Chapter 7
Jim and Peg were back in their Summer Hill home for no more than an hour when Peter’s predictable call arrived.
“Good trip mate?” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“Not bad, if you include a few pennies I made in the casino in Auckland” replied Jim.
“How’s Peg? Not too sore at leaving the Big Apple before she had seen it all?” asked Peter.
“No, I don’t think so. She just said she was glad to be home. She’s in bed already” Jim replied.
“Tell her to stay awake during the day and hit the hay after dark tonight. That way she’ll sleep through the night and wake up pretty well back in her own time zone” said Peter.
“Okay, I will” said Jim.
“How about another trip on the boat?” Peter asked.
“When were you thinking?” replied Jim.
“Wednesday. Day after tomorrow” said Peter. “Bring your overnight stuff. We’ll go up into the Hawkesbury River. Great place to relax. There’s never any wind. Meet you at the marina about 10 Wednesday morning.”
“Okay. Do we need to bring anything in particular?” asked Jim.
“Only your sleeping gear and your swimwear” his brother replied.
“Right. Thanks. See you then mate” said Jim.
The day dawned overcast and cool but as the boat swung gradually around in the Harbour to pass through the narrows at the Heads the sun came out and the layer of cloud peeled back.
“One thing about a cool start like this is that at least the wind won’t get up too soon and we’ll be inside the Hawkesbury before it does” said Peter.
“She seems to handle the rough pretty well anyway mate, judging by last trip,” said Jim.
“Yeah, but if the Nor-Easter gets up when you have to bash into it things can still get a bit hairy. We’d have to slow down some anyway,” Peter replied, keeping a watchful eye on some fishing boat traffic as they rounded the high sandstone wall of the North Head and turned north-east.
“What’s the power plant in her Pete?” asked Jim.
“She’s got twin 800-Horse Caterpillar Diesels. Marinised tractor engines. She can get up to 35 knots at a stroll, more if you want to really push her” said Peter.
“How long to the Hawkesbury from here?” asked Jim.
“We’ll drop the speed back to about 20 and you can take it if you like. It’ll be about twenty-five minutes from here to Barrenjoey Head” said Peter.
“No crew today Pete?” said Peg who had just come up to the flybridge.
“No Peg, I thought Jim could handle things all on his own if something happened to me, ha,” he responded jovially. “Keep her on about 030 degrees mate, there on the compass” he said, indicating with his hand the beautiful French made console compass.
Angelique joined them and they began comparing notes on their respective flights home from New York. Angelique said how she always enjoyed Singapore. The climate seemed just right and there was endless fascination in the various markets and around the Orchard Road shopping precinct that she loved to visit, even when she failed to purchase very much. Except, of course, the new string of cultured pearls interspersed with several not so small diamonds that swung from her neck and looked entirely out of keeping with the low-cut blouse and loose-fitting slacks she wore.
Peg also chuckled quietly to herself that she too was now dressed in considerably more up-market attire that she had acquired at a little fashion boutique on the other side of the Auckland Harbour at Devonport. They had specialized in Dior and Gucci.
Jim helmed the boat and enjoyed the task very much until the Barrenjoey Headland appeared on the port bow, and then Peter suggested he might like a change. Peter obviously knew the waters well because he did not consult any charts until they were under the rail bridge and headed for the still waters upstream of the bridge carrying the Sydney-Newcastle freeway. The upper reaches of the estuary were a little tortuous in places but the boat appeared just to glide along, the impression of speed heightened by the proximity of the wooded banks of the estuary and occasional jetties and moored vessels along the encroaching edges.
When they were at anchor and enjoying a late morning coffee, Peter opened the discussion on the results of the North American trip. All the funds were safely back in respective bank accounts ready for further projects and by this time the debriefings were becoming rather routine. There followed some discussion of how stupid the American banks had been to go lending so much cash to people all over the country who hadn’t a hope in Hell of paying it back. The conversation went on until the trip was almost fully debriefed and Angelique had gone to organize a cold salad lunch.
What was surprising however was the Peg did not join Angelique but instead stayed with the two males and actively participated in discussion of the details of the short selling as they had pulled it off in the States. She clearly understood exactly what short selling was and how the rewards were being reaped. She also had begun to make some valuable contributions in terms of where the next opportunities might present themselves. Peter had begun to feel that on the business front Peg was becoming the equal of Jim. He knew that to speak with one was to speak with the other. He made a mental note to involve Angelique more directly in the operations side of his investment schemes. There would be many advantages and he well knew she was more than capable of such a role.
