"How can people say this thing......"

Ruan Fugen frowned, the expression on his face could not tell whether he wanted to cry or laugh, he was extremely entangled.

"I'll tell you. Liang Dongming took over the conversation for Ruan Phuc Gen and said: "After we contracted the land, we hired some agricultural technicians from China, mainly to take charge of technical matters, and the work in the fields must be done by local people." We posted job postings and paid twice as much as the average local worker. I went to their villages, and the peasants here were very poor, and giving them a dollar a day was enough to feed their family, which was much better than being idle at home all day. ”

"And then?" Feng Xiaochen asked.

Liang Dongming spread his hands: "There are very few people who come to apply, and those local blacks would rather go hungry than come to work with us." ”

"Why is that?" Feng Xiaochen's curiosity was aroused.

Liang Dongming said: "I didn't know it at first. Later, after two days of work, the blacks who had been hired asked for my salary, and I said that it was not yet the end of the month and that they could not be paid, so they said that they would lend them their wages for those two days first. I thought that maybe there was something urgent about their family, so I paid them their salary. As a result, when they got their salaries, they went to buy cigarettes and alcohol, and took the whole family to the restaurant to eat. Spend all the money, then go back to work, and then borrow your salary. ”

Feng Xiaochen roughly understood, and couldn't help but smile knowingly.

Ruan Fugen said: "As soon as Lao Liang told us about this, we understood. The people here are not like us Chinese. Let's make a little money, always thinking about the long run, we can't spend it all at once, we have to save a little just in case. The people here are all drunk today, and they will have no rice tomorrow and worry tomorrow. They don't want to plant so much land because they can't wait for the harvest. We were looking for workers who were paid on a monthly basis, and they couldn't wait, so they didn't want to come to work. ”

Liang Dongming said with a smile: "After we understood this, we changed the recruitment conditions, stipulating that the salary will be paid daily, and you can get one day's money if you work for one day." As a result, thousands of people signed up at once, and they all worked very hard, and they were more motivated than we hired people in China. ”

"Haha, I see. Feng Xiaochen laughed, he had heard about this kind of thing before, but he didn't pay special attention to it. Now listening to Nguyen Phuc Gen and them, he realized that Africans do have such characteristics, and if they can do what they like, these people are actually very good laborers.

There is a concept in economics called the "resource curse", which roughly means that a country with abundant resources can live a better life without much effort, so the country will have no incentive to innovate, and will eventually become a backward country.

Many parts of Africa have tropical climates and abundant vegetation, and people can survive by simply collecting wild fruits, which has led to the habit of having fun on the fly. In China, on the other hand, there are many people and little land, and survival depends on the production of land, and a year of hard work can only get the food ration of the whole family, and if you delay the farming time a little, you will starve. Such geographical conditions have caused Chinese to have a sense of crisis at all times and dare not slack off. This habit has been preserved even in the industrial age.

According to data released by international organizations, the savings rate of Chinese residents is the highest in the world, much higher than that of developed countries in the West. Some people interpret this as the "inferiority" of the Chinese, and say that this is because the Chinese system cannot guarantee medical care and pensions, so the people have to save money. In fact, this is precisely a virtue of the Chinese. Financial experts in the United States believe that individuals should have savings that can guarantee more than half a year's expenses in order to be financially healthy, and most Americans simply cannot do this.

The same is true in Africa, South Asia, Latin America and other places, where the more abundant resources, the more backward the economy, this is the magic of the resource curse.

At this point, Nguyen Phuc Gen and the others opened up their chatterbox and began to talk about interesting stories about their hiring of local blacks. According to them, after adopting this daily wage payment method, they do not have to worry about employment, and a large number of people are waiting to be hired every day. Some people don't come to work the next day after settling their wages that day, because they already have their rations for the day, and they will only come back to work to earn money when they have eaten them. Ruan Phuc Gen and the others are now accustomed to this kind of highly mobile employment method, these people do not come to work, they hire other people, and after two days, the original group of people is back, still familiar faces, and they don't even need training.

Africa's economic development is not as good as in other regions, but people are no longer satisfied with just food and clothing, but have other needs, such as the use of mobile phones. With the habit of these black people eating food, it is naturally difficult to save money to buy mobile phones. So, Ruan Phuc Gen and the others came up with a method of renting mobile phones, stipulating that as long as they work on the farm for one day, they can get the right to use the mobile phone for one day, and after one year of use, the mobile phone will belong to the other party. As soon as such a policy was introduced, the number of applicants for jobs was more than doubled, and the continuity of work was also guaranteed.

