How to Burn Billions

An 2007 Ti Deza Evidan Ki Kann Pena Lavenir

Ek mem avan. Aster an 2018 vomye pa koze.

RIP Sugar

It's heading there. Less than 1% of GDP now and declining further. It would already have been dead if so much good money had not been thrown after its bad situation. And if it was not for the completely silly policy of competitive depreciation. I heard Krepalloo Sunghoon mention that it costs Rs17,000 to produce one ton of sugar that now sell for less than Rs15,000. How much bigger would the loss be at the very reasonable rate of 25 rupees to a dollar? No wonder then that thousands of acres of sugar cane have been abandoned. But that's kind of natural. We can't pursue activities that are incompatible with the kind of money that is needed to live properly here. Unless if we want to allow modern forms of slavery like too many seasonal workers and God knows what else. Just like we use cars and buses to go to work. And not horses.

We should use the land under sugar cane to grow food and to create more productive opportunities for our unemployed youth. So that we move Mauritius forward.

Economic Restructuring, German Style

That's a story I read in Spiegel Online and wanted to write about for a while now. Because of fierce competition from China and India, ThyssenKrupp decided that a shipyard with a 106-year history was going nowhere. So it sold it to another company which plans to use the shipyard to build steel foundations for marine wind farms. A move like this will no doubt contribute into Germany holding its own in the global economy.

Compare this to Sithanen throwing billions of good money after the dead sugar industry. Any idea what that does to our competitiveness?