargo also effectively blocked all food imports at the same time.
The Emirates imports between 80% and 90% of its food, with roughly 70% of food shipments to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries normally passing through the Strait of Hormuz on the 100- odd ships that traversed the Straits until a week ago.
…
be dubai
build city in the middle of the desert
literally nothing grows here
we import all our stuff
trade blockade
gonna starve
mfwAlso how did people historically live there? Before desalination plants
In XVIII they lived from fishery and hunting clams. In XX they lived from port and trade. In second half of XX they lived from petroleum. Now they live from youtubers who are testing rooms and food there.
It should also be mentioned that considerably fewer people lived there back then.
Yes
You left out the slave trade in XIX but yeah…
Most of the Arab peninsula was inhabited by nomadic tribes that continuously moved with their cattle and tents, with the exception of a few scattered cities that thrived on trade and light agriculture (dates).
Obviously far fewer people lived there. They probably got their fresh water from a wadi or an oasis.
They’re not going to starve because they have a reserve of canned and frozen foods (as it says in the article), but they won’t get fresh food for a while. And, if you live in a modern city, you also import all your food, often from across an ocean.
The problem we’re seeing a lot in the modern world is that everything has been ultra optimized. Lots of just-in-time delivery, as little warehousing as possible. Products are bought for the lowest possible cost, even if that means they’re shipped from the other side of the planet. When it works, that’s fine. But, when there’s a disruption it’s deadly. I remember at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the price of bread in Egypt skyrocketed since all the grain they used came from Ukraine.
UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, etc. are in a bad geographic situation. They have ports on the sea but to get anything into their countries it has to pass by the Strait of Hormuz. Iran can mess with that traffic any time it wants, and Iran isn’t exactly friendly with those countries, or particularly stable. I wonder if those countries have backup plans to ship things in via say Oman.
Maybe one of those vanity projects could have been a greenhouse or something, but I guess it’s too late for that.
With what water?
It’s a desert. Solar powered desalination plants might have been a good idea.
That’s a nice soft target there. Would be a shame if something, oh iran bombed one already.
water.fanack.com/desalination-plants-water-weapon-gulf/
The American Israeli coalition directly and intentionally destroyed a desalination plant in Iran. Barhain’s desalination plant was damaged by debris from a drone strike on another target. Those are very different statements and very different levels of destruction.
But yes, they’re soft targets if the people attacking you are complete degenerates willing to commit way crimes!
I’ve had a look at their bank balances, they could afford a few backups
With the amount of money and access to tech that’s available over there you could build an advanced hydroponics greenhouse that would recapture at least 95% of your water (some obviously leaves the system inside the plants). Build that and fill your reserve tanks during the times you’re not under blockade and you could function for a long time. It might not be enough to feed your entire population a full serving of fresh fruits and veggies every day but it would minimize the impact in situations like this.
i hope nobody starves but fuck Dubai
Oh don’t worry. The modern day slaves - the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, and Filipino workers will absolutely suffer.
Now would be a great time for these overworked and underpaid masses to do the funny thing to the besieged city of millionaires.
Except that they wouldn’t be obtaining the land they toil on to feed their children because the land there is a fucking desert, and their land and families are an Emirates’ long haul flight away.
Pile of rolexes (blood rinsed off) would fund a plane ticket home and some home improvements back in Bangladesh.
I was thinking more they’d do it to get what food remains or they’d starve.
The starving have nothing to lose, slave or not.
Maybe they can sell the shiny parts of the Ozymandian nightmare city and use that to pay they way home?
Also, they could livestream burning the rest of it on pay-per-view or something. There would certainly be an audience for it.
Oh, that great, I almost worried anyone important might have to skip their favorite breakfast. /s
They should honestly try to go home by any means necessary at this point, even if it means deportation (since a lot of predatory contracts confiscate their passports).
The families responsible for why everything is unaffordable will be fine.
