← New Books Network
New Books Network
Christian Henderson, "Monarchies of Extraction: The Gulf States in the Global Food System" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
01:02:49
Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:01]
Commercial Announcer
Everyone knows that unexplainable it factor, that smile that lights up a room, that wow. Well, it doesn't happen by itself. There's chemistry behind the charisma. Colgate Optic White Pro series toothpaste removes 15 years of deep set stains when you brush twice daily for two weeks. How? The clinically proven formula is powered by Colgate's hydrogen peroxide complex. It works at the molecular level to gently dissolve stains deep within the enamel where your brush can't reach. It's proof that daily routine can be remarkable. That's the science of wow. Colgate Optic White
- [00:32]
NBN Survey Host
Hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most and and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with, when we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:44]
Christian
I was groomed to become one of
- [01:47]
Interviewer
his wives this week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein
- [01:53]
Christian
survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
- [01:57]
Interviewer
I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now.
- [02:04]
Christian
It's one of the most powerful interviews
- [02:06]
Interviewer
I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. Welcome to the New Books Network, so it's a pleasure having you on the podcast, Christian. I'm really looking forward to talking about your new book, Monarchies of the Gulf States in the Global Food System. Its publication feels tragically timely in light of the ongoing war in Iran and its far reaching effects on regional trade networks and the Gulf agri food sector. And I'll be sure to leave time at the end of our conversation to discuss the impact of recent geopolitical turbulence, as our audience will no doubt value your expert perspective. But first, I'd like to begin by giving our audience a chance to learn more about your intellectual background and what led you to research and write this book. So, to start, how did you come to study regional food systems? And how did you arrive at the idea of the Gulf countries as inverted farms? And what does that concept reveal to you about the ecological foundations of capitalist development within the Gulf Cooperation Council?
- [03:17]
Christian
Well, firstly, this is essentially a PhD project. It started as a PhD project and that was a PhD that examined the way in which the Gulf countries had invested in Egyptian agriculture. And my argument within that PhD was essentially that when we look at the corporate food system in somewhere like Egypt, we need to understand that it is a product of Western capital, Western investment, but it's also a product of capital flows from the Gulf. And then when that project was done, I kind of moved on more
- [04:05]
NBN Survey Host
in
- [04:05]
Christian
my interest, moved on to looking at the way in which the food system more generally in the Gulf states had been created. And I think one of the things that interested me was food in the Gulf states tends to be dominated by food security, the concept of food security. And essentially I always found this a little bit problematic or a little bit inadequate really in some ways to kind of explain the reality of the food system in these countries. And one of the kind of interesting details that I uncovered as I was looking at the flow of commodities around the region was just a huge scale of food that the Gulf countries import. One of the details that I kind of mention in the book is that the whole Arab region, Israel and Iran, import roughly about $100 billion worth of food a year. And about half of that is accounted for by the Gulf states. And that figure is particularly striking when we look at the population differential. Right. So the Gulf states is about 55 million or 50 million people, and the rest of the whole region is 500 million. So about 11% of the region. You know, these are societies that import about half of the total imports, but they're only about 11% in terms of population. So obviously the notion of food security doesn't really fully explain
- [05:57]
Credit Karma Advertiser
or
- [05:59]
Christian
there is a problem in the sense that how can these societies import so much food, yet we're constantly talking about their security and their scarcity. So this was one of the motivations for writing the book. And I think the notion of inverted farms, this is a term I took from someone else who was referred. It was essentially a work that kind of referred to San Francisco as a planetary, sorry, an inverted mine, in the sense that if we look at a city like San Francisco, we'd have to understand that all the matter, all the material that you can see within this built environment is mined from somewhere else. And in that sense, you could look at the Gulf states, you could look at a city like Dubai, you know, this fantastically kind of, you know, this booming city, and understand that all of the food that's consumed in these places in a place like that comes from somewhere else. And in that sense, it was a kind of. I kind of adapted this term to use the notion of an inverted farm. So I think another way to describe it would be kind of ghost takers, you know, in the sense that these are societies that completely dependent on other societies for the food that they consume. And what does that mean? What does that mean about the global environment? What does that mean about the. The political economy of flow, of ecological value within our world? So that was essentially the kind of premise of the book.
