Qatar poised to get even richer
Paraphrasing the words of Simpsons anchorman Kent Brockman, "Allow me to be the first to welcome our new Qatari overlords!" , which may also be rendered:
Qatar was my home for a stretch in 2001, where I taught and tutored these Sons of the Desert in English. The "long white robe" referred to in the article is distinctly non-robelike - more of a tailored dress shirt/night shirt combo - and is called a thaube locally or a dishdash in the wider Arab world.
"Little noticed, Qatar has reversed the typical role of the producer country, which simply opens its territory to oil companies to explore, and takes a cut of whatever they find.
Not only does Qatar own the majority share of each LNG joint venture, but it will also own delivery ships and stakes in import terminals in Europe and the United States. The arrangement allows Qataris to profit from processes and sales far beyond its borders, elbowing into a business that was once the sole province of big oil."
In other words, Qatar is boosting its wealth by doing precisely the opposite of what the World Bank/IMF group have counselled for the ‘developing’ world. Instead of merely becoming a primary producing exporter of a raw material (one which would, in this case, provide a great income in any event), they are becoming involved in the "value chain" of that commodity. The standard, perpetually failed model espoused by Washington has been for the producers of "our" primary commodities to remain at the lowest rung of the chain, bidding each other lower for our business.
While not quite "import substitution," this development model cleaves much closer to the self-investing and rabid capital retention model of the ‘Asian tigers’ than anything that anyone at the Bretton Woods institutions or the University of Chicago’s econ department has farted out. It is, in fact, similar in spirit to the protectionism of early industrial development in the UK and US, or to the Soviets’ stretch of "socialism in one country."
Protection of internal capital/internal reinvestment and control of the value chain in the life of commodities have been the only successful development model components in human history. That we continue to push the open market for low-rung fungibles upon the struggling billions of the Third World is a testament to our hypocrisy and greed.
