The U.S.-Iran Pistachio War Is Heating Up

Forty years of vicious geopolitical competition between the U.S. and Iran came close to open war in January, and it’s still too soon to call a winner—except in one field. American farmers have deposed Iran as king of the global pistachio industry, benefiting from U.S. policies hostile to Tehran, climate change, and egregious failures of economic and water management that have sucked the Islamic Republic’s lakes and aquifers dry. The country is unlikely ever to recover its pistachio crown, spawning a race among other producers to grow the nut and fill the gap created by its defeat. In the reductionist language of President Trump, Iran lost big.

That’s more shocking than it sounds. Persia enjoyed a virtual monopoly on cultivating the hardy yet demanding pistachio tree for at least 1,000 years. Exports followed in the footsteps of Islam’s conquering armies from the seventh century on. Giving pistachio farmers more access to land and water was a core offer of the 1979 revolution, and the country’s new ruling class—in particular the family of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani—saw the hard currency potential. The country devoted ever more land to growing the fatty green nut and replaced the ancient Qanat system of subsoil canals that fed the crop with higher-volume water pumps. Harvests boomed, even through the chaos of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.