PARIS (Dispatches)  - Referring to Abu Dhabi’s decision to suspend business relations with Tehran, AFP quoted experts and business activists based in the United Arab Emirates and wrote that a lasting break in relations between the parties could have a negative impact on Dubai’s economy in the long run.
 Also, the relations that have been formed between the financial hub of the UAE and the south of Iran for decades cannot be broken so easily.
In the markets of old Dubai, saffron, cumin, pistachios and almonds from Iran still fill the stalls, as if the two shores of the Persian Gulf were not separated by war.
Last month, the United Arab Emirates announced the suspension of trade and financial exchanges with Tehran.
But in old Dubai, where Iranian merchants are firmly established, they do not believe there will be a break in the ties forged over decades between the UAE’s financial hub and southern Iran.
Since the start of the war, certain Iranian products have become scarcer, and others have seen their prices soar, says Morteza Asaadi, who runs the grocery store his father founded in 1963.
Most traditional foodstuffs, such as nuts or zereshk -- small red berries used in Persian cuisine -- remain available, however.
“It’s just coming. How? I don’t know, but it’s coming,” he said.
Two wholesalers interviewed by AFP on condition of anonymity said they are still sourcing from Iran, notably via Omani ports.
“We can’t export from the Emirates anymore, but we can still bring in certain goods,” one of them said.
In Yasser’s saffron shop, the precious spice arrives by air from Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, thanks to the resumption of air links after a brief interruption.
Dubai is home to a large Iranian community, estimated at several hundred thousand people, which has contributed to the emirate’s commercial development and weathered the various periods of tension with Tehran.
After the U.S. tightened its sanctions against the Islamic republic in 2012, “those in Dubai managed to convince their partners in Abu Dhabi that the trade, regardless of the sanctions, needed to continue because it was contributing to the UAE economy,” Mehran Haghirian of the London-based Bourse & Bazaar Foundation think tank told AFP.
In the long run, a lasting rupture could even weigh on Dubai’s economy.