“We didn’t just have a holiday in New Zealand, Peter,” Peg said, almost as if she had to justify their extra time before the return from the North American expedition. “Jim and I have been working on a plan that might work well for one of the next projects”.
“Okay, so what is it?” asked Peter, “because I’ve also got a couple of projects we could explore.”
“Well”, said Jim, taking over effortlessly, “in New Zealand we took a hire car and drove the countryside and met some of the locals. Most of them are farmers there as you know.”
“No, I thought there were several cities like Auckland and Wellington as well as Christchurch and Dunedin, in the South Island,” responded Peter.
“What I mean is, they make most of their money from farming. Sure they have their cities but their economy is still driven by the farm” replied Jim.
“Okay, I’m with you” said Peter.
Jim was not too sure that Peter wasn’t just feeling a little indulgent towards his older brother but he ploughed on, joined periodically by Peg. He explained how New Zealand had massively expanded its dairy industry to sell milk and milk products into Asia, mainly China.
“They haven’t any iron ore or coal so they reckon they can be the ‘food bowl’ for China” said Jim. But as soon as I looked at these massive dairy operations I was reminded of something that happened in China several decades ago, and I don’t see why the Chinese would have changed much since then. You see it’s an attitude thing. What I’m talking about is quality control.”
“Well, what happened before in China mate?” asked Peter, “I’m all ears.”
Jim knew that whenever Peter used that term he was in fact not really going to listen at all, so he said:
“Do you really want the details because it’ll take a while to outline. I got it from a PhD dissertation I was asked to examine way back in the early to mid-nineties.”
“What’s a PhD dissertation?” asked Peter.
“Well I suppose in your line of work on building sites you never really came across the term, eh?” asked Jim.
“Not really, no” said Peter.
“Well, a PhD is shorthand for Doctor of Philosophy. That’s when you reach pretty much the top of the degree pyramid at university. It’s really the entry ticket for working in a university or research establishment these days.”
“So they get to call you ‘doctor’ when you have one?” said Peter.
“Yes.”
“And did you get to that stage?”
“Yes.”
“Well congratulations. We’ve a doctor in the family and I didn
’t know!” said Peter with a tinge of his old sarcastic self.
“Okay, enough” said Jim. “I was just pointing out that the doctoral dissertation is a research paper, usually pretty substantial, that reports on some worthwhile piece of original investigation. Now in each discipline there are many subjects that haven’t been minutely researched and so the candidates for doctoral work select a topic and get into it with a fine tooth comb so to speak.”
“So that’s why you ended up with a doctoral dissertation?” said Peter, still only half listening to his elder brother.
“No, the one I’m talking about was another person’s. I had already got my PhD and it happened to be in a field related to agriculture” said Jim.
“I thought you were some sort of social studies teacher, you know History and Geography and so on?” said Peter.
“I was” said Jim, “but my interest in agriculture grew out of the move I made into the environmental sciences. I wanted to research how farmers were improving their land management practices” replied Jim.
“And are they?” Peter asked.
“No simple answer, mate. In some ways yes, but in many ways they have a long way to go yet” replied Jim.
“I suppose the almighty dollar gets in the way of things that should be done to look after the farm land, eh?” said Peter.
“Exactly” said Jim. “It’s amazing what power money has even when it’s obvious to blind Freddy that the environment can’t sustain certain practices.”
“The power of money to corrupt” said Peter wryly, not sure if he was meant to get any other subtle message.
“Anyway, back to this PhD dissertation I was telling you about” said Jim.
“Ah, ha” said Peter.
“Well, it studied the attempt by one of the large multi-national tobacco companies to get the Chinese to grow their tobacco. This all happened back in the Seventies and Eighties but I think the lessons need to be learned again” explained the older brother.
“So what went wrong?” asked Peter.
“It’s a bit of a long story” said Jim “but here goes as an attempt to summarize: The Chinese refused to let any of the American or British management team make any on-farm decisions. They were so very willing to have a joint venture operation but they had their own ideas about how to grow tobacco and nothing would shift them from their long established habits.”
“Like what?” asked Peter.
“Well, for one thing, like fertilizing the crop with night soil” said Jim.
“Shit, you mean?” Peter asked.
“Yes, and can you imagine what that would do to tobacco?” asked Jim.
“Tell me”, said Peter, beginning to see where the conversation might be leading.
