Population Growth, Real Estate Agents, Aircraft Carriers and Bananas in Belize
March 18, 2024 Volume 4 # 44
Here Comes Africa
Africa will have the fastest population growth between now and 2050. Europe will actually have fewer people, as birth rates go below replacement.
Are Real Estate Agents in Danger?
They are in the United States, says the Wall Street Journal. A deal to settle a string of antitrust lawsuits about high real estate agent fees “…has the potential to drive down commission rates and force hundreds of thousands of agents out of the industry.”
There are 2-million real estate agents in the United States. They have been making commissions of 5% to 6% as real estate prices soared.
New agencies are popping up that will do a real estate deal for a flat fee of $9,750.
There are an estimated 228,000 real estate agents in Canada. Selling a $500,000 house generated $30,000 in commission to be be split by the buying and selling agent. Sell an over valued million dollar condo in Toronto and you are splitting $60,000. There are lower fees, but as prices rise the real estate take home goes up. No wonder there are so many real estate agents in Canada. There have been news stories saying real estate prices in Canada will pick up in the spring. We’ll see.
Are Aircraft Carriers Obsolete?
At the start of the Second World War the Battleship was King.
The Japanese Yamato with its 18 inch guns, the mightiest battleship ever built.
The USS Missouri, its nine 16 inch guns each fired a shell the size of a Volkswagen. It never did much fighting, mostly shelling ahead of landings. Aircraft Carriers did the heavy lifting in the Pacific. The Yamato fought some battles but in the end it was sunk by American aircraft.
The age of the battleship ended at the Battle of Midway when planes from two American aircraft carriers sank four Japanese carriers. Spycraft also did a lot of the work. The Americans had cracked the Japanese naval code and knew of the planned attack at Midway. Now aircraft carriers are as vulnerable as battleship once were.
The USS Gerald R. Ford, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, home to up to 90 aircraft, There are almost as many F-18 fighter jets on this one aircraft than in all off the Royal Canadian Air Force. This is the largest aircraft carrier ever built at a cost of $13-billlion. Its aircraft and 4,500 sailors are protected by a ring of destroyers, submarines and other ships that are capable of shooting down incoming drones and missiles, as we have seen by those launched by the Houthis in the Red Sea. But…..China, Russia, North Korea and even terrorist groups have missiles that might overwhelm the protective shield and sink a mighty aircraft carrier. The Houthis say they have a hypersonic missile, which travels at five times the speed of sound. A publication called The National Interest had this warning:
“America could find itself in a similar position that the French found themselves in at the outset of the First World War: a beautiful looking force that was completely outmatched by their rivals because they had made the wrong strategic investments--and their people paid for those bad investments.”
What could replace aircraft carriers? Maybe submarines like this one.
The USS Seawolf, a nuclear powered attack submarine. It can move at 20 knots underwater and is stealthy, meaning it is all but impossible to find. For now. The British and the Russians also have `dangerous’ submarines, but the Americans lead.
From Warships to Passenger Ships
This poster is terrific but there are a few boo-boos. A couple of ships are listed twice. The Britanic and the Majestic are confused. The Normandie is double listed and the Titanic has smoke coming out of all four funnels. One was just for show. The flag for a German liner is wrong. It’s a flawed poster but still interesting enough to forgive its foibles.
Since this chart was produced, there is an even larger ship, Icon of the Seas. It has a maximum capacity of 7,600 passengers and 2,350 crew. It is 364.75 metres long.
What a nightmare. You couldn't pay me to get on that thing.
Gasoline vs Electric
It costs more to buy an electric car but much less to run one. For some reason Electric Cars are seen a political: many people on the right see them as some kind of conspiracy, though one of my Conservative friends loves his Tesla.
These figures are for the United States. They would be dramatically different in Canada, especially in British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec where electricity is so cheap. First, the average fuel cost in Canada is C$1.53 a litre which works out to about US$5.90 a gallon. It goes the other way with electricity. The average cost of electricity in Canada is 19 cents per kilowatt hour, or 14 cents US. But in Quebec and British Columbia the cost is more like 8 cents Canadian or just under 6 cents US. So in Canada, it’s more expensive to drive a gasoline car, but a lot cheaper to go electric.
