Transcript of The Iran War's Devastating Butterfly Effect New

From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. 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. 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. Peter Goodman, welcome back to The Daily.

Thanks for having me.

So Peter, we are now 101 days into the war with Iran, and we have talked a lot on this show about 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.

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, Taiwan get expensive and hard to secure. The ripple effects of this are almost infinite.

Reminds me of the butterfly 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. Mm-hmm. In In addition to these kind of ripple effects, there are also significant issues of life and death, 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. 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. Mm-hmm.

The aid cuts that you referred to, the US 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. And this is in part because the Trump administration has pressed European allies to spend more money on their own defense 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, to this picture. So let me give you an example. You know, 4 years ago, mm-hmm, when Russia invaded Ukraine, mm-hmm, there were similar fears about a fertilizer crisis and hits to food security because Russia and Ukraine together produce a lot of grain. They also produce a lot of the piece parts for fertilizers. And so from Egypt to Indonesia, there were worries about the price of bread and grains.

And if the energy prices did go up because of that war too. They're not unfounded, right?

Oh no, the, 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. But here's what was different. There was $43 billion in international humanitarian relief led by $17 billion from the United States. Mm-hmm. 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.

Exactly. And then came the war in Iran. 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.

Do you feel like the US's allies looked at the cuts that the US was making to USAID and thought, okay, well, if the US is cutting it, we can cut it too? Like, do you think the US 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, of saying, "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. Mm-hmm. Now, 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 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. It's traditionally been about national security policy. And while it might be tempting 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 could end up with the mother of all migration crisis. Sure. Now, I'm not here to, to fearmonger about immigration, but if your perspective is you don't want millions of people heading to the Darién Gap in Panama or streaming toward places like Greece and Turkey and on toward Northern Europe, well, you gotta 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, is poised to get even worse because of the shocks caused by the Iran War, right?

People are not going to sit in their villages and starve. Mm-hmm. 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. It's also worth reminding people that, you know, al-Shabaab, which is this al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militia, is active in the Horn of Africa. And certainly trauma like famine provides recruits. It's, 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.

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, right? You know, gated community as national security policy tends not to work very well.

Right.

So, you know, I was already thinking about places I could go to illustrate the crisis from rising fertilizer prices and 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.

Mm-hmm.

Somaliya. A country that is especially susceptible to climate change, drought. My reflexive take on that was that 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. 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.

We'll be right back. Okay, so Peter, talk to us about your trip to Somalia. What did you find going on there?

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'd 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. Mm-hmm. So, Somalia imports something like 70% of its food and 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. 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 potentially catastrophic results. I want to go through them one by one. Let's start with the food situation, right?

So in Mogadishu, which is the capital of Somalia, I went to a fish market and there were these guys wielding machetes to hack sharks and tuna into steaks. I talked to a woman who was running a stand there, Fatuma Noor, and she was telling me that 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.

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?

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.

Mm.

This is the drought that existed before. Mm-hmm. But what struck me was how UNICEF, for one example, they're trucking 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, 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.

So what did you see when you visited those camps, and what did the people there tell you?

Yeah, well, this was gutting. On my first day in the town of Dolo on the Ethiopian border, 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. 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 9 days. Wow. Carrying their 3-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.

Did they tell you how it felt to arrive only to find out that this was just an aid camp with no aid?

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 this shelter, and they're just waiting and hoping that some aid will return.

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. I think maybe the most harrowing thing I saw, I was taken to a UNICEF ward. Of a hospital in Mogadishu where the most severe malnourishment cases are taken. This hospital has seen a doubling 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 okay? And I talked through a translator with a mother who was sitting next to her 18-month-old baby boy leaning up alongside her.

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.

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. Yeah, there's 3 or 4 days. Yeah, he was about to be discharged. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. But here was the part of this that was most striking to me. The doctors there told me 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.

Mm.

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.

Peter, you mentioned that Somalia was already facing a cascading series of crises even before the Iran War.

Right.

Do we have any way to quantify how much worse the humanitarian crisis has gotten?

Well, let me put it to you this way. In February— so this is before the impacts of the Iran War— Mm-hmm. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, warns that there are 6.5 million people in Somalia. That's about a third of the population that are suffering hunger at levels that are deemed an emergency. And early last year, the World Food Program, which is the largest source of food aid in the country, has funds to serve as many as 2 million people a month. Mm-hmm. 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. So I went to visit a World Food Program warehouse. So this is 2 months' supply.

2 months of electricity.

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 2 years ago, how many of these tents were full?

Basically, we used to have full capacity.

She showed me these 13 A-frame tents that normally would be full of food aid. And 12 of these 13 tents were empty. Mm. So we're in the one tent that actually does have some supplies, and it's— We went inside this one tent that was full, and there were these brown cartons— Cardboard boxes stamped with the USAID logo and American flag. Eggs, it says made in U.S. They were full of Plumpy Nut, which is this peanut-rich nutrient paste that's fed to malnourished children and pregnant and breastfeeding moms. And this was the last of it. There was nothing else in the pipeline.

Up to June, June, July, right? If we don't get any funding, we'll be dry completely. Completely.

And I asked the director quite bluntly, and then what happens to the population? What are you going to do?

I would ask you the same question. What happens when you don't have anything to give? What do you give? Right. And get desperate and see people really—

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 2 weeks.

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. So in Sudan, which is widely considered the world's most dire humanitarian crisis at the moment, where you already have parts of the country in officially declared famine. Well, now in Port 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.

They're worried they're going to get stuck there.

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, 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.

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. And I wonder whether you foresee that same kind of more lasting disruption in the countries that we've talked about today?

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, Think about the butterfly effect, all of the ripple effects that can't be undone in a few weeks, uh, 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 thread. They didn't have chemicals for their sewing machines, and enrollment had crashed. Now, this is not the most acutely needed sort of program if you're thinking about feeding 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. I spent a lot of time in conflict zones and disasters.

You know, 2004, I was in Thailand the day of the tsunami. I went to Indonesia and I saw and heard stories that will haunt me forever. 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. Mm. I mean, I don't really like the sort of Olympics of suffering. And yet, 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. You have hundreds of millions of people who, by dint of climate change, cuts to the aid system, the 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.

Peter Goodman, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Rachel.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

Early Wednesday morning, the United States and Iran exchanged military attacks in the Middle East, a 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. Cruise, striking Iranian air defenses, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites. The scale of the damage is not yet clear. In response, Iran claimed it launched drone strikes targeting the US Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, along with 21 attacks on US bases across the region. But US officials report that nearly all of the incoming missiles and drones were intercepted, and there have been no reports reports of American casualties or damage to U.S. bases, according to initial American assessments.

Today's episode was produced by Adrienne Hurst, Rochelle Bonja, and Claire Tennis-Getter, with help from Diana Wynn. It was edited by Chris Haxell and Michael Benoit, with help from Liz O'Balen, and contains music by Dan Mikhaël and Leah Shaw Demeron. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.