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Sea captain David O’Keefe spent 30 years on the islands of Yap in the western Pacific. In that time, he established a successful trading company, married two wives (with another waiting in America), introduced alcohol and firearms to the islanders, and gained a monopoly over the island’s currency of giant stones called fei. Fei was a rare commodity, as it was quarried and carved on the island of Palau, 250 miles from Yap.
The Yapese may have been using fei as early as 1400, though the stones were so difficult to quarry with shell tools and then transport that they remained very rare as late as 1840. [Price p.76; Berg pp.151-4; Gillilland p.3] Their existence was first detailed by one of O’Keefe’s predecessors, the German trader Alfred Tetens, who in 1865 traveled to Yap on a large ship ferrying “ten natives… who wished to return home with the big stones they had cut on Palau.” [Gillilland p.4] It’s clear from this that the Yapese were eager to find alternatives to transportation by canoe, and O’Keefe fulfilled this demand. By 1882, he had 400 Yapese quarrying fei on Palau—nearly 10 percent of the population. [Berg p.150]
This trade had its disadvantages, not least the introduction of inflation, caused by the sudden increase in the stock of money. But it made huge sense for O’Keefe. The Yapese, after all, supplied the necessary labor, both to quarry the stones and to harvest coconuts on Yap. O’Keefe’s expenses, in the days of sail, were minimal, just some supplies and the wages of his crewmen. In return, he reaped the benefits of thousands of man-hours of labor, building a trading company worth—estimates differ—anywhere from $500,000 to $9.5 million. [Evening Bulletin; Hezel]
Read O’Keefe’s story at Smithsonian’s Past Imperfect Blog. Link
(Image credit: Eric Guinther)
In 1967, Colorado State University graduate student David Cheever wrote a term paper on the Colombian cut flower industry. In 1969, he went to Colombia and started a business. Things took off from there.
It’s not often that a global industry springs from a school assignment, but Cheever’s paper and business efforts started an economic revolution in Colombia. A few other growers had exported flowers to the United States, but Floramérica turned it into a big business. Within five years of Floramérica’s debut at least ten more flower-growing companies were operating on the savanna, exporting some $16 million in cut flowers to the United States. By 1991, the World Bank reported, the industry was “a textbook story of how a market economy works.” Today, the country is the world’s second-largest exporter of cut flowers, after the Netherlands, shipping more than $1 billion in blooms. Colombia now commands about 70 percent of the U.S. market; if you buy a bouquet in a supermarket, big-box store or airport kiosk, it probably came from the Bogotá savanna.
The Colombian flower industry has its problems, like hard work and low wages, pesticide dangers, and environmental impact -not to mention the effect it has on the US flower industry. On the other hand, there is a movement to certify fair labor practices, and working with flowers offers workers economic independence and possibly a better life than they would have otherwise. Smithsonian has the story of how your flowers are grown, picked, and shipped. Link
(Image credit: Ivan Kashinsky)
James Hayes-Bohanan, Ph.D. is a professor of geography AND a scholar with the Vanderbilt University Institute for Coffee Studies. His website Geography of Coffee is full of information about coffee around the world, including the places coffee is produced, shipped, and sold. You’ll also find out about fair trade and the politics of the coffee business. Of course, there are also coffee reviews and instructions for making the perfect cup. Link -via the Presurfer
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