- [07:48]
Interviewer
And I think it would probably be helpful as well for our audience just to understand a bit about your particular perspective on the political economy of the GCC states. Drawing on Adebania's call to take seriously the Gulf states as capitalists, not simply monarchies that sit atop an oil spigot, you resist accounts of the region that emphasize its exceptionality or its parochialism. As you write, quote, by studying food, its importation and production, this book shows that the Gulf is global. It is deeply integrated into the global economy, not just through oil capital and migration, but also through imported resources. So could you unpack this key point for our audience? Why is it so important to highlight the specifically capitalist character of the GCC states? And how does focusing on food challenge the conventional view of oil rich societies as determined by their environment?
- [08:49]
Christian
Yeah, I think that obviously this, you know, there is a growing group of scholars who are increasingly concerned with understanding how the Gulf sits in the global economy and essentially illustrating that this is a region that is core to the global economy. And often some of the work that has been previously done on the Menti estate and also some kind of approaches to oil tend to kind of treat it as a marginal region or a region that doesn't necessarily consider it as a core region within the global economy. And by looking at food, what is apparent is that the kind of Distribution of value from flows in food commodities and distribution of, shall we say, social and environmental problems is hugely differential. It is an unequal exchange. And food provides an opportunity to really kind of look at that and to essentially understand it from a kind of. From the perspective of the statistics, but also to kind of exemplify the role that this has, this environmental resource has, in patterns of growth and development across the region. And it maps onto, you know, what other people are saying, like Thomas Piketty, for example, who described the Middle east and North Africa as the most unequal region in the world. And you can clearly see that food is a good indicator of that. You know, food is an indicator. Those countries that have substantial imports are growing developing economies, and those societies in the region which are food stressed are not. And in that sense, I think one of the objectives of the book is to kind of show how we can understand the way in which the Gulf region is essentially a core region and has its own kind of relations with peripheral economies. And I think it's important here to state that when I'm talking about using this notion of core periphery, I'm using it as a kind of. As an adjective. In some ways, I'm not necessarily applying these labels that come from world systems theory, because those can be. They're more complex. Right. I mean, there's also this question of the semi periphery. And isn't the Gulf part of the semi periphery? Well, yes, it is to a certain extent, but that's not my objective, really. My objective is just to say that the relationship between the Gulf states and many other countries in the region in Africa and Asia, are essentially a core periphery relationship.
- [12:14]
Interviewer
And then in chapter two, you carry this perspective into your account of the recent history of Arabian agriculture, highlighting the deeply political nature of agrarian change in the region. As you Write, quote, the 20th century saw the demise of small farming in the Gulf states with the consequence that a lifestyle that was dependent on local environmental knowledge and a sustainable relationship with the environment was replaced by farming practices that were intensive and nondescript. So obviously this is a massive transformation. But could you sort of map out for us what this historical process meant? And also how did foreign agencies like the Middle East Supply center, which was established by the British in the United States in 1941, transform the region's agriculture into the object of development, to quote Timothy Mitchell? And in what ways then did the monarchies leverage these interventions to secure legitimacy and maintain social control?
- [13:17]
Christian
Yeah, so I think one of the things that I wanted to do in that chapter was essentially illustrate that the transfer or the change that took place from agrarian economies, which were characterized by a little bit, you know, settled farming in some parts of the region, but also, you know, pastoralism, mostly pastoralism in some cases had. The change from that kind of system towards a kind of oil economy was not necessarily linear. And that it embodied a political process. Embodied at times. It was. It was in some ways deeply political and deeply intrinsic also to the development of oil in the sense that in order to kind of stabilize these countries and prepare them for the extraction of oil, it was necessary to kind of stabilize these economies and that kind of social relations and make sure that the collapse of the kind of smallholder economy didn't happen too quickly or too chaotically. And in that sense, I think it was apparent that this was a kind of process of managed decline in the sense that there were moments where the kind of government, certainly when oil revenue started to flow in governments were kind of doing, you know, had. Had contradictory policies in the sense that they would be subsidizing smallholder farmers, but they would also be subsidizing food imports. And I think that was, you know, that's often kind of portrayed as a sort of sign of, you know, irrational expenditure by governments that didn't necessarily know what to do with all this oil money. But actually, I think that was partly to do with the fact that there was this need to kind of ensure that there wasn't too much disruption within these kind of smallholder economies. I think the other thing that I wanted to show also, and we're kind of jumping back in time here a little bit, was that there was a history of famine in the region in the sense that in the 1940s there was quite a serious famine and there were reports of many people dying in some of the Gulf states. And that was partly the result of economic depression, of the collapse of the pearl fishing industry. It was also the result of the Second World War and disruption to supplies. And that memory of famine, I think, did play a role in formulating policy on food later. And it did, like anywhere else, I suppose, ensure that food was really at the center of the kind of ruling pact. The ruling governments understood that it was really necessary to ensure that the population had a supply of food. Now, in terms of your question about foreign agencies, I think this is a fairly common story in the sense that this was the way in which kind of industrial agribusiness, methods and equipment, capital intensive agriculture became embedded in these countries. And that there was a kind of process of ensuring that there was a market really for water pumps, for mechanized equipment. And that often took place through these, these kind of foreign agencies. I also think that there was, you know, a kind of political and political objective really on behalf of these agencies in the sense that it was apparent also that some of them didn't necessarily know that much about farming in Arabia, but it kind of didn't matter because they were essentially able to use these types of equipment that mitigated the lack of knowledge. So in place of a kind of indigenous management of irrigation, which had been around for thousands of years in Arabia, the water pump arrived. And that essentially meant that that type of knowledge wasn't needed because it could be resolved through the use of water pumps. But obviously what happened was that the aquifers, the very rich aquifers that lie underneath the ground in Arabia were drained quite quickly.
