The Iran War's Devastating Butterfly Effect

[00:00] I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. We exchange articles. And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. She sent me a year-long subscription so I have access to all the games. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. It enriches our relationship. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff. We're making the same food. We're on the same page. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com slash gift. [00:30] Thank you. [00:31] From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. [00:42] The war in Iran has had some visible consequences, like skyrocketing energy costs and higher gas prices. But the effects of this war are often far less obvious and much more serious for the world's most vulnerable people. [00:56] Today, my colleague Peter Goodman tells us about what he learned on a recent trip to Somalia, and why the system of global aid is no longer in a position to help. It's Wednesday, June 10th. [01:17] *music* [01:19] Music [01:25] Peter Goodman, welcome back to The Daily. Thanks for having me. So Peter, we're now 101 days into the war with Iran, and we have talked a lot on the show about

[01:33] its effect on gas prices. But you cover global supply chains, which means that you've gone all over the world, you've reported on how something gets from point A to point B, and you have focused a lot on all the people who are affected in between. So for that reason, we wanted to ask you for your take on how the war has disrupted things all over the world in less visible ways. [01:57] Well, first of all, the price of energy goes so far beyond putting gas in your car, right? I mean, we've seen cooking fuel get scarce in India, in South America. We've seen the Philippines limit the hours that people can work in office buildings to limit the cost of air conditioning. We've seen helium, which is used by computer chip factories from Taiwan, get expensive and hard to secure. The ripple effects of this are almost infinite. [02:27] effect. A butterfly flaps its wings in one place and you see a tidal wave in another. Right. I mean, this particular butterfly is coming out of the Strait of Hormuz, which is the conduit for something like one-fifth of the world's oil supply and something like a third of major forms of fertilizer, which affects how much food that we can grow. And so the consequences of this particular flapping of wings are especially enormous. In addition to these kind [02:57] And that's what I've been focusing on. I've been looking at 60 or so countries that tend to suffer from malnutrition, even in the best of times. And every time there's a shock, we have reason to worry. And now we have a big reason to worry because the price of food and fertilizer is going up very quickly in many parts of the world.

[03:21] And we in wealthy countries decided to dismantle large parts of the international humanitarian relief system. This is the safety net that dates all the way back to the end of World War II. And then we in the United States and Israel decided to launch this war. [03:41] Mm-hmm. The aid cuts that you referred to, the U.S. aid cuts, of course, refer to USAID. We covered this on the show. That was something that happened very early on in the second Trump administration. Yes. I mean, that's a critically important part of the story, but it's far from the only part. I mean, in addition, major European donors like the United Kingdom, like Germany, have also pulled back. [04:11] or financing NATO as opposed to, in the Trump view, just relying on the good graces and largesse of the United States. And so in London, in Berlin, major governments have also cut back significantly on overseas aid. And that has contributed to this picture. So let me give you an example. Four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, there were similar fears about a fertilizer [04:41] hits to food security because Russia and Ukraine together produce a lot of grain. They also produce a lot of the peace parts for fertilizers. And so from Egypt to Indonesia, there were worries about the price of bread and grains. And the energy prices did go up because of that war, too. Absolutely. They were not unfounded. Oh, no. These were real effects. In fact, I went to Nigeria back in 2023 to write about the shock to the fertilizer situation, and it was pretty dire.

[05:11] Thank you. [05:11] There was $43 billion in international humanitarian relief led by $17 billion from the United States that got marshaled to take on this crisis and staved off famine in places like Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Somalia. So when the war in Ukraine shocked the world economy, the humanitarian system more or less worked. [05:37] Exactly. And then came the war in Iran. [05:41] And this time, we're in a moment where the politics are completely different, and much of the developed wealthy world is pulling back. And so now we're in a situation where we've got tremendous need for aid. We've got climate crises around the world. And yet we've seen international humanitarian relief drop from $43 billion in 2022 to $28 billion last year, and it's still coming down. [06:11] I feel like [06:12] the U.S.'s allies looked at the cuts that the U.S. was making to USAID and thought, OK, well, if the U.S. is cutting it, we can cut it too. Like, do you think the U.S. almost gave our NATO allies permission to cut their own humanitarian programs? Yes and no. I mean, look, the Nordic countries and the European Union as a bloc are still holding the line on overseas aid. And yet the political appeal in many countries, and especially this one, the United States,

