Which people in this photograph are from Uzbekistan? Which person is not from Uzbekistan? I am the second person from the left, with a white shirt, black coat. The sellers here, in Odessa's Privoz market, come from all over the Former Soviet Union usually selling goods from their brithplace through family connections. These sellers are all from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, one of my favorite "Hot" spots in the Former Soviet Union (on account of the heat and not politics). They bring in nuts, apricots, raisins, and a wide variety of other, often sun-dried, fruits by train. Due to the cost of shipping, typically only the very best dried aprictos are available, and if you saw the same display in Tashkent, there would be a wider variety of quality levels with various prices. I think in Central Asia I used to pay under a dollar per kilogram for organic high quality dried apricots. Almost the same ones here are about 3 - 4 dollars per kilogram. I asked these sellers and they told me that they bring in the food by train container several times per year and that this is expensive. In addition to Uzbek fruits, they also bring in Iranian dates, dried figs from several different regions and a wide variety of nuts. No Samarkand green tea yet, or any of the other really great minty tea mixes I really liked in Southern Uzbekistan, but I did put in a request.
Clearly there is something wrong with that logic I all too often read in high tech economics journals which suggest that people in the FSU do not understand markets - and they need Western training/marketing, coordination skills, etc. Real life evidence suggests otherwise. I can imagine, though, what would happen if the economists had their way, these apricots would no longer by sun dried, but wrinkled instead from sulfer. They would be lumped together into one giant storage facility, and they would be packaged with preservatives in expensive plastic wrappers. A guru in NYC would be hired to read about Uzbek culture and preferably learn their language, maybe visit the Hayat hotel in Samarkand two times to get a real feel for the situation - then he/she would design, for several millions of dollars, a label for this plastic wrapping suggesting that the apricots are anything but simple apricots. The price, instead of being 3 dollars per kilogram, would have to be raised to cover the extra marketing fees, consulting, packaging, and hi tech chemicles. It would now be 7 dollars for a small package of King Khan's superdilicious traditional Uzbek apricots. This would be progress by economists' standards. The alternative, of course, is to let the sun dry the fruit, once preserved, ship it by train, and let the consumer simply select what they want and haggle for a price - you know, the way that they have been doing it for over a thousand years (except for the train - replace that with camel) - but if we allowed this to happen, what would economists then do for a living?