“You used to smoke and so did I. Could you tell the difference between different brands of tobacco?” asked Jim.
“Yes, I could. I hated some brands and loved the taste of others” said Peter.
Peg chimed in with:
“Nearly everyone I was in school with started off smoking when they left if not before they left school. I didn’t, but my Dad smoked and I knew the different smoke aromas when he treated himself to the expensive menthol ones rather than his usual unfiltered ‘camels’ I think they were called.”
“Right,” said Jim, “well just image if you put say ten percent dried human excrement inside the cigarette and puffed your smoke through it. It would be putrid. Now the problem this large multi-national firm had was that the Chinese supervisors were in charge of harvesting and drying the crop. Despite all the efforts to cultivate the fields with modern chemical fertilizers and despite absolutely forbidding any contact between the ‘export crop’ and the indigenous tobacco that they grew in the same areas, it was impossible to get a crop to market that was not contaminated with the pong of ‘night soil’. Year after year they tried again and again. Each trial cost them millions, yet after harvest when the Chinese insisted on drying the tobacco under their supervision, substitution of the ‘export’ crop with local tobacco leaf went on. Now the whole episode cost this company over twenty-five million dollars US, and the company had to pull out of China admitting defeat.”
Peter had now begun to make the connection. “So you think the Kiwis are mad trying to send their milk to China?”
“I do” intoned Jim. “It’s a classic case of not reading the research literature. All this information is on the public record through the university libraries and could be picked up readily if anyone had cared to look for it.”
“Do you think the problem is still as bad in China today?” asked Peter.
“Well, there’s certainly an urban and industrial boom on that might be changing things in the cities. Might, mind you. But I wouldn’t want to bet on anything where the Chinese and money are concerned. Why were they substituting the local tobacco for the ‘export’ crop? Because they could sell the ‘export’ tobacco themselves and make a killing because it tasted so superior to their own heap of crap, no pun intended. They did not seem to have the first clue as to how they were going to kill the goose that was laying the golden egg. All short term action and let the consequences take care of themselves” said Jim.
“So we think” said Peg, “that the giant New Zealand Dairy Company Kiwi Milk is likely to come a cropper in the not too distant future. There’s also another company similarly involved, Long White Cloud.”
“Well done you two. We’ll put them on our list and think about things over the next few weeks” said Peter.
Choosing an appropriate lull in the conversation Angelique called up to them that lunch was on the table on the lower deck. She had gone a little further than a mere cold salad, including copious local cooked prawns, cold mussels and pickled calamari and baby octopus, all favourites of Peg who suddenly realized that through her involvement in the conversation upstairs she had left the meal preparation entirely to the younger woman.
“I could have given you a hand, Angie” she said, for the first time using Peter’s affectionate abridgement, kindly.
“No need” was the response “it was good to hear you all so involved on this China thing. I couldn’t help overhearing bits of it through the air vent here” she said, pointing to a vented connection to the fly bridge from inside the main cabin. “Wasn’t it awful how the Chinese stuffed up the tobacco program?”
“Yes” said Peg “my father would turn over in his grave to hear these stories about China.”
Peter had just entered.
“Why, was he a commo Peg?” he said, with a bit of a laugh.
“What’s a commo?” said Angelique and then blushed as all eyes had turned to her.
Jim put them all at ease by saying:
“I had a bloke ring me up in the middle of the night and ask me if I was a commo. It was when I was school teaching in Canada and his kid had gone home a little fired up with how the American economy was virtually the owner of every major component or sector of the Canadian economy. Anyhow, this guy was a city official, a sheriff or something really big time over there, and he got me out of bed at 2 am to debate the fact that because he had an American wife and I was criticizing America that automatically made me a commo, shorthand for a communist. I nearly told him my father-in-law was a commo but then I thought better of it and swung his viewpoint round to some realities that his kid needed to understand and clearly wasn’t going to get from him.”
“Did he try to get you fired?” asked Peter.
“No, by the time I was finished with him he was more than a little embarrassed, but it didn’t change my impression of the simplistic black and white notion many Americans have of this world. Because you seem to have a few criticisms of the capitalist system you are by definition a communist” said Jim.
There was a quiet moment so Jim turned to Angelique. “You see, during the Cold War, it was thought that we were all about to become slaves of communism and China was seen as the biggest threat to Australia and its way of life.”
“They still are
” said Peg, quietly.