[06:42] hey, how about we solve problems at home instead of trying to save starving kids in some faraway place that I'll never visit? That has a lot of political punch. Now... [06:52] I think it's important to remember that while politically it's sometimes very convenient for people to attack overseas aid and treat it like it's just sort of a discretionary type of charity, the people who designed it and continue to advocate for this system have argued that, you know, in addition to the humanitarian aims, it's also been an instrument of foreign policy. [07:22] attempting to say, well, what do people in some faraway place have to do with the voter in Ohio or New Jersey or wherever? History tells us that when you leave tens of millions of people in a situation where they don't have enough food to eat and their already difficult lives become that much more traumatic, that can play out a lot of different ways, but they're not good. First of all, you can end up with the mother of all migration crisis. Now, I'm not here to fearmonger about immigration, [07:52] of people heading to the Darien Gap in Panama or streaming toward places like Greece and Turkey and on toward northern Europe. Well, you got to give a thought to what's going to happen if you remove all of this aid and then add on an enormous crisis. You're describing a bunch of reasons why people risk everything to travel to other countries in search of a better life, hunger, climate change, desperation. And all of that, as you're describing,

[08:22] because of the shocks caused by the Iran war. [08:25] Right. People are not going to sit in their villages and starve. People are going to go to where they can better support their families. And the worse the crisis gets, the more likely that people will be on the move. [08:55] recruits. It's another societal shock. Right. There are a lot of reasons why it might be bad for a country to become, for lack of a better term, a failed state. [09:05] That's right. What happens when a state sinks into absolute dysfunction? That can play out a lot of different ways. They're generally not good. And it's not tenable for the rest of the world to pretend that it's living in some sort of giant gated community. [09:35] malnutrition. And I was talking to aid groups around the world. And then I had a conversation with Mercy Corps, this American aid organization that I had known from traveling with them in Nigeria to write about the fertilizer crisis back in 2023. And they suggested that I think about going to Somalia, a country that is especially susceptible to climate change, drought. My

[10:05] Somalia was not a place on my map of potential places to do reporting because it's traditionally thought of as very difficult, dangerous. But they suggested that it would be possible... [10:18] And as I saw how dependent Somalia was on not only imported food, but also imported fertilizer coming out of the Strait of Hormuz, I realized that it was the perfect place to see up close this grave test of what one person put it to me as the post-aid era. [10:40] *music* [10:48] We'll be right back. [10:54] I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for The Athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now. And The Athletic's World Cup coverage has everything you need to follow the tournament. There's 48 countries taking part from the tiny island of Curacao to the five-time champions Brazil. Even if you don't know your offside from your onside, if you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. [11:24] who's already up early every weekend, waking the neighbors when your favorite club scores. We'll make sure you get equipped with more information, more insight than anyone you know. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground covering the ins and outs from every game. I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to the Athletics World Cup coverage in our app. Download the Athletic app and see you there.

[11:51] Okay, so Peter, talk to us about your trip to Somalia. What did you find going on there? [11:57] Well, it's important to say right at the top that Somalia was already in a very precarious situation before the war started. There was, you know, as I mentioned before, a severe drought. There had been several droughts in a row. These had devastated the food supply. You've got armed conflict. And then you've got these dramatic cuts to the aid system before this war. [12:27] 90% of its energy. And because so much shipping has been disrupted by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and to a lesser extent, the Red Sea, you've got several weeks of delays getting supplies into ports in the Horn of Africa. And so the price of food and fuel has more than doubled since the war. You're describing a series of cascading events that all could lead to these [12:57] by one, let's start with the food situation. [13:02] - Right, so in Mogadishu, which is the capital of Somalia, I went to a fish market. [13:10] And there were these guys wielding machetes to hack sharks and tuna into steaks. [13:17] I talked to a woman. [13:19] who was running a stand there, Fatou Manor,

[13:23] And she was telling me that... [13:25] Wholesale prices have gone up because the fishing boats can't afford to buy as much diesel as they used to, which means they can't go out to the deeper waters where the biggest fish are. They're staying closer to the shore, which is depleting the catch, which is limiting the supply of fish. So she has to pay more. And as a result, she has to charge her customers more. So her sales are down half. And she's actually worried about going bankrupt as a result of this. [13:51] And Somalia, of course, is a country where a lot of people already had trouble affording food. Of course. But what about the people who even before the Iran war could not afford to go to this market and purchase the sharks that are being cut up, the fish that she is selling? What have they been doing since prices have only gone up? [14:08] Yeah, I mean, I talked to, I don't even know how many families who said, we don't know where our next meal is coming from. We're lucky if we can feed our children one meal a day. Lots of families are now subsisting on, you know, sorghum porridge with weeds that they're finding by riverbanks and the drought is even eliminating that. [14:38] water to drought afflicted areas. And they were already dealing with budget cuts. Well, now the price of diesel goes up. So the price of trucking that water is much more expensive. So now they're trucking less water. Well, now that they're trucking less water, [14:52] There are more people in need who can no longer stay in the places that used to be relying upon that water. They have to go move somewhere in search of aid in the places like the ones I visited in camps along the Ethiopian border.