- [18:31]
Interviewer
And then in chapter three, you sort of continue this historical account and show how the ultimate demise of smallholder agriculture in the region was replaced by homogenous agribusiness system in the second half of the 20th century. As you write, quote, oil money, water, land migrant labor, chemicals and fertilizer were set in motion and the rural and agrarian spaces of the Arabian Peninsula became sites of capital accumulation. There's an enormous amount to unpack from this chapter and we won't be able to get through everything in just this podcast. But I'll ask maybe a more specific question that speaks to this state led transformation of the sector. Why did GCC states direct resources, including substantial oil revenues, toward the development of private agribusinesses such as Sevola and almerea in the 1970s, and how did this impact the wider social metabolism in the Gulf?
- [19:34]
Christian
So I think that, you know, what happened in the 1970s was that there was this concern about food security. And I think there that you can really can see a sort of manifestation of this anxiety that I referred to just now about being reliant on international food markets for food supplies. So there was an element of that, or at least that's how it was kind of used. And you had these incredibly ambitious projects that were initiated across the region, but particularly in Saudi Arabia, where huge amounts of land and resources, government loans were directed towards, you know, quite a small handful of farmers. Except they weren't farmers. They were people, you know, essentially in the ruling class of these countries who had connections to the royal family or were in the royal family themselves to initiate a kind of state subsidized program of grain production. And I think at one point Saudi Arabia in the 1980s was the sixth largest grain exporter in the world as a result of this program. And what really happened was that real farmers in a country like Saudi Arabia were kind of continued to be sort of neglected or weren't necessarily given much support. But those connected to the kind of ruling class enriched themselves considerably. And the fact that they were able to grow grain with government subsidies and then sell it back to the government at a set price essentially was a huge opportunity for enrichment. And there's some really funny stories about how it kind of warped regional grain markets. So at one point, this coincided in the. With the famine in Ethiopia, and there were. Apparently there was a surplus of grain within Saudi Arabia. So the Saudi government gave it as food aid to Ethiopia. And some Yemeni entrepreneurs then took that grain from Ethiopia, diverted it away from starving people, as it was intended for, and then took it back, smuggled it back to Saudi Arabia, and then sold it back to the government. So there was this kind of. The scale of this project really kind of warped regional grain markets. But I think the enrichment that followed from that really formed the basis of the kind of what I would describe as Gulf agribusiness capital. So it played a role in capitalizing these big companies like Cevola and Al Marai, which are big agribusiness conglomerates in Saudi Arabia. And these companies then went on to really become the core of the regional agribusiness industry, and they are so today. So I think that kind of transfer of resources and water and land played a big role in a kind of wave of capital accumulation that then formed the basis of what was to come next, which was a kind of much more external investment. And I think I should add here also, another important aspect of this is this was kind of devastating to the aquifers in Saudi Arabia. The extraction of water from the scale was really, really, really drained the aquifers. There's no details on this, I think, but it did have a very kind of damaging effect to these groundwater aquifers in Saudi Arabia. And that was one of the reasons why these projects were stopped, is that there was a realization this was just fiscally too expensive, but also too exhaustive for the water supplies in the country.
- [24:11]
Commercial Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Big news for your kids. Lunchbox. Welch's Fruit snacks are now made without any artificial dyes. A snack parents can feel good about and the same delicious taste kids can't get enough of. All made with no artificial dyes. Try Welch's Fruit Snacks today.
