Americans Need to Mind Global Workings

By Jack Markowitz

Globalization has its scary side — where will everybody’s job be in 10 years? — but it makes good geography lessons, which schools don’t seem to do anymore. They ought to.

Who and where, for example, is the world’s biggest salmon farmer?

It’s a company called Marine Harvest ASA (unfortunately ASA, not USA) and it “farms” salmon in Chile and halfway around the world in Norway. Right now the Chilean farms are hurting. Bloomberg News reports they’re plagued by infectious salmon anemia, or ISA. The company’s stock is down 28 percent on the Oslo exchange.

Marine Harvest is controlled not by a farmer or a fish man but an oil tanker tycoon. Norwegian billionaire John Fredriksen isn’t letting infectious salmon anemia scare him out of the pond. He upped his stake in Marine Harvest to 30 percent, more than 1 billion shares.

Salmon today practically has to be farmed. Nature’s way of reproducing the flaky orange entree takes just too much of a miracle. Each fish has to find its way from the ocean to the exact stream where it was born, then swim up against rapids, barriers and people with hooks to its spawning place. The farm-raised surely have an easier life.

The world’s biggest producer of precious metals is South Africa, where men sweat deep underground for paydirt that’s now at record prices. Platinum recently made a new top for the 13th day in a row, at $2,119 an ounce. A gold ounce hit $949.20 yesterday. Is it a price bubble? Or a sign that people the world over are getting that old nervous feeling about paper money?

The world’s newest country — if nearby enemies let it live — is Kosovo, a Serbian sliver of the onetime Yugoslavia. With just over 2 million people, half under 25, it could be a land of great infrastructure-building if leaders are smart enough to be hospitable to private capital instead of socialism. Roads are bad, and the electricity keeps going out. Factory machines quit almost every day. A $4 billion power plant would make use of the country’s ample supply of lignite — a low-grade coal. Here’s a hint to Kosovars. Check that $4 billion price tag. Bet it could be done cheaper.

A tiny but very rich country, Qatar, a dot in the Middle East oil patch, will build the world’s biggest plant for extracting sulfur from natural gas. Gas is a great energy source, in demand everywhere, but sulfur pollutes. Pulled out and granulated, it’s a fertilizer worth up to $250 a ton. The plant may cost $1 billion.

The world’s third largest automaker is based — surprise! — in the United States. But the newest production line for Ford Motor Co.’s Focus hatchback is at a plant in Vsevolozhsk, Russia, near St. Petersburg. Ford claims it has 20,000 Russian orders for the car. A $100 million capacity boost there will take Ford to 125,000 vehicles a year from 72,000.

Foreigners love American cars, Americans foolishly undervalue them.

(c) 2008 Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.