[15:04] So what did you see when you visited those camps, and what did the people there tell you? [15:11] Yeah, well, this was gutting. On my first day in the town of Dolo on the Ethiopian border, [15:19] the sort of place where traditionally large international relief groups, World Food Program, UNICEF, have clustered. I met a family that had left a rural area where the drought had been particularly severe. [15:33] It had killed their 50 head of cattle. That's their life savings. Once that's gone, they've got nothing. Meanwhile, the rivers have dried up. They can't grow any food. So they walked for nine days carrying their three-year-old daughter on their backs. And they get there to Dolo and they discover that all of these international relief groups, almost all of them, have abandoned the area. There's no help. [16:00] Did they tell you how it felt to arrive only to find out that this was just an aid camp with no aid? [16:07] I mean, they were in disbelief and they understood, like most of the people in these camps, they can't go back. They set up a tent alongside hundreds of others with some plastic sheeting that gets donated by some other people in the camp. They find some sticks and they set up the shelter and they're just waiting and hoping that some aid will return. [16:31] What you are describing is a mass starvation crisis in the making, if not already here. Can you talk a little bit about what treatment is available for people who do not have enough food, for these children who do not have enough food? And has that changed also as a result of the war? Yeah, that's changed dramatically.

[16:51] I think maybe the most harrowing thing I saw, I was taken to a UNICEF ward of a hospital in Mogadishu [17:01] severe malnourishment cases are taken. [17:05] This hospital has seen a doubling of the risk [17:09] of cases in the last few months. This is since the disruptions of the war. I saw babies needing feeding tubes and oxygen to be kept alive. Is this OK? - - [17:26] And I talked through a translator with a mother who was sitting next to her 18-month-old baby boy leaning up alongside her. [17:36] So she's saying the river dried up so they cannot cultivate. So they lost their crops, so they got hungry. And her son began vomiting? Yeah. [17:47] You have to do that. [17:48] And when her infant son couldn't hold down any food, she had to beg to get $24 to get her child to the city in a place where farm laborers are making a dollar a day. And he was actually a quote-unquote positive outcome. Oh, that's it? Another three or four days? Yeah. He was about to be discharged. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you so much. I love you. Thank you. [18:15] But here was the part of this that was... [18:18] most striking to me. [18:21] The doctors there told me

[18:23] A third of these cases, they think, could have been avoided had these kids been assessed and treated earlier. Now, UNICEF has been forced to close 205 health and nutrition centers throughout Somalia. If those centers were still there, then a lot of these kids ending up in the hospital needing oxygen to breathe and feeding tubes to stay alive would be treated and assessed earlier. But that capacity has been dismantled. [18:54] Peter, you mentioned that Somalia was already facing a cascading series of crises even before the Iran war. Right. Right. [19:01] Do we have any way to quantify how much worse the humanitarian crisis has gotten? [19:06] Well, let me put it to you this way. [19:08] In February, so this is before the impacts of the Iran war, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns that there are six and a half million people in Somalia. That's about a third of the population that are suffering hunger at levels that are deemed an emergency. [19:38] Well, when I was there, this is late April, early May, they were down to funds that were adequate to serve 300,000 people a month. And that was going to run out at the end of June. So from 2 million to 300,000 a month and no more come July. Correct. And I actually got a snapshot of this aid running out in real time in Somalia.

[20:08] World Food Program warehouse. So this is two months supply? Yeah, two months supply. OK. This is a place that felt like a fortress, you know? High walls topped by barbed wire. Supplying the region basically with food. And I walked through that facility with the director, Josephine Mouly. Josephine, so when you first started here two years ago, how many of these tents were full? [20:34] Basically we used to have full capacity [20:38] She showed me these 13 [20:40] A-frame tents that normally would be full of food aid, [20:46] And 12 of these 13 tents were empty. So we're in the one tent that actually does have some supplies. We went inside this one tent that was full, and there were these brown cartons. These cardboard boxes stamped with the USAID logo and American flags. It says Made in USAID. [21:16] eating moms, and this was the last of it. There was nothing else in the pipeline. Just up to June, June, July. If we don't get any funding, we'll be dry completely, completely. We can't risk. [21:30] And I asked the director quite bluntly, and then what happens to the population? What are you going to do?