“Yes, in a way you’re right Peg” said Peter. “They’ve got all our manufacturing jobs and soon they’ll not need our resources and so we’ll end up working for them in one way or another.”
“New Zealand is already there” said Jim. “They have no resources so the best they can do is produce the food for the Chinese while Australians relax and eat prawns, eh?”
Peg changed back to the earlier point about her father. Looking at Angelique she said:
“My dad was a trade unionist and he thought Mao was the best thing that had happened to the Chinese. There, workers were all equal just like in Russia, but in Russia they had killed about 30 million people mainly after the Second World War because Stalin wanted to stamp his foot on any dissent or sign of Western imperialist thinking. Freedom in other words. Never mind that people in China are no longer equal. They have a middle class that is bigger than that in the USA now, but they still have about four times as many poor peasants who are not sharing in the spoils of growth. So, unless they’re very careful, things could blow up in their faces pretty soon too.”
Peter had been thinking during lunch and at the end he said:
“You know, we could do some checking around in China to see just how they’re handling all that milk that’s going in there from New Zealand. On the basis of what you say, Jim, there might be room for a little bit of harmless interference with things so that the parent company catches a little Chinese pneumonia. Any ideas?”
“I’ve not been to China” said Jim, “but a former work colleague learned Mandarin and used to take regular tour groups there. I know he had many contacts there so perhaps if I got in touch with him he might have a few suggestions. Perhaps we could organize a little study tour to China to look at the processing of imported foodstuffs such as dairy products and the like eh?”
“Maybe your former colleague could conduct the tour?” said Peter.
“I’m not sure ” replied Jim. “He was older than me by quite a bit. I’m not sure if his health would be up to it but I know how I can contact him so I’ll give him a call. By the way Peter, did you come up with an idea or two for our next venture?”
“I’m still working on it” replied Peter, “there are one or two little obstacles in the path of both my best ideas, and I’ll have to figure a way around them. Why not try to call your friend now, mate. There’s the ‘phone.”
Jim called the Telstra directory line and gave the name of the former colleague’s son who lived in Victoria. Duly connected, the son’s wife was at home and informed them that her father-in-law was then in Sydney on holiday. She asked for a number and said she’d pass it to him and he could call back.
A pleasant afternoon was spent catching a few flathead, perch and bream and generally either lolling about the boat or taking a brief swim despite the water being still a little on the cool side. Jim took care of cleaning the fish and then prepared his favourite garlic egg and breadcrumb coating to produce the lightest lift to the natural fresh fish flavours. He finished off by cooking the fish on the aft barbecue and all were served a cool Tasmanian riesling, ‘Kelvedon’ with the evening meal.
After dinner they were watching a little television more for diversion than anything else and the news arrived that the US President was going to bale out all the banks in the US that had lent so much money so recklessly. Needless to say they had more than a few laughs at their own small role in things on Wall Street.
“Wasn’t it nice though that we didn’t have to do more than make a few worried phone calls to set that one in motion?” said Peg.
“You mean there was no nefarious activity behind the scenes Peggy, eh?” said Peter quietly.
“Well yes” said Peg, “I suppose that’s exactly what I mean.”
“Is your conscience troubling you?” said Peter, “because what we’ve done is nothing compared with what these corporate crooks do all the time.”
“Okay” said Jim, “enough of the self-reflection. Haven’t we all ended up so much better off for it?”
At about nine that night Jim’s phone rang and it was his old colleague who sounded not a day older than when they had last seen each other at Jim’s retirement dinner. His Scottish accent was just as strong as ever and he seemed pleased to be hearing from Jim. When told the purpose of the call he reflected for a few moments then said that he would be able to make a trip to China and would enjoy going there again. Airfares and accommodation are almost always sufficient inducement for such a response but he seemed also to like the offer of some consultancy money to go with it.
“What do you really want to do in China?” he said, knowing that Jim had always been rather uninterested in the Orient. When Jim told him a group of investors was looking at investing in agricultural industries there he thought he could locate someone to help once they arrived.
Tentative arrangements were made for a period about three weeks away and the conversation returned to small talk about what each had been doing with their retirement years. Afterwards, Peter said that he had a good feeling about this one. They’d need to locate a contact on the ground over there to work for them in a little fixing up of things to put the proverbial spanner in the works, and that should do the trick.