- [24:33]
Credit Karma Advertiser
Not sure how to tackle your taxes. Are you sweating the small print? You may be experiencing FOMO, the fear of messing up the answer using TurboTax on Intuit credit Karma. They help you get your biggest refund and then we help you do more with it with a personalized plan designed to help you hit your money goals. It's time to take your taxes to the max. Start filing today in the Credit Karma app.
- [25:01]
Christian
I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or
- [25:05]
Commercial Announcer
more headache days a month, each lasting
- [25:07]
Christian
four hours or more.
- [25:09]
Botox Advertiser
Botox Autobotulinum Toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for Those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or La Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
- [25:54]
Christian
Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call
- [25:58]
Commercial Announcer
1-844-BOTOX to learn more.
- [26:02]
Interviewer
Yeah, you noted at the at the end of the 1990s that you observed many of these large scale agribusiness projects were running up against significant both fiscal and ecological constraints. And in response to this, GCC states begin to reduce subsidies for domestic agriculture and redirect investment towards the creation of transnational supply networks to ensure their food security. And food security then becomes the focus of Chapter four, which you don't just take the discourse at face value around food security, but instead analyze how that discourse functions as quote an epistemology that codifies multiple logic of security and profit as expressed by both the government and the private sector. You also describe it as a biopolitical logic used to demarcate responsibilities, entitlements and circuits of production. If you could, what does it mean to understand food security as both a bipolitical logic, biopolitical logic, and as an epistemology that's codifying these overlapping logics of of security and profit?
- [27:18]
Christian
So I think you know, food security comes up A remarkable amount in, in the Gulf states. You can see it constantly referenced to, in media and policy reports. It's, you know, and it varies from country to country. But you know, the UAE I would argue takes us to the kind of extreme in the sense that they really pay a lot of attention to this institutionally. They have a, a food security office, they have kind of objectives as part of their kind of long term planning to become, I think at one point they made announced that they were going to be one of the best countries in the world in terms of food security. And what I argue essentially is that food security is this kind of discourse that accompanies go for agribusiness and it means many different things to different parties. And I think my argument really is that in some ways it's a way to, it's a discourse that kind of refers to trade, an investment in food. So if you look at some of the big land grabs that took place in places like Sudan by Gulf investors, there will always be a reference to food security, but it's referenced in a very vague way, right? And in some ways it's a kind of, you know, from an epistemological perspective, it's a way of understanding and framing and creating a kind of boundary around the subject. So another interesting thing about food security is that, and I go back to this in later in the book, but you know, in terms of technology, the, you know, food security has become a way to talk about food and the technology that can be used to produce food, but without really going into all of the kind of social realities of food, without going into the fact that if you look at a country like Yemen, which is on the border with the gcc, with Saudi Arabia and Oman is essentially been on the verge of starvation for the last 10 years. And food security is a way of addressing scarcity, but without actually addressing that reality which is really extreme within the region. You have, you know, something like 50% of the Arab population cannot afford a healthy diet. So food security serves that agenda, right? You can talk about something from a kind of technocratic perspective, but without getting into all the politics and sensitivities of real scarcity. And in that sense it has a biopolitical dimension, right? It claims to be a kind of universal logic in the sense that it's used to justify investments in land, for example, but in reality it doesn't do that at all. It is about really creating a kind of front through which one side is assured security and resources and access and the other side isn't. So it kind of demarks along the basis of national boundaries or populations, who gets access to nutrition and who doesn't. And it's not just nutrition. I mean, it goes further than nutrition in the sense that it also has a kind of business logic, right? In the sense that, as we just discussed, you have these big capital groups, big conglomerates such as Cevola or Almerai, which have a capitalization of billions, but they themselves will also use this logic of food security. So it's quite an interesting discuss a feature of this industry in the sense that it. It's quite difficult to kind of pin down sometimes what it means because it means many of these different things. And I should add also that, and I, again, I, you know, referenced this in, in earlier, that there is a kind of fear of, of famine. There is a fear of not having enough. And so it is in some ways a real thing as well. It's not just a kind of an imagined thing. It is also a real thing. There is also a real anxiety about that. And I think that we kind of are experiencing that at the moment, and hopefully we'll have the opportunity to talk about that towards the end. But dependence on imports does create a certain reality. So I think the point I'm trying to make in this chapter is that it serves, you know, it makes references to many different things. It's partly political, it's partly about economic, it's partly about profit, and it's also about, you know, a real anxiety of being exposed to the world, of not having control over, you know, where this vital kind of input comes from in terms of your society.
