Paul Poenicke, a student from my honors seminar on Spontaneous Order, sent me this Slate article concerning the “unorganized” and surprisingly efficient market in “green gold” out of Kenya. A quote from the end of the article:
Miraa is certainly a striking example of business ingenuity rising to meet formidable challenges. The chemicals that give chewers their high start breaking down as soon as the twigs are picked, so time is of the essence. Somehow, an industry with no coordinating body, whose players are mainly small farmers or modest middlemen, manages to get tens of thousands of neatly packed kibundas (bundles) of fresh miraa loaded onto the “miraa jets”—the Toyota pickups that line Maua’s main drag; down the long, potholed road to Nairobi’s Wilson Airport; crammed aboard the notoriously overloaded flights; and onto the coffee tables of expectant chewers in foreign capitals in under two days.
“This is a business which has always operated informally, in which accounts are kept on the back of cigarette packets, yet it’s the most efficient agricultural industry on the planet,” says Paul Goldsmith, a Meru-based development expert. “The commodity has a 48-hour shelf life, but it goes all over the world.”