The other issue these gulf states have is potable water. The majority of it is generated at a few desalination plants. The Iranians have already demonstrated their ability to reliably hit infrastructure all over the region. They can up the ante and create absolute chaos in the region. Even if the US-Israeli strikes cripple Iran’s infrastructure, Iran is in a stronger negotiating position. I’m appalled at the EU response to this unprovoked attack. They seem to think that appeasing a bully like trump is going to benefit the EU. Trump started this conflict in order to distract us from his other crimes. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
There are roads between the eastern side of the strait and Dubai and there is a cool technology called “trucks” that can be used to transport produce. Yes, it’s more expensive than boats but I read somewhere that Dubai is very rich.
If your infrastructure is all geared around getting everything in by port, it might not be possible to switch to getting it all in by truck.
There might not be enough trucks, or enough truck drivers. If they can get enough trucks and drivers, the roads may not be able to support that much traffic. And, that’s assuming they even have enough ports, and the right kinds of ports to unload any ships that come in on that side.
No, surely they just didn’t think of it.
There’s thousands of trucks driving every night
There’s so many trucks they are not allowed to drive during the day. So the night it’s just one straight line of trucks from RAK to Abu Dabi
They don’t have trains so its the main way of moving goods between the emirates
See the problem there is, that they don’t have the oil /s
No for real they don’t have the trucks they would need and to acquire them takes time
Trust me. They know about trucks. From 8 in the evening to 6 in the morning it’s miles and miles and miles of trucks going from the north to south
You need the trucks in place now, and port capacity in the off coasts. It’s fair that they can work out an alternative to starving.
You need ships to get those trucks there in the first place. Also they have to be manufactured and bought.
What, you mean you dont actually need helicopters to do that?
Dubai had no problem using slaves to build the Burj Khalifa. Maybe they should have their slaves bring some food for their masters?
I propose the slaves eat their masters
Perhaps a few cocktails as well
All the Andrew Tate bro types are going to FAFO.
REAL MEN DON’T STARVE!
Spec Ops: The Line was a very good game.
Never finished it and won’t.
Game directly tells you you can stop killing Civilians at any time by just not playing.
That’s kind of silly. I get where you’re coming from, but since it’s a video game that’s telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and since the people are not real people in any sense of the word, wouldn’t it make sense to just finish it to see how the story ends?
Yeah. The story is on rails. It’s not an RPG where you can choose the good path or the evil path. I can imagine feeling bad about playing the evil path in a game where you had the option not to do it. But, if you want to see the story in a linear game like that you have click the mouse in the way required to get to the next save point. Feeling superior about not finishing a game like that is like feeling superior because you read a book where the main character is an antihero, and you chose not to finish the book.
Besides, it’s “deep” for a modern AAA shooter video game, but not particularly deep or upsetting in terms of storytelling.
Yup. Undertale’s Geno Route is much better at this. Not only can you avoid it, you need to actively go for it and make sure you don’t “fall” out to the Neutral route halfway through. Not to mention the skill curve walls (if for no other reason, you should do the Pacifist route first for practice).
Yeah, it’s a cool game, but you could just read Heart of Darkness instead and prob be better off
Yeah. I read Heart of Darkness long before I saw that, plus I’d watched Apocalypse Now, which is a movie adaptation of Heart of Darkness. I saw a list of their influences in making the game, and I’d already seen all of the other ones too. So… it was definitely taking FPS military games in a new direction, but it wasn’t anything really new overall.
The story isn’t strictly on rails - you do get some choices (especially how your character reacts in the end.) When you reach the part where you are told that you have to kill one of two guys, you can actually refuse to kill either and take on a massive firefight.
Does that actually change anything beyond the firefight though?
You got it right.
You know, that’s an interesting point. I think it can be really interesting to explore the „darker“ sites of one’s psyche through choices offered by better RPGs.
I refuse to play games which revolve around what I perceive to be normalization of and desensitization towards amoral killing, though. I simply don’t enjoy them because I can’t help but wonder what playing them does to people’s minds.
I refuse to play games which revolve around what I perceive to be normalization of and desensitization towards amoral killing, though. I simply don’t enjoy them because I can’t help but wonder what playing them does to people’s minds.