- [33:18]
Interviewer
And maybe to elaborate on that a little bit, to use the case of the uae, which stands out as sort of a particularly salient case study when thinking about food security and securitization. You know that the country hosted 16 conferences on food security between 2021 and 2023, and that the government aspires to hold the top place in the Economist Intelligence Unit's Food Global Food security index by 2051. And over the past year, there's been considerable debate about how the UAE should be theorized within the international order and capitalist world economy. And one quite influential perspective holds that the Emirates is a kind of neo Venetian empire in the making, that it's leveraging its commercial advantages and logistical networks to advance certain geopolitical ambitions. You don't seem fully convinced by this neo mercantilist framing, and instead you contend that the narrative of food security serves, as you've explained, as a justification in Discursive shield making the profit driven motives behind the investment decisions of major Gulf agri food conglomerates possible. Could you explain how the discourse of food security is employed to legitimize investments and control of foreign resources? And how can we understand the ways in which Gulf states are securitizing their social metabolism via the private sector and private investment?
- [34:53]
Christian
Yeah, I mean, I think the, the, there is this kind of critique that is made of the Gulf states that actually these are countries that are mercantile, as you pointed out, and that their objective is essentially about total control over, over resources, total control over other societies that kind of produce what they need and that they're kind of blocking out the market exchange as a result. And I think to be fair, there is some truth to that in the sense that if you look at some of the idea of direct land ownership is clearly designed to guarantee kind of a supply of commodities at a certain price. And it is clearly intended to be a way to, you know, manage exposure to fluctuations in market price. But the thing the problem is is that from my perspective, that doesn't really explain or nor does it shed enough light on the way in which a country like the UAE is hugely engaged with the global trade or, well, the regional trade in food and the global trade in food in the sense that as much as it is an importer of food, it is also an exporter of food. And I think that's the other kind of key characteristic of this topic in the sense that this isn't just about kind of domestic supply, it's about essentially inserting oneself into the kind of global value chain. So if you look at the uae, which has really been remarkably successful at doing this, it has the biggest value of agricultural exports in the whole region, which is really remarkable, right, because for anyone who's been to the uae, it's apparent that this is not a country that really has a natural endowment of agrarian land by any means. And the whole reason, and this level of exports is also remarkable given the fact that, you know, it completely outstrips that of let's say Egypt or Morocco, which are, you know, traditional agricultural economies. And the reason why they've been able to do that is essentially they've inserted themselves on the value chain. They import raw commodities, you know, be it sugar cane or wheat or rapeseed or corn, and then they process them and then they re export them. So I think that the kind of mercantile argument maybe holds true to a certain extent in terms of what they import, but it doesn't give enough explanation as to their role and their need for a market for their exports. And I think that that is a really helpful way of understanding in an economy like the UAE more generally in the sense that they are really about kind of it's really based on a kind of extractive model in the sense that they have been able to find a place within the global economy where they're very effective extracting value from other places but not necessarily paying the full cost. And you can apply this to food, but you could also apply it to migration in the sense that a country like the UAE and other Gulf countries have a huge migrant working class that are a very important source of cheap labor for these economies, but they don't pay for any of the kind of social reproduction of that migrant working class. The social reproduction of that migrant working class takes place in the country of origin. So this is a kind of, you know, food gives us a good insight into that, what that actually means. And that is essentially what inspired the title of the book in the sense that they are pretty effective and certainly the UAE is pretty effective at extracting value in lots of different ways from poorer economies, poorer countries and then processing it, finishing it, and then re exporting it. So I'm not sure if that, you know, mercantilism necessarily fully explains that. It doesn't necessarily give us enough explanation of market creation, market marketization of their
- [40:13]
Home Depot Advertiser
own exports Spring Black Friday is on at the Home Depot. Save on grills and patio sets that will be sure to bring your hosting game up a notch. Fire up your feast with help from the Home Depot and save on grills like the next grill 4 burner propane gas grill was $249. Now in special buy for $199 or give everyone the best seat in the yard with the Hampton bay Mayfield park four piece conversation set for only $399. Save on grills and patio sets with low prices guaranteed during Spring Black Friday only at the Home Depot now through April 22nd while supplies last exclusion supplies to homedepot.com Pricematch for details.
- [40:44]
Depop Advertiser
You tell yourself no one wants your college era band tees, but on Depop people are searching for exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for them at merch stands. Now a teenager who calls them vintage will offer that same small fortune back. Sell them easily on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste would be a money making machine? Your style can make you cash start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste.
