Some of you human beings astonish me at times. I have been having a chat this morning with an associate in Sierra Leone. He’s asked me to see if I can find buyers in the UK for spices he’s grown. He knows this is not my field, but I have explained that a close friends immediate family have a large greenhouse business here in the UK growing spices.
Given we’ve naturally been discussing the Ebola Crisis in the region, I’ve asked him who would be prepared to import from West Africa at this time. Why am I, given my 304yrs on this planet, shocked to hear him tell me that “they dont need to know” :blink: He’s not a desperate Sierra Leonean, he’s an American entrepreneur…
This reminds me of Orson Welles in the film noir classic “The third man”.
Orson goes in the run after being implicated in contaminated food chemistry for profits and is eventually tracked, fittingly, in the underground sewers. There are stunning black and white scenes of light penetrating through shafts into the darkness of the sewers in a brilliant play between light and dark; a metaphor for good and bad.
Orson’s nervous friend, unsure of this is the one who tracks Orson down. He explores the right and wrong of Orson’s motives and asks him to give himself up. Orson is recalcitrant and dismisses his friend.
Faced with a dilemma on seeing Orson get away, his friend makes the decisive moment which overrides all of his personal failings, self doubt and insecurities: as Orson is about to make the final escape, his friend shoots him in the back. Orson collapses as the single gunfire shot rings in the dark sewer chambers. There, he dies in the sewers where he belongs as his friend, exits alone back into the light of the human world.
I have no idea if exported spices could harbour the disease but given the dire situation in those countries surely now is not the time for Sierra Leone to be exporting either goods or people. We should be giving them all the imports and aid they need in the short term to help them through the crisis. The stakes are so high market forces shouldn’t come into it. Their economy is suffering (and no doubt the profits of ‘entrepreneurs’) but that shouldn’t matter when thousands or millions more will die when the disease spreads further. It annoys me that politicians and economists seem to think that a temporary restriction of market forces would be a greater loss than the human cost already in process.
Not the same thing at all but when our livestock was hit by foot and mouth disease and a few years before that BSE every other country in the world banned importing our meat until those diseases had run their course.
