Dear Ken
So nice to hear from you after all these years. >Gasoline is $4.59 this week in Berkeley, and $9.20 a US gallon back in the UK. I filled up the pickup truck yesterday at the SeTAR Centre: ZAR 740.00. I could not believe my eyes. That is just about $100 for 66 litres. $5.75 a gallon. A rural farmer with government support for children might get 1.5 tanks of fuel a month in income. I found that one of the reliable ways to tell what a local salary should be is measured in beer and gasoline. The local cost of 24 beers and 100 litres of gasoline is often a standard local salary. Remember that Angola was for a time on the 'beer standard' where local currency was useless. Beers can't be created and have near universal value. It is also a decent value so it applied to many commodities (3 beers, 2 for 5 beers). As only the brewery could create a beer, counterfeiting was impossible. Very practical. The same with gasoline and diesel. I heard that the WB used to use the gasoline and beer calculation in Uganda as a way of coping with rampant inflation in the local currency. Best regards Crispin in thundery Johannesburg
_______________________________________________ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://www.bioenergylists.org/