- [41:15]
Commercial Announcer
Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in original and cherry Vanilla that Pepsi taste you love with just 30 calories and no artificial sweeteners. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola, Unbelievably Pepsi.
- [41:30]
Interviewer
Yeah, and you've brilliantly anticipated my next question as well on chapter five, where you really examine how the investment strategies of GCC agribusiness businesses are reordering that circulation of food in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, a defining feature of that process being the formation of this new core periphery dynamic between the Gulf and neighboring states, sort of epitomized in one example by contemporary Emirati and Egyptian relations. And this sort of paradoxical outcome being, as you've already explained, that the uae, a country with very limited arable land, has managed to achieve agricultural export values that exceed those of Egypt and Morocco, both of which have very long histories of settled agriculture. So, jumping ahead then maybe to the subsequent chapter, your attention shifts to the ways in which Gulf states acquire foreign land holdings to augment their control over regional value chains. And you note in this chapter how these land purchases are, quote, sometimes seen as a departure from historical patterns of northern control of resources in global south states, and that opposed to a form of dispossession. Golf acquisitions are considered as the result of cooperation based on shared identities, such as Islam or Arabism. You reject these claims and document how these acquisitions are predicated on a form of violent enclosure that is entirely consistent with historical processes of dispossession. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in contemporary Egypt, but you also cite several other examples, especially in Africa. So could you walk us through how the developmental aims of a place like Egypt and the Egyptian state have been synthesized with the profit seeking and the investment profit seeking investments of Gulf capital to repurpose arid land in the country. And do you have any comments on how this new core periphery relationship might also be impacting the energy transition and other related processes in Africa?
- [43:49]
Christian
Yeah, I think. I mean, Egypt is a kind of a special case when it comes to these projects because. Well, first of all, I think the cases that I focused on in Africa were Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. And I think in some of these cases they can essentially just be explained by a kind of corrupt relationship. But Egypt is particularly interesting because when we look at a project like Toshka, which received quite a lot of investment in agricultural land, Toshka started life as something much more ambitious than just farmland. Toshka started life in 1994 under Hosni Mubarak as a new city, essentially. And it was Initiated with the aim of developing a new and new industrial space, a new urban environment. There was some talk that it would be a place where population from the Nile Valley could be rehoused because of and so called overcrowding could be avoided. Had all these different developmental aims, but it didn't really get off the ground and it wasn't really that successful. But then a Saudi prince came along, and this has obviously been documented by people like Timothy Mitchell, but also others. And that started this kind of relationship whereby the Saudi prince, Walid Bin Talal kind of rescued the project by giving his name to the project. And that was done as a sort of favor to Hosni Mubarak. It didn't really cost William bin Talal that much, to be honest with you, to invest in it. And in that sense, I think what happened really is that Hosni Mubarak was using this as a kind of mega project to sort of try and generate and maintain political legitimacy. During the sort of phase of neoliberal reform in Egypt, where things were quite unstable, there were a lot of changes taking place in the country. And in that sense, the kind of involvement of a Gulf businessman kind of facilitated that. Now, in reality, I think you could argue that that type of investment wasn't really about agricultural land or farming. It was much more about just, you know, elite relationships. And I think the. In the case of Walid Bin Talal, what was particularly interesting after he made that investment is that, that he was then able to buy out a large part or much of the catalog of the Egyptian National Film Archive, as well as make investments in other areas. So I think that a project like that, you know, often we can see this in other cases it provides a kind of vehicle for, you know, different elite interests. And that was definitely the case in Toshka. However, you can also see there are other projects in, in Egypt, such as there's a project out in the Western desert called Shark Al Awinat, which is essentially run by the Egyptian military. It's not publicized, it's not subject to much attention, which functions as a kind of enclosure that does seem to produce food and is taken back to the Gulf states. And I think there's, you know, there's, there's a kind of. The other thing you could argue really about some of these projects is that they are sort of benefit from a sort of state of exception. You know, they are kind of extraterritorial spaces whereby, you know, normal laws, normal procedures don't necessarily apply. And they. That that's facilitated by Kind of powerful state agencies like the army or like the presidential office that are able to do that. And in that sense, and I think that's a very interesting question, I do think they represent the blueprint that is going to be used in other forms and other projects. And I do think you can argue that when we look at other levels of Gulf investment in places like Egypt, the level of very high level interaction does represent a state of exception and it does facilitate, you know, agendas and it does. But ultimately the problem, I think, is that it, it is a loss of national, the National Endowment to a certain extent, you know, land, water, and the logic of these kinds of investments when you have, you know, very high food prices for the domestic population is really questionable. But within this kind of matrix of, you know, elite relations and state to state, very high state level agencies interacting with one another, that doesn't matter.
