Small-scale Successes

Small hydroelectric plants and oil from croton nuts supply villages in India with electricity and Kenyans with biofuel. These solutions are too small to attract major foreign investments. In marketing management terms, they would be considered "dogs" with a very little share of overall electricity and fuel markets and limited growth potential.

     Yet I always have respected "dogs." They are like every small scale business, such as a bed and breakfast, barber shop, or organic farm, that provides services/goods and generates enough income to support one or more families.

     Along India's rivers in the Himalayas, Vaishnavi Consultants and other private companies subsidized by the government are building hydroelectric plants that can use small amounts of water to light 100 homes 24 hours a day in remote villages. This clean power adds no pollution in India, the world's third largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions. And the plants provide employment for the day workers who build them and about 25 local people who run them. The government commits to buying the energy for the villages, and, by law, local councils receive a small percentage from the plants' profits.

     Despite the advantages of India's small hydroelectric plants, these projects are not problem free in a country suffering from drought and clean water shortages. Even though the government's bureaucratic process to obtain the necessary permits to built a hydroelectric plant can take two to five years, a lack of oversight and exemption from the government's environmental impact act require remedies. Too many plant sites along the same stream can compromise plant performance and unregulated deforestation by developers almost always violates environmental rules.

     Like India's small hydroelectric plants, biofuel from Kenya's croton trees produces energy with fewer carbon emissions than coal, oil, or gas. Further, without deforestation or replacing agricultural land needed to grow food crops, the Nanyuki-based Eco Fuels company presses oil from the nuts of the croton trees that grow wild in the Mount Kenya and Rift Valley regions. Farmers do not need to water or fertilize the trees that they can harvest for six months out of the year. Eco Fuels pays 5,000 farmers for the nuts on delivery, unlike coffee farmers who have to wait months for payment.

    The croton oil used in generators, water pumps, and tractor engines is cheaper than diesel oil and generates 78% less carbon dioxide emissions. The protein-rich seedcake paste left from pressing croton nuts is sold as poultry feed and husks are sold as organic fertilizer.

     Don't discount India's small scale hydroelectric plants or Kenya's croton nuts. For some, these "dogs" are families' best friends.
   

     

   

   

   

   

What Does North Korea's Kim Jong-un Fear?

On February 13, 2017, Kim Jong-nam's assassination with a banned VX nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where North Korean nationals have visa free travel, brought to light more information about both North Korea's so-called hermit kingdom and China.

Kim Jong-un, 33, who inherited leadership of North Korea after the death of his father, Kim Jong-Il, was not the first choice for succession. That honor was to go to Kim Jong-nam, 45, until bad publicity followed his 2001 arrest while using a fake passport to sneak into Japan, allegedly to visit Disneyland. New information in 2018 claimed Kim Jong Il and his other son, North Korea's current leader, Kim Jong-un, tried unsuccessfully to visit the West using fake names and Brazilian passports in the 1990s.

Although Kim Jong-nam was the illegitimate son of Kim Jong-Il and Sung Hae-rim, the South Korean-born actress murdered under suspicious circumstances in Moscow in 2002, he grew up with all the advantages of an heir and attended school in Europe, where he was susceptible to capitalist teachings and playboy womanizing. A bloody shootout with Kim Jong-nam's bodyguards failed to kill him in 2011, but it showed Kim Jong-un considered his half brother a threat to his position.

When Beijing became Jong-nam's protector, Kim Jong-un also seemed to have his suspicions about China, supposedly North Korea's closest ally. Back in December, 2013, Jong-un ordered the arrest and execution of his uncle and close adviser, Jang Song-thaek, who was considered North Korea's liaison representative with China.

 Despite reports that Kim Jong-nam was trying to defect to the EU, US, or South Korea, did Peking see Jong-nam as a possible hereditary backup in case China wanted to stage a North Korean takeover? At the time of his assassination in the Malaysian International Airport, Jong-nam was separated from his bodyguards, and he was en route to Macau, the "Las Vegas of Asia" and former Portuguese territory that became China's autonomous Special Administrative Region for at least 50 years beginning in 1999.

When Malaysian police began looking into possible North Korean embassy and airline personnel involvement in Jong-nam's assassination, North Korea prevented Malaysian citizens from returning home.

How to Recruit a Spy

It's no secret. Recruiting a spy is as easy as M.I.C.E. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the CIA, wrote in his book, Playing to the Edge, spies are recruited through Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego.

Prime targets are those:

• who need money because they can't pay their gambling or other debts,
• who believe their country's system of government relies on a bankrupt ideology,
• who can be blackmailed (compromised) because they harbor sexuality, stealing, or other secrets they want to hide,
• who have bruised egos because they feel they have been unfairly fired, passed over for a promotion, or ignored even though they are smarter than everyone else.