“The first thing then is to set up a New Zealand trading facility for each of us” said Peter. “I’ll call my bank when we get back on Friday and find out what we need to do to trade on the New Zealand Stock Exchange. Maybe we can do it on our present platforms, I’m not certain. After that we should place some sell orders on the company or companies in question. We’ll have time to get our inoculations done. I think cholera is needed for China but there’s probably others like typhoid and diphtheria that we need to check up on and TB is rampant in some places so we should all get booster shots including BCG and possibly polio and so forth. Remember we’ll probably end up in some country areas off the regular tourist trail. We have to make the trip look genuinely farm related.”
“Perhaps we should say we’re going money farming?” said Peg, to which there was all round laughter.
The broad planning complete, the group retired for the night to the gentle sound of clicking shrimps on the hull and slight gurgling from air trapped in the waste pipes as the vessel rode the anchor and rolled ever so slightly to the echo of ocean disturbances far away. A comfortable night was enjoyed by all and the return to Sydney was equally relaxed although this time they had a hard following Northeaster to scoot down the waves as they part surfed along the coast and turned in between the familiar sandstone headlands that marked the Harbour entrance.
The biggest delay in their planning turned out to be getting visas to enter China. Interviews were held with Chinese officials and it was probable that some minor inconsistencies in their reasons for the visit were the cause of a longer than expected delay. But after four weeks their paper work was all in order and their medical preparations were complete. Air bookings again delayed things a further week but eventually five Australian visitors on a fact finding visit to look at cooperative Chinese and foreign agricultural investment opportunities departed Sydney’s international Air terminal bound for Hong Kong. Jim’s former colleague, Duncan, said that he nearly always flew Cathay Pacific and that it was a great airline. True to his word, the flight was virtually flawless and Peter and Jim both began to wonder if their assessment of Chinese competence might be wrong.
They arrived in Hong Kong to be met by a long time friend of Duncan, Wong Li, who welcomed each of them as though they were also his long lost friends. They were to spend a night in a hotel in Hong Kong then would depart for the provinces the next day where a series of meetings and plant visits had been scheduled. They were to go first to a meat processing plant where small-goods were made from imported frozen beef and pig meat, then to a fruit canning plant where western technology and local produce were combined to supply supermarket shelves in China and abroad.
Despite having some initial fears about not appearing to be very
interested in what they were seeing all managed to sustain the interest level reasonably well and asked numerous questions which Li translated, in turn translating the responses from their hosts except that a surprising number of the people they met were fluent in English. At each stop they were also introduced to either one or two government officials who were there to ensure that their needs were being taken care of. Li explained to them that he was not considered sufficiently close to government to fulfill this role. In effect, he said, they were also watching him.
The next day was to be spent travelling north by train, and after a journey of some five hours they found themselves in Fuchou in Fuchien province. Here they were to be shown tea plantations. The following day was most interesting and they all learned a great deal about traditional Chinese green tea including its medicinal virtues. There was not much evidence of external capital however with most of the enterprises they visited appearing prosperous and self contained.
The routine of train travel one day and scheduled visits the next was strictly adhered to so on the following day it was back on board the train and the journey finished in the vast metropolis of Shanghai. Li had arranged a stay on the outer perimeter of the city however and a commuter train was used to get them there. They attracted a few curious looks from their fellow passengers but otherwise it could have been New York or London, all cities smelling much the same.
The following day they found what they had come for. They were taken up the Yangtze Valley by a small hired tour bus and Li was able to request a stop at a co-operative butter and cheese plant where western technology and imported milk powder were employed to make consumer dairy products for the Chinese and export markets.
Peter found it difficult to play down his excitement and appear as if this was but one more in a series of visits of equal interest, but the situation was eased as there were several English speaking employees although no westerners to be seen. What was immediately evident was that although there were some automated parts to the plant, hygiene could become an issue because all the equipment being used was still washed by hand after each day. As well, there was a curious mix of automated tank and pump systems but also places in the production chain where ingredients were being hand mixed. Peter and Jim also noted that the workers wore no hairnets, gloves or masks.
Soft cheeses, butter, milk powders, baby formulae and canned milk concentrates were all part of the plant’s production system. Gently with one of the English speaking supervisors, Peter asked where the milk came from and was told some from Australia but most from New Zealand. It then turned out that the milk was powdered for transit as it could take up to four weeks from paddock to plant. They were hoping to eventually produce all the milk feedstock for the plant in China but the main problem was lack of space suited to dairy cattle and lack of suitable grain for store feeding. So the importing system was working reasonably well. Of course more such enterprises could be established if there was more milk to be sent from elsewhere because China could market this milk in the form of butter, cheese, infant formulae, yogurt, liquid milk, milk powders and concentrates as well as confectionaries including chocolates.