[21:44] It really brought home for me that these aid workers are now in a position where they're having to contemplate this surreal hierarchy of suffering where, you know, as one World Food Program official put it to me, we're deciding who lives today and who dies in two weeks. [22:03] Peter, how representative is what you saw in Somalia of the downstream effects of this war in the other countries that you have been focused on? Well, look, Somalia goes into this crisis especially vulnerable, but it is very much representative in that the trajectory is the same. [22:33] in officially declared famine. [22:36] Well, now import Sudan, the primary gateway for food aid in Sudan. You have stuff coming in weeks later. And then the head of UNICEF for Sudan told me it's difficult to get that stuff trucked to places that are stricken by famine because not only is the price of diesel so expensive, but the trucking companies are unwilling to take the risk of bringing their trucks into the hinterland because there are actual physical shortages of diesel fuel. [23:06] They're worried they're going to get stuck there. So I just came back from Ivory Coast, which is one of the fastest growing economies on Earth. This is in West Africa. And there you have cocoa farmers who have already been suffering from dramatically reduced prices for their crops. Now they're looking at increased prices for fertilizer, which means lower yields, lower livelihoods, and on it goes.

[23:32] Peter, one of the things that we have talked about on this show a lot since the war began was that even if it ended tomorrow, even if the Strait of Hormuz opened tomorrow, enough damage has been done to energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf that the disruptions to energy supplies could go on for years. [23:51] I wonder whether you foresee that same kind of more lasting disruption in the countries that we've talked about today. [23:59] Look, a lot of what we're talking about here will change people's lives forever. Now, will some of it return to normal when the strait reopens? Maybe some of it. Sure, fuel prices presumably will go back down, fertilizer will be more available, and food prices could come back down, and that could have a lot of benefit. But you have to look at things a little more expansively than that. I mean, again, [24:24] Think about the butterfly effect, all of the ripple effects that can't be undone in a few weeks or maybe even years. I mean, I went to a training program in Dolo in Somalia that used to be funded by USAID. It trained people to be seamstresses. And when I was there, they had no threat. They didn't have chemicals for their sewing machines. And enrollment had crashed. Now, this is not the most acutely needed sort of program. [24:54] people tomorrow. But it's vital in terms of building up some upward mobility. Think about that times a million. You know, Rachel, I've been doing this sort of work a long time.

[25:10] I spent a lot of time in conflict zones and disasters. You know, in 2004, [25:15] I was in Thailand the day of the tsunami, I went to Indonesia, and I saw and heard stories that will haunt me forever. [25:24] I saw 200 bodies in Thailand set up at this makeshift morgue lying out in the sun. I heard parents recounting how their children had been yanked out of their arms by this wave. [25:39] I mean, I don't really like the sort of Olympics of suffering. And yet... [25:44] What I saw in Somalia was enraging as well as gutting, because what happened in the Indian Ocean tsunami was, as they say, an act of God. And what I was seeing in Somalia was the product of a series of political decisions. It was made by human beings. [26:14] impacts of the war are now in these sort of purgatory situations, and we're still at the beginning stages of it. There's a long way down to go from here. [26:30] Peter Goodman, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Rachel. [26:38] We'll be right back.

[26:46] Here's what else you need to know today. Early Wednesday morning, the United States and Iran exchanged military attacks in the Middle East. Severe escalation after the downing of an American helicopter gunship earlier in the week. Acting on orders from President Trump, U.S. Central Command launched what it called "self-defense operations" near the Strait of Hormuz. [27:07] striking Iranian air defenses, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites, the scale of the damage is not yet clear. [27:15] In response, Iran claimed to launch drone strikes targeting the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain, along with 21 attacks on U.S. bases across the region. [27:26] But U.S. officials report that nearly all of the incoming missiles and drones were intercepted. [27:31] and there have been no reports of American casualties or damage to U.S. bases, according to initial American assessments. [27:43] Today's episode was produced by Adrienne Hurst, Michelle Bonja, and Claire Tennisgetter. With help from Diana Wynn, it was edited by Chris Haxel and Michael Benoit. [27:53] with help from Lizzo Balin, and contains music by Dan Powell and Leah Shaw Demeron. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. [28:12] That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.

[28:23] This week on The Wirecutter Show, we're going to have a new noise-canceling earbud pick. It has a fantastic noise-canceling microphone, like magical. We're taking your questions about headphones, earbuds, over-ear, Bluetooth, bone conduction. Lauren Dragon, longtime headphones writer for Wirecutter, answers it all with her expert recommendations. Find it wherever you like to listen.