I think this has been bleeding over into television as well. There have been series I have just stopped watching because there was no longer someone I could consider a protagonist. Not everyone has to be a shining paragon of virtue, but for fucks sake, if you just give me a bunch of sociopaths running amok am I supposed to keep watching and hope they all die in the end? The latest series I dropped for this reason was Alien Earth, which was pretty decent up until near the end of season 1.
The only shooter I’ll play is Hell Let Loose because it really makes you feel like canon fodder.
Still worth playing in 2026? I have it and never played. I just have a hard time pulling the trigger (no pun intended) and starting to play mms’s. And that’s even with all the old guard game reviewers like tb praising it, which is why/how I own it in the first place. It just sits uninstalled in my steam library and I think about it every few years.
Yes, its still worth playing.
It may have lost its cultural significance some since the 2000’s US invasions have been forgotten a bit, but its not all about that anyway. Its still poignant. Maybe it will make it easier to decide if I tell you its a short campaign.Still one of the best games with a story that subverts its own genre alongside KOTOR 2, definitely worth experiencing.
Absolutely, especially if you care about good story and atmosphere in games.
I played it again last year on a whim and was not disappointed.
Then they shouldn’t allow US bases that get them embroiled in unprovoked conflicts.
In a city of billionaires, 10 days of food is about enough for 1 days of food for one of them.
Haha I hadn’t even considered this.
The airports are gonna be jampacked for days with instafluencers trying to catch the first nonstop flight back to Connecticut.
I just talked to a coworker who has friends out there who spent 7 days to get home being flown ping pong all over the region. It’s quite the chaos with lots of price gauging.
Shouldn’t have been an ally of the US and Israel.
Why not? It’s not like the true “Allies”, the billionares of Dubai, will be affected by the food shortage. They will just fly off and abandon every worker and tenant (if any?) in dubai.
It’s imoral, but the scumbags lose nothing.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
If nothing happens that society and its practices will never change and the pain will continue.
If the whole castle of cards collapses due to this, whilst it’s a small consolation for the current slaves given the pain they’ll endure, it’s way more pain spared for would be future slaves.
Further, the scumbags will definitelly lose if the whole slave-using realestate-bubble empire whose value supports their wealth collapses back to nomads camel fucking in the desert.
They’re not allies of the US nor Israel but just try to play being allies of everyone, just like Qatar, Turkey or India
If you’re hosting some other country’s military bases you’re either its Ally or its Vassal.
I can understand why they do it, but none the less there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Thoughts & prayers.
Is that a Harry & David gift box by chance? I caint see shit b/c I caint find my dang spectacles. There they are. Nope. Not Harry & David but much better than they are getting.
I see you want to poison them with tater tots.
Considering the only people at risk of starving there are the migrant workers and indentured servants to royalty, then yeah, we should probably give a fuck about the innocent people who didn’t ask for this.
I’m sure the uber wealthy have plenty & will share unselfishly.
They’re not starving.
It’s fine, I’m sure all the instafluencer porta-potties can just order Amazon!
Let them eat Uber.
Shouldn’t they be more worried about water hasn’t Iran started targeting desalination plants that are 90% of the supply there (I think).
yes, after the us attacked iran’s desalination (which it depends on much less than other countries in the region do) opening the door to in-kind retaliation
Eh, they have been in a what shortage since before this war so it might be more important to them
There’s a cold, dark calculation I’m sure Iran has done which probably determines less people = more water.
After killing the protestors (which btw, Trump was too stupid to support so good luck on that rEgImE chAngE) plus casualties from war simply happening, there’s more water for the remaining.
So even though they’ve lost some water supply, they’ve also lost population, balancing things out.
Iran has a population of 90 million. How many people do you think have died to make a significant difference?
Trump and Netanyahu don’t want protesters in charge. They want a puppet.
Yeah but the classic CIA playbook is to support/arm rebels and place your puppet among them as a leader.
As for Israel, I think they want the territory. They want all the territory.
Let them eat those stupid ass chocolate bars