- [49:08]
Interviewer
Yeah. And in the penultimate chapter, then you also talk about how food itself is politicized and can be an object of politics. You examine how food, for example, functions as an instrument that both ruling classes and individual consumers can exploit for competing or, yeah, competing political objectives, from the creation of a cohesive national identity to popular expressions of protests in fairly repressive societies. So I guess a very simple question is, in what ways has food and consumption become a proxy for politics in the Gulf states? And maybe one way of answering this as well, because in the book you actually mentioned visiting Doha in 2024 and a mall and seeing displays of Palestinian solidarity and consumption kind of very obviously displayed.
- [50:14]
Christian
Yeah, I mean, I think the, the point that I'm trying to make in this chapter is really that, you know, food is, is, is part of the moral economy and it has so many, you know, it is wrapped up in so many different, you know, values. And, and you know, there's always politics about consumption and consumption choices. And it's a way of expression, it's a way of, it's a lifestyle, it's the fashion. All of these different kind of elements are embedded within food consumption and that really manifests in the Gulf in the same way that it is anywhere else. But I think what's kind of interesting in the Gulf states is that maybe you can see that there is more of an emphasis on the way in which the state kind of uses food and food consumption as a way to kind of encourage reform amongst its citizens or changes in behavior. So, you know, there is a kind of, there's a concern about food waste, for example. There's also the state uses the kind of technopolitics of food production as a way to kind of garner legitimacy in some cases to present itself as a kind of modern entity. You could also see that there's some questions about nationality and nationalism embedded in cuisine at the same time as much as there is this kind of state level kind of act agenda. What's really interesting about the Gulf states is that you can also see that the boycott of certain products in protest of the Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is also manifest, but perhaps ways in ways that are not necessarily immediately obvious. But you know, there does appear to be, based on the financial results of some food companies, that does appear to have been a decline in turnover as a result of these types of Boycotts since, for example, since October 7, 2023. So, and I think that's particularly interesting because in some ways, you know, the I, you could argue that aspects of society, or not necessarily society, but aspects of the built environment in the Gulf are kind of hyper consumerist. But I think it would be a mistake to kind of portray that in a deterministic manner or a manner that doesn't really account for the fact that as much as that is true, there are also ways in which people are expressing political values through what they consume and what they decide to consume. And I think that's kind of important because it shows that even in societies which are kind of quite consumerist and which aren't necessarily tolerant of public activism, people still find a way to articulate their politics.
- [53:41]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. And finally, let's turn then to the recent crisis unfolding across the region. So not two days after the publication of your book, the United States and Israel launched coordinated military strikes against targets in Iran. And in response, the IRGC has carried out a series of drone and missile attacks on critical energy infrastructure across the Gulf, striking facilities in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the uae, while also disrupting maritime shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important oil transit choke points. And these actions have sent global energy prices soaring, evoking memories of the oil crises of the 1970s. But there are a number of important distinctions between our current crisis and those of the 1970s. In 2026, it's not only crude oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz, but an array of other downstream petrochemical products, including an estimated one third of the world's nitrogen fertilizer supply, sulfate, which is important for the production of phosphate fertilizers, helium, which is important for the AI supply chains and semiconductor production. And recently, the international Business Press has been reporting extensively on American and European farmers grappling with soaring chemical input prices ahead of the spring planting season. All of which to say, it seems that the world has been catching up in some sense to the significance of, of your research over the past month. But I'm wondering how you've been interpreting recent events. So I might ask you, what lessons do you think the Gulf states might draw from this ongoing crisis? And could it prompt a reassessment of their current investment strategies? Or will large agribusinesses only expand their overseas asset purchases and portfolios?
