Growing Vegetables at Home and Comparative disadvantage

I met Mr. Dal Bahadur who hails from Sarpang District last weekends at Centenary Farmers’ Market. We studied together at Jakar Junior High School in Bumthang long time ago.

With his caliber and intellect, I was sure, beyond a shadow of doubt, that he will either become a doctor or an engineer, -a profession much sought after even today, after his studies and to that extent, he even proclaimed his aspiration, if I can remember correctly. 

As I met him that day, he was neither a doctor nor an engineer. As much as my guts failed to ask him what happened to his childhood aspirations, his appearance and the circumstances quickly told me that he has taken to farming for his profession and he isn’t doing well.

Drawing lessons from the interviewing techniques, I quickly leveled our emotions and drove him into a common but non-threatening ground of rapport building.  I told him about the RUPEE CRUNCH and the Government’s austerity measure of BANNING vegetable imports from India and how this might and would provide OPPORTUNITY for him as a farmer to cash in and do well.

“This is Bullshit!” he said. “Things do not work in a vacuum like this.” He added.

The next hour or two of our togetherness was no less than an academic setup for economics class as he went about illustrating the theories of international trade starting from the David Ricardo’s classical theory of comparative advantage to Adam Smith’s theory of absolute cost difference to modern Bertil Ohlin’s theorem, which ‘states that countries which are rich in labour will export labour intensive goods and countries which are rich in capital will export capital intensive goods.” 

There was nothing I could agree less with him. Unless we improve the conditions for agriculture in terms of water and fertilizers along with adequate subsidy to make up for the cost difference between our two countries or with other countries for that matter, not even the Great Wall of China, let alone the BAN, can stop us from going to India given the rationality of human beings.

We didn’t even talk about the advantage of ‘economies of scale’ that countries like India enjoy over us.  In the interest of my kids who I was with that day, we had to part our ways, and we parted our ways, ofcourse increasingly convinced of the unconvincing implications of the policy put in place to overcome rupee crisis.

I wished him all the luck in all the turnarounds he is wishing for in future.