How is Qatar Handling the Blockade?

So after waking up the other morning I felt a little too relaxed. 8:20 AM, I didn’t have to go anywhere, what a morning! At least that’s what I thought before I looked at my calendar app. And there it was: “9:00 AM, visit to allergist”.

Sweet, so that was a pretty quick move from “what a morning” state, to “damn, I’m late” state. So here I am, 20 minutes later, devouring my breakfast like a golden hamster (btw, this little f**kers are the reason why I had to go to the allergist in the first place, apparently they and some plants formed a coalition with a sole goal of making me sneeze like a crazy person) and getting ready to sprint to the doctor.

And then out of nowhere, the million Steem idea hits me: it seems like I’m doing alright on time, I have another minute or so, why not check how is Qatar handling its blockade?

OK, so here I need clarify: I am a highly weird (and highly unpunctual) Homo sapiens. Hopefully more sapiens, than homo. When normal intelligent people spend their rushed mornings swiping through Facebook feed either stalking their exes or watching cats lick things, I swipe through Wikipedia either stalking Uzbekistan in its border dispute with Kyrgyzstan or watching (you guessed it) Qatar handling its blockade. OK, let’s consider this clarified.

So I like politics, geography, economics and other boring crap, so what? Sue me. And this article will be on what I currently want to write about, and that is how a small nation of Qatar is handling a full-scale blockade, a kind of blockade that doesn’t happen in history that often. So of course I’m interested in that, and you should be too.

So here is what you probably know about Qatar:

• It is a small country in the middle East
• It has oil
• Because of oil it is rich as “you know F-what” (№ 1 in the world’s wealthiest countries list with a GDP of 145k USD per capita)
• It has a pretty decent airline

If you know these things: good, continue reading. If you don’t, then you just became a little smarter. Nevertheless, continue reading.

So as you've probably heard on the news, on June 5th Qatar became an outlaw in the region when most of its neighbors have cut off all ties with it: diplomatic, economic and they even closed their airspace to Qatar’s airplanes.

If you think that Qatar could’ve just quoted the greatest philosopher of all time – Ms. Iggy Azalea and said “I don’t need Y’all”, you might think differently after looking at the map:

So using the Steemit lexicon, Qatar is that tiny black "minnow" when its former friends are the red "whales". Quite hard to ignore them. Especially after taking into consideration that it has only one land border, the one with Saudi Arabia, which is now officially closed.

I don’t take sides in the conflicts I know very little of, so instead of speculating on who is the bad guy here, let’s take a look at how such a small nation is handling such an enormous crisis. To me it’s pretty fascinating.

If you want to know more about the political side of this crisis, you have Sir Anthony Google at your disposal. And I will even give you a hint: it has a lot to do with Al Jazeera TV channel.

So let’s take a look at three core issues of the crisis, moving from the most boring one (as it always is, the most boring one is the most important one) to the most interesting one:

1) How do they sell their oil now?

2) How do they import food?

3) How does Qatar Airways fly now?

Don’t worry, in 5 minutes' time you’ll be done with this article and you’ll go back to looking at sweetsssj’s lunch (please sweetsssj , don’t send your followers flagging me, I’m too young, I still want to live) or to watching yet another video on what shitcoins to invest your 73 dollars in.

1. So how does Qatar sell its oil now?

By the way, it’s not oil, but natural gas that Qatar is rich in. Indeed, Qatar has made a fortune on oil, but its black gold reserves will be depleted by 2023. But as soon as the oil “party” was about to end, Qatar found the third-largest in the world reserves of natural gas. So now it continues to party while sending one by one liquefied petroleum gas tankers by sea to its customers (mostly Japan, by the way).

Qatar has shallow ports, so big tankers can’t dock there. So before it used the services of Middle East biggest transshipment port - the United Arab Emirates’ port of Dubai. Qatar used smaller vessels to bring its liquefied gas and crude oil there, which were later loaded on Japanese, Chinese, etc. mammoth tankers.

Now that’s not the case anymore since Dubai no longer accepts Qatar’s shipments (well it kinda does, but not to the previous extent, Google it). What did Qatar do? It now sends shipments through a neutral party in this conflict – Oman. If you want to know where Oman is, let’s look at the map again:

Yeah, there it is, just casually minding its own business near UAE, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Indeed, it costs Qatar more to reroute all its ships, establish a new base in a new port, but the point is that the gas and crude oil are still being exported.

2. So how do they bring in the food now?

As you’ve probably noticed, Qatar is small, located in the middle of the desert and, what’s more important, its 2.7 million residents are too busy spending their 145k USD annual income shopping and just don’t have enough time to farm.

So Qatar relies heavily on food imports. These 2.7 million people spent 11 billion USD last year on groceries only, most of which were brought through Qatar’s only land border with Saudi Arabia. Now with the only land border being closed, they fly in the food. Yes, they fly the Doritos in.

You know that you live in the world’s most opulent country when Oreos are being flown in to your table. And if you are still not fascinated, consider the following: Qataris like dairy products, so how do they get fresh milk now?

Yes, you guessed it, they’ve decided to fly in the ladies:

3. So what’s up with Qatar Airways?

Oh, yeah, the Qatar Airways, the world’s № 1 airline according to Skytrax. The airline whose first class every Steemian wants to be able to afford and hence sends 2 SBDs every night to randowhale secretly hoping to see one day a 10k SBD upvote.

Qatar Airways has been hit especially hard. Now most of the airspace around Qatar has been blocked for it to fly in, thus it had to:

a) cancel its most profitable routes - the ones to Saudi Arabia, UAE and other former friends (almost 20% of the entire network)
b) reroute multiple even more profitable routes to Europe and North America. Now these flights have to take huge detours over Iran or Oman

Here is how Qatar Airways used to fly before the ban:

Here is how they fly now:

Qatar Airways is a massive state owned company and taking detours through Iran and Oman makes most of its flights unprofitable. They use more gas, have to pay high fees to Iran to use its airspace and fewer people buy their tickets because they are less competitive timewise.

So the company has two options now: either to raise the price of the tickets and scare the average Steemian off (who worked so hard writing all those "great post" comments) or rely on governmental subsidies. Either of the options will hurt the Qatar’s economy.

Qataris say they have over 300 billion USD in the bank, so indeed they can handle the blockade. But the big question is: for how much longer?

And those 73 bucks you should probably invest in InvisibleCoin (IVZ). Poof, and just like that, they are gone.

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Hi, I’m Kirill, aka Kir-B on Steemit.

I am here to entertain you with my articles on non-trivial topics. If you liked it, please upvote it and resteem. And follow me for more.

Sources of the images I used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.