Like Father Like Son
An amazing likeness. Phillipe de Gaulle died this week at 102. There he is with Papa in 1962. Charles de Gaulle’s only son, Phillippe was an Admiral in the French navy.
Essay of the Week
This is from a book I wrote on Belize in 2017. An amazing small country in Cenrtal America, with a tiny population of 400,000. One of only two English-speaking countries in Latin America: the other is Guyana.
This is a bit about a banana plantation. Interesting that in getting there I flew from San Pedro to Belize International, then took the same small place to Belize Municipal; it took less than three minutes. The man who owns the banana plantation also owns the airline and his office is in the tiny terminal at Belize Municipal.
The Banana Belt
Belize is the perfect place to grow just about anything, with its ideal combination of sun and rain. It has attracted farmers from the Mennonites, who supply a huge percentage of the country’s daily food needs, to immigrants from Iran and India who feed world markets for bananas and shrimp.
High in Banana Tree in Belize
Eugene Zanabeh owns an 1,180-acre banana plantation in southern Belize. His father was born in Iran and came to Belize with his wife from El Salvador and started a small citrus farm. Eugene is an amazing entrepreneur, who has grown the small citrus operation into a major agricultural holding. As you will read elsewhere in this book, he also owns Maya Island Air, and commutes between his plantation and his office at Belize Municipal Airport in less time than most big city-drivers take to commute to work.
The first thing a visitor to a banana plantation notices is that all the bananas are wrapped in blue bags, used to protect the fruit from insects among other things.
“You’ll notice there are a lot of holes in the blue bag and that’s for ventilation purposes, which accelerates the growth and the quality of the fruit,” says Felipe Magana, a graduate agronomist who is the manager of the plantation. “It takes anywhere between sixty-three days and ninety-one days to be ready for cutting and shipping.”
Eugene and Felipe lead a visitor through the process. After they are chopped from the tree, the large bunches of bananas are carried to a cable system for transportation to the packing house. There is a network of cables, called cableways, through the plantation, and no banana plant is more than 100 feet from a cable line. Growing bananas is a labour intensive process.
At the packing house the bananas are cleaned and packed into boxes, all weighing at least forty pounds, each box marked for Fyffes, the Irish company that buys all the bananas from this plantation. They are shipped directly to a nearby port, then make the trip across the Atlantic. Just about all the bananas in Ireland come from Belize, though others from Eugene’s Zanabeh plantation make it to the United Kingdom.
“We cut the fruit between the ages of sixty-three and ninety-one days and after we cut it, it’s processed in the packing shed, sent to the port, and from there it takes about eleven or twelve days at sea until it reaches its destination,” says Eugene. “So from the time someone swings a machete at the banana plant, it’s taken anywhere from fifteen to twenty-one days before someone is eating one of our bananas in Dublin or London.”
Eugene’s family started in the citrus industry and is still active. It, too, is a big contributor to Belize’s economy.
Shrimp
Zubair Kazi came to the United States as a young man in 1969 and started work in a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Within no time he owned a franchise. After several years he owned more than three hundred franchises. Today he owns around one hundred. His main interest now is medical research, through a company that manufactures a machine called Artemis, that diagnoses prostate cancer.
An incredibly successful businessman already, Zubair Kazi first came to Belize not to make more money but as a tourist. “I am from India where it’s very tropical and a friend called me from Belize and said that if I was looking for a place like that, Belize is the best he knew of. So I just went there and happened to see this property on my first trip,” said Kazi (many of his close friends call him by his last name). “Within twenty-four hours we shook hands and made the deal on this shrimp property.”
Kazi finds it relaxing living and working in Belize. The British tradition reminds him of his childhood home in India. He says if you want to do business in Belize, you have to adjust to the local culture.
“The total population is only three hundred and eighty thousand people and everybody knows what others are doing and it’s good not to get in anybody’s way. I never had a problem because I approached everybody independently. You have to be respectful, respect what they need and what their thought process is and work accordingly and give them time to make things happen,” he says.
Paradise Shrimp has 3,600 acres and is capable of producing and processing ten million pounds of shrimp a year, though five million pounds was the largest crop so far. It is frozen and shipped to the United States, Mexico, Jamaica, Trinidad, and other places.