The Sheer Awesomeness of Adventure Tourism

Yes, elephants are - and should be - a commodity. Photograph by Eric Isselee.Several years ago, before I traveled across the Pacific Ocean to explore Japan, I considered becoming an economics professor, wrote an article on space tourism which appeared in the Duke Journal of Economics, applied for a Fulbright Grant to study economics in the Tanzanian bush, was rejected, and realized a future as an economics professor wasn't meant to be.  But in the process I did almost a year's worth of research into the various forms of tourism and the capacity of tourism revenues to provide economic incentives for conservation in places like East Africa.  I'm still convinced that my project would have established tourism as both an environmental panacea and the key to East African development.

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Black Gold and the Law of Large Numbers

This afternoon I watched the 2006 coffee trade documentary "Black Gold" for the first time and learned some things, like, for instance, in terms of trade volume among commodities, coffee is exceeded by only oil, and that the eco-friendly fair-trade image cast by Starbucks and other chain coffee shops is only a veneer.  The film follows a group of Ethiopian coffee growers and is harshly critical of the World Trade Organization, which it claims keeps the world price of coffee artificially low to benefit the four major middlemen (Sara Lee, Proctor and Gamble, Kraft, and Nestle) as well as consumers in rich countries.  "Black Gold" criticizes foreign aid for Africa as a poor substitute for extending an appropriate share of the profits generated by coffee sales and those of other commodities to the poor Africans that produce them. 

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