The Islamic Republic, on the other side of the Gulf, is in a serious pickle. After its war with Israel, it is more isolated than ever. Its oil exports are still flowing, but it is struggling to collect the proceeds because America keeps cranking up sanctions on anyone helping it move money. Britain, France and Germany are threatening to restore their own embargoes unless it resumes nuclear negotiations in earnest. That is pushing Iran to find new ways to pay for the foreign goods it so desperately needs. Flooding the Gulf with fruit and veg is one of them. Iran now supplies nine out of ten cauliflowers, tomatoes and watermelons imported by the UAE, a near-monopoly built in just a few years.
Noooooo 
cauliflowers!!
the article being dog shit aside, why is it always a conspiracy of “ooh the evil mullahs in the government are orchestrating a vegetable coup in the gulf” and not like “middlemen and fruit traders looking for increasing their profits try to sell their produce in richer countries”? why is it always some big conspiracy about the evil ayatollah doing imperialism through fruits?
aside from that, im against this because it’s basically only benefiting middlemen at the expense of everyone. iran is running out of water, water in tehran is being rationed and if things don’t change we’ll run out of water in october. the farmers are always forced to sell way under the real price to middle men just to pay debt from the previous year, only to go in debt for this year again. it’s fucked.
“Food imperialists” really do exist, they’re American and they have bootlicking biographies written about them. And the dumbest business school graduates you know breathlessly worship them (“literally me!”) as examples of how capitalism rewards risk
also it’s funny it never goes both ways. almost everything iran imports either comes from dubai based companies or is smuggled through UAE. where’s the article on that assholes?
idk anything about the internal situation of Iranian agriculture but imo they have to paint this as evil shit because otherwise what would happen is Iran would export a bunch of food, food prices in general would decline which most people, needing to eat, would see as a good thing, which would then make it much harder to justify sanctions cutting off all of this trade
so instead of “hell yeah Iran is feeding the world, cost of living will go down!” it’s all this fucking “vegetable imperialism” nonsense