[suzannelowrie]

Dear Friends of the Akoya:

I'm back in my comfortable home in Chiang Mai and very happy about my trip to Hanoi, Haiphong and Ha Long Bay. Vietnam Pearl was very kind to me.

If it is true (as a Hanoi newspaper reporter informed us) that Vietnam is going to bury the remnents of socialism and open the country and Ha Long Bay to direct foreign investment (a la Singapore), then the Vietnamese pearl companies will have a difficult adjustment period. A difficult period of psychological and economic adjustment to competitive capitalism.

In the offices of Vietnam Pearl, I explained that the buying of pearls was similar to the wholesale purchase of corn. The international market set the price of corn per corn type and the buyer reviewed the quality of the corn before purchasing. So what was the international wholesale price of Akoyas?

For lack of a better yardstick, I opened their laptop to www.pearlparadise.com and www.pearloutlet.com and said "the world market wholesale price for Akoyas is 50% of the average retail prices of these two websites." The collective brains of Vietnam Pearl whirred. I could see the manager mentally adjusting the nacre thickness downward from .5mm to even less. The blow for the Vietnam Pearl people came when I explained the concept of "master strand". So I (and others) would be the judges who would classify their pearls and Jeremy and Terry would set the wholesale price. The concept of adjusting their product to fit exogenous criteria was shocking. But that is what internet sales are all about, I explained. The sale of pearls on the internet is pure competitive capitalism at its best-- forcing producers and "store" owners to seek better and better products at lower prices. (Karl Marx would be thrilled. He loved the transformative power of capitalism).

Of course, as an economist, I was excited by a vision of the 1,600 islands of Ha Long Bay sheltering 1,600 pearl farms where a third of the Vietnamese population would labor at clean work with good wages. Working on a pearl farm (pearls are a high-value crop) beats the hell out of holding on to the lead rope of a water buffalo and watching the animal eat grass all day.

The road from Hanoi to Haiphong cuts through the rice fields where the descendants of the Viet Cong labor in the rice fields in the sun for next to nothing. Their daughters work in Dubai as maids and sustain the rice farmers with remittances. All that war effort to defeat the French, the Japanese and the Americans--and 70% of the Vietnamese have nothing to show for their efforts. The cultivation of pearls might transform the life chances of the Vietnamese as it has transformed Zhuji City and other places in China.

Well, I'm in favor of buying Vietnamese Akoyas and helping the Vietnamese people--- if and only if they can produce high quality at acceptable prices within the parameters of the world (internet) market. That task requires an enormous mental transformation as well as a high tech, large-scale operation. I wish them all the best.