At a busy Dubai wharf, four men crowd around a hessian sack before slitting it open and plumbing the contents to check what’s inside. It’s 1967 and customs officials would have been busy calculating the two per cent tax owed on essential commodities such as this white sugar from China.
Records show that by 1967, five years after oil revenues began to flow from Abu Dhabi, Dubai was still reliant on revenues generated by customs duties for 75 per cent of its income; in fact, it would not be until 1969 that Dubai saw any revenues from oil. That year, it exported four million barrels, compared with Abu Dhabi’s 219 million barrels that year.
Vast quantities of sugar continue to flow into Dubai, these days mainly from Brazil, India and Thailand, according to analyst Platts Kingsman. The UAE is currently the largest importer of raw sugar in the region, at 2.46m tonnes in 2015 to 2016, compared with 1.42m tonnes for Iran and 1.31m tonnes for Saudi Arabia.
Today, the UAE is also home to the world’s largest port-based sugar refinery at Jebel Ali. All of which is a long way from four men sweating on the docks.
* Clare Dight