- [55:41]
Christian
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing I would say is that it was evident when I was researching the book that Gulf governments had thought this through to varying degrees. Right. I mean, the UAE definitely was particularly proactive about planning for this. Other countries in the region perhaps less so, but still, it was on the. They. They had not. They had kind of planned this to a certain extent. And I think now that Hormuz is essentially closed and that this main route for, you know, about 70% of the region's food supplies is essentially, is now closed. It's not available. I think what's striking to me is actually from, based on what I understand, there are no, no real shortages. There's maybe some panic buying taking place in supermarkets, but I haven't heard any reports of major shortages taking place. And people I know in the Gulf, I've asked them, and they've said that doesn't appear to be any major problem. So to me, what's really interesting is that it shows actually how effective the kind of these plans have been in the sense that they have stockpiles of three to six months of, you know, basic commodities. They also, the logistical depth and flexibility that has been established in the region is also playing out. Right? So they are able to unload food in Oman on the Indian Ocean or on the Red Sea coast and Saudi Arabia and just truck it through the rest of the region. And if things get really difficult, you know, they can also bring it in by air as well. However, this will all incur a cost. It will incur increase in prices. And I think that that may be, you know, food price inflation will happen. But I think the Gulf governments can kind of manage that. They can, you know, intervene with subsidies, and they do have the means to control that. I think the big question for me is twofold. One is the rest of the region, its relationship with the Gulf, both as an exporter and importer. So there are already reports that exporters to the Gulf countries are suffering because they can't get their produce to market. That's going to hit the agrarian economies in these countries at the worst time, given the fact that we know that they will also suffer from inflationary shock and it will be much worse than anything that the Gulf will experience. And also their import of food. So, you know, the UAE exports 3% of the global sugar market, comes from one company in, in Jebel Ali Port. It exports flour, exports uht, milk, cooking oil, all of these basic commodities. And I don't know what effect those exports, what the status of those exports are and that they export to countries like Yemen and Sudan and other poorer countries in the Horn of Africa, for example. So that's a question mark for me. I don't know what the effect of that will be, but I'm sure there will be disruption. And then of course, we have the much bigger global economy question of what will the effect be of the shortfall of fertilizer on international markets. As far as I understand it, fertilizers are essentially doubled in price, which then leads much trickier. That essentially creates much bigger questions about the, the food, global food price inflation. And I think in that sense we are kind of experiencing, you know, global international food markets that are, you know, seem to be becoming more and more unstable. We had a, you know, the 2008 food price spike, 2011 afterwards spiked again. Covid was another kind of spike and then the invasion of Ukraine and now this. So food price, food markets appear to be becoming more unstable. And of course, ultimately who pays the price for this is not necessarily wealthier countries like the Gulf states, but you know, poorer people around the world and inflation is a kind of war on the poor. And the more that they spend on, more poorer people have to spend on food, the less money they have for other aspects of household expenditure. So this is a major problem. And I suppose in the longer term it really raises questions about the need to become more sovereign and less dependent on inputs that are industrial input inputs that are exported around the world and traded around the world. And I think going back to your question about what the Gulf states will do, it's hard to know. But I mean, what is apparent is that for a long time, for decades, really, arguably since the invasion of Kuwait and since the Iran Iraq war, the Gulf states have really benefited from a world which was characterized by open trade. And that may be coming in the future of that may be in doubt to a certain extent or becoming less certain. So that's partly something that I think has been initiated by the war in Iran. But it was something that was already. There were already signs of fragmentations in the global political economy. And in that sense, the Gulf may, or some Gulf countries may decide that they're actually less comfortable with being so dependent on international trade and move more towards direct control. And maybe they will. One scenario is that they will make bigger investments in direct control of land. But the problem with that is that it's still a vulnerability, right, in the sense that you're still at the behest of another government, you're still at the behest of someone else for your food supplies. That's one scenario. Another scenario is that they may make bigger investments in agritech, vertical agriculture projects, indoor greenhouses that really represent a freedom from kind of dependence on food imports. But the problem is with that is that it's very expensive. And I think all of the aspects of Gulf agribusiness remain dependent on inputs from somewhere else. So they are really, there are not that many choices. I think from that perspective they remain really, they will always be dependent on free trade when it comes to this particular aspect of their economies.
- [63:33]
Interviewer
Well, thank you for fleshing all of that out. And I think it's likely something that many listeners will be monitoring with some degree of anxiety for the foreseeable future. There's still so much else that I could ask you about this book, but I'm going to stop us here. But I hope that this conversation will be encouragement for everyone to pick up a copy of what is truly an excellent book, Monarchies of the Gulf States in the Global Food System, out now with Cambridge University Press. Thank you so much, Christian.
- [64:12]
Christian
Thank you. Thank you.
- [64:26]
Blinds.com Advertiser
The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million in Windows and have 50,000 five star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure right now. Get up to 40% off site wide, plus get a free professional measure at blinds. Com. Rules and restrictions apply.