Why Qatar is raising cows in the desert

The Saudis refuse to sell them milk, so the world’s richest country is making its own.
Share on twitter
Share on facebook
Share on linkedin
Share on whatsapp
Share on email

STEP inside, and it could be a scene from the English countryside or the American heartland: one hundred well-fed dairy cows spinning slowly on a circular milking parlour. But outside there are no green fields, only sand. Baladna (“Our Country”) is a dairy farm in the desert, 50km from Doha, the Qatari capital. Behind the milking house is the din of construction. Hundreds of labourers are working to expand the farm, building new barns and installing fans and misters to cool them. “None of this was here a year ago,” says John Dore, the Irishman who manages the place.
There was no need for it. Until June Qatar imported milk from Almarai, a Saudi conglomerate. Then Saudi Arabia and three other Arab states closed their borders to punish Qatar for supporting Islamist groups and Al Jazeera, a state-owned broadcaster that criticises all the Gulf monarchies except Qatar’s. Overnight the world’s richest country (measured by income per head at purchasing-power parity) was cut off from its food supplies. It first turned to Turkey and Iran. Shoppers got a crash course in Turkish: placards in the dairy aisle of supermarkets explained that “süt” meant milk.
Now shoppers just look for Baladna’s ubiquitous logo. The farm, founded in 2013 to rear sheep, airlifted 3,400 Holsteins to Doha last year. Thousands more arrived by boat in February. Within months the farm will have 14,000 cows—and Qatar will be self-sufficient in dairy products. A litre of Baladna milk costs slightly less than eight rial ($2.20), comparable to what was once paid for Almarai milk. It also sells cheese, yogurt and laban, a fermented drink. The state-of-the-art facility has become an unlikely attraction for Qatar’s 2.6m citizens and foreign workers. They dine in its restaurant or bring their children to picnic in an adjacent park. A share listing is planned for later this year, which could see Baladna valued at up to 2bn rials ($550m).
As the blockade nears its first anniversary, there is talk of a thaw. The Saudis thought Mike Pompeo, America’s hawkish new secretary of state, would take their side. But on his inaugural foreign trip to Riyadh he bluntly told the king to lift the embargo. “We’re fed up with it,” says an American diplomat in one of the four blockading states. “The Qataris aren’t perfect, but none of our [Gulf] allies is.”
This is just talk. America may be exasperated, but it will not force the Saudis to end the blockade. And Qatar has learned to live with it. Although it burned through $40bn when the embargo began, the economy has stabilised. The spat has made Qatari firms more creative. Architects say the cement they now import from Asia is cheaper and better than the old stuff from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.
The Saudis are determined to isolate their neighbour. Some want to do so literally, by turning Qatar into an island. In April Saudi newspapers announced a plan to dig a 650-foot-wide canal on the border, so that Qatar is surrounded by water. To annoy the Qataris even more, the Saudis would also turn part of the frontier into a nuclear-waste dump. All this would cost $750m—a steep price just to spite a neighbour. The scheme sounds far-fetched. But then again, so did airlifting thousands of dairy cows to the Arabian desert.
By: AL KHOR
Source: The Economist
Link: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/05/19/why-qatar-is-raising-cows-in-the-desert

G
M
T
Detect language
Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Nepali
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Sesotho
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Nepali
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Sesotho
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
Text-to-speech function is limited to 200 characters

Mirá También

Así lo expresó Domingo Possetto, secretario de la seccional Rafaela, quien además, afirmó que a los productores «habitualmente los ignoran los gobiernos». Además, reconoció la labor de los empresarios de las firmas locales y aseguró que están «esperanzados» con la negociación entre SanCor y Adecoagro.

Te puede interesar

Notas
Relacionadas