Conversely, if you don't want to be recruited as a spy, don't fall into these traps.

Oscar Nominations Enlighten the World

This year's Oscar nominations for live action short films provide a view of France, Denmark, Hungary, Spain, and Switzerland that is both particular to those countries and inspiring to countries throughout the world.

In Ennemis Interieurs (Enemies Within) and Silent Nights we see French concern for residents from Algeria who might be terrorists and a man from Ghana who finds in Denmark abuse from local and Arab neighbors rather than the income he expected to send to his family back in Africa. In both cases disillusioned men do things they never intended, and we wonder if their new countries could have acted differently to prevent these outcomes.

Sing from Hungary won the Oscar in this category on February 26, 2017. This film tells the story of a friendly elementary school girl with a heart and a new girl who is told by the chorus director to just mime the words to songs because she doesn't have a good voice. By convincing all the children in the chorus to mime the words to every song at a competition, the two clever girls undermine the director who they consider unfair. Children everywhere in the world could benefit from seeing how to treat new kids in their schools and how they can work together to right an injustice.          

Spain's Timecode gives hope to everyone who has ever had a boring job. After his shift as a security guard who watches the cameras that keep an eye on a garage parking lot, he uses the whole garage as a dance floor to practice his moves. The woman who takes over after him sees his performance and decides to do her own routine for the cameras. After the male security guard sees her dancing, they join up for a duet that the manager sees when he is introducing a new guard to the job. The film ends with the new employee telling the manager, "I don't know how to dance."

A woman's daily gesture of waving a Swiss flag at a passing TGV train before she rides her bicycle to her pastry shop leads to an exchange of messages and gifts of cheese between the woman and the train's engineer in  La Femme et le TGV. You never know where simple gestures might lead. 

Commodity Crush Careers

Commodity traders keep an eye on prices like the following every day.

Per day prices

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Commodities            1/18                1/24               1/31                   2/1                   2/3

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Cotton                     72.3                                                                                        76.3

Corn                                                363.5

Coffee                    149.5                152.2             149.6                                       146.8

Cocoa                     2229                 2202              2091                                        2063

Rough rice               9.94                  9.98              9.54                9.53                   9.51

Soybeans                                                              33.83

Sugar                      20.95                20.55            20.49                                        21.3

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But commodity traders are not the only ones whose careers involve commodity prices. Whether we live in Toronto or Timbuktu, trading money for goods and bartering goods for goods are what we do all our lives. On the global level there are careers in shipping agricultural commodities that go into what we eat and the mineral commodities that go into what we use. Crude oil is the most traded commodity in the world and coffee is the second. 

The prices buyers are willing to sign a contract to pay for commodities roll across the bottom of the CNBC station every trading day. You also can find commodity prices on the internet. I like to check them occasionally to see if there is an up trend or down trend, like the above prices show for cocoa, or up and down volatility.

What each quoted price means is complex. The price quoted for coffee beans applies to 37,500 pounds and the price for sugar applies to 112,000 pounds. These are the amounts that fit in one overseas shipping container. Since a ship might carry 18,000 containers, you can figure how much a company would pay for one shipload of a given amount of pounds.

Commodity prices are also important to those who price consumer goods. In the case of coffee beans, there are the additional costs of roasting the beans, repackaging the 250 bags that carry 37,5000 pounds of coffee on ships into the smaller bags or cans a consumer wants, distributing the coffee to thousands of stores, and advertising a brand.

How to increase prices

When a crop is harvested in countries that produce agricultural commodities, such as coffee, farmers will be offered lower prices if a harvest is large and marketed at one time. If a harvest is smaller because of drought or disease or because it is stored and sold gradually, prices will increase. Countries also can increase coffee export revenue, if they develop roasting facilities. Consequently, there are potential careers in water and pest control, storage, and processing. Some of these same subjects are covered in the earlier posts, "I Love Coffee, I Love Tea" and "Become a Discriminating Chocolate Consumer.")

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Worldwide booms and recessions are a matter of concern to those whose careers in companies and countries depend on demand for the mineral commodities used in industrial production. Politicians in mineral-rich countries are tempted to take out loans in good times that voters will not want to repay with higher taxes in bad economic times. (The earlier post, "Falling Commodity Prices Spur Diversification in Emerging Markets," lists some of the counties affected by demand for certain mineral commodities.)

Commodities offer a vast field of career opportunities now and probably even more in the future as AI, robotics, and sensors are incorporated. For those interested in investing, the site, investopedia.com, covers the basics and more.