They were watching a milk mixing or batching vat when Jim spotted a worker with a shovel and some white looking powder being shovelled into the vat. He asked the supervisor about it and was told it was just a dry ingredient to make the milk more suitable for passing through the machinery that was heating it for the cheese making operation.
Peter and Jim had the same idea at once, and both began to work their way around the vat feigning real interest in the size and dimension of the system, periodically looking up to see the spider web of interconnecting pipe work that appeared to feed back and forth within the plant.
By degrees they were both close enough to the young labourer with the shovel. He was extracting the powder from a bag printed in English with rather bold lettering on the front labeling it as ‘melamine’.
Back in their hotel for the night, Peter opened his laptop and ‘googled’ up the word ‘melamine’. He’d known it as a solid wood-like shelving material and could not understand how there was a powder that could be used for fluidizing dairy products. He was astonished at what he found. Melamine is a plastics-like material used for coating synthetic wood but also used as a pesticide in China. How this material could be fed into the human food chain was beyond belief. Moving quietly along the corridor he knocked on Jim and Peg’s door.
Jim and Peg had not got the information yet but were shown it by Peter.
“We should start selling down the two New Zealand dairy co-operatives that are listed on the New Zealand stock exchange” said Peter.
It was late in the day and New Zealand had been closed for hours so the next morning saw them hard at work at 5 am. The trading platforms were linked through their Australian trading platforms but operated direct into the exchange in Auckland. What they noticed immediately was that the pace of uptake was going to be slow. The smaller New Zealand market did not seem to have a very great appetite for the respective dairy companies, although there did seem to be a small range within which shares were moving. So the decision was taken to put up only so many for sale each day and hope they had time before problems emerged. Of the latter they were now certain.
Meanwhile, they wished to avoid any awareness on the part of Duncan that they were in fact involved in China-related share trading so they had passed off the computers as needed for monitoring their share portfolios and keeping in touch with friends back home.
They continued their conducted tour of northern provinces of China over the next week, rising at 5 or 6 am to watch progress on the Auckland exchange, and then flew back to Hong Kong with Li. Li had been an excellent guide and it was also true that Duncan had enjoyed meeting up with him again. They made a very welcome contribution to Li for his time although he had indicated it was done out of friendship for Duncan. But Duncan was also very pleased with the generosity of their payment to Li.
The flight back to Australia was uneventful although Angelique had tried to get a change of flight path to take in her ‘shopperholic’ needs in Singapore. Peter had indicated to all that they needed to be back in Australia to continue their sell down of shares in Kiwi Milk and Long White Cloud.
This time, they had a further six weeks in which the share price allowed them to keep shorting without any adverse price movement. They had come close to exhausting their limit after a further six weeks. It turned out that company officials already knew about the melamine at the time of their departure for China but it had been kept quiet while attempts to limit the damage were going on behind the scenes. Once the issue erupted publicly however, the share prices of the two companies took a predictable nosedive. China, it turned out, had been selling the contaminated milk and milk products throughout much of the rest of Asia and even back to Australia and New Zealand. There were confectionery items, biscuits and dairy products as well as soups containing milk products sitting on supermarket shelves in Australia, but most incredibly the melamine was in more than twenty countries throughout South East Asia, south Asia and even as far as Europe. It certainly was a global village to use a very old cliché. There had already been a number of deaths of children in China reputedly caused by the melamine and more were possible as many thousands were showing adverse symptoms.
The two investor couples closed their association with the episode when the shares were bought back at rock bottom prices and profits returned from their holding banks. There was no joy in the outcome but there was certainly a great deal more cash in the respective bank accounts.
Of course, the real losers were the thousand of mainly Chinese children, but also children from many other Asian countries who have been given a lifelong crippling dose of melamine in their kidneys and other body organs. This was an example of human greed at its very worst.
Peg was the one who made the final debriefing comment when she said:
“Well at least we didn’t have to give them any sort
of helping hand to push the odds all our way.”
The big financial losers were the many hard working dairy farm families whose retirement incomes were significantly reduced by the episode.
It did seem to Jim that there was irony in the fact that he could have predicted this sort of debacle from any involvement with China so far as food or agricultural products were concerned. But who would have listened to him? he thought. Worse, similar catastrophes will undoubtedly happen again.