"I thought that if I continued to do this, it wouldn't take a few years for these people to learn to save money. Liang Dongming commented with a smile.

"If you can really make these locals learn to save money, you will be very meritorious. Feng Xiaochen said with emotion.

"Yes, if we can do it for more than ten years, twenty years, this place will definitely change a lot. Nguyen Phuc Gen said.

Feng Xiaochen looked at Ruan Fugen and asked, "What, old Ruan, have things changed?"

It was not strange for Feng Xiaochen to ask like this, because this was an obvious matter. Ruan Fugen and the others have made so many detours, and when they told Feng Xiaochen about renting land, it was obviously not because they were full of food and had nothing to talk about. They said that the income from renting land and farming land in the past few years was good, and the latter sentence naturally meant that the situation has changed now. Feng Xiaochen has this self-knowledge, knowing that he is by no means a little fresh meat who is ashamed of flowers and closed moons, Ruan Fugen and they came to Kantay, not to chase stars.

Sure enough, Nguyen Phuc Gen sighed and said, "Alas, we worked hard to develop the land, the irrigation facilities were built, and the farmers were trained, but as a result, they didn't let us rent it. ”

"Why?" Feng Xiaochen asked with a frown.

"There's competition. Wan Guansheng said, "Someone gave the government of Gosner better conditions, asking us to take back our land and give it to him to plant, so we can't plant it." ”

"Europeans?" Feng Xiaochen asked.

Ruan Fugen sneered and said, "It's us Chinese." ”

Feng Xiaochen suddenly became serious: "What's going on, Lao Ruan, you tell me the matter clearly." ”

In fact, the matter is very simple, when Nguyen Phuc Gen and his family rented land in Gosner, the benefits of running farms in Africa to engage in agricultural operations were not obvious, so there was no one in the country to compete with them. In the past two years, most of the enterprises and individuals who run farms have made money, and the argument that running a farm in Africa can make a lot of money has gradually become popular in China, so more and more Chinese people have gone to Africa to rent land, and they have formed a competitive relationship with these people who originally rented land.

There is a lot of wasteland that can be developed in Gosnel, but because Ruan Phuc Gen and his family came early, they chose a piece of land with good transportation and water conditions, and after two or three years of development, the land has gradually changed from raw land to cooked land, and the development model is ready-made, which is much stronger than reclaiming wasteland.

As a result, a company from China targeted Nguyen Phuc Gen's farm and came to negotiate with the head of the farm, asking them to subcontract the land to this company. Of course, subcontracting is also allowed, but whether it is subcontracting land, subcontracting factories, shops, etc., there is a subcontracting fee. For example, I rented a storefront for 500,000 yuan a year. I have been in business for two years, and I have become popular, and if you want to subcontract from me, in addition to bearing the 500,000 rent, you also need to pay me an additional subcontracting fee, which is a common practice in the industry.

The company also agreed to pay the subcontracting fee, but it only paid 10 yuan per mu, and 10,000 hectares of land was less than 2 million, which was almost humiliating Ruan Fugen and others. You must know that with Ruan Phuc Gen's net worth alone, the value of staying in Africa for a few days is more than 2 million, and the other party wants to use such a subcontract fee to take away the land he has been operating for several years, isn't it wishful thinking?

The managers arranged by Nguyen Phuc Gen and others on the farm did not dare to make decisions on their own, and reported the matter to Nguyen Phuc Gen and others through long-distance phone calls. When several bosses heard this, they were furious, but considering that the farm was abroad, it was not appropriate to cause more trouble, so they told the person in charge of the farm not to conflict with the other party, and just politely refused. If the same thing is left in China, Ruan Fugen and the others will already be very reasonable if they don't hire someone to beat each other's stuffy sticks.

Who would have thought that after the refusal, the other party did not give up, but contacted the police of Gosner and began to trouble these farms, trying to force them to give up the lease and subcontract the land to this company. The farm side was able to cope with it at first, but as the other party's methods continued to intensify, the person in charge of the farm could not bear it and asked for help from home, which led to the trip of Nguyen Phuc Gen and others to Africa.

"This kind of thing is not uncommon. Listening to Ruan Fugen's narrative, Du Xiaoyuan interjected.

"What are you talking about?" Feng Xiaochen asked.

Du Xiaoyuan said: "Similar things have happened in our industrial parks all over the country, and some domestic companies are desperately trying to lower prices or bribe local officials in order to grab the market, with the aim of crowding out their peers." Many companies say that they are not afraid to compete with foreign companies, whether they are local companies in Africa or Western countries, they are strong enough to win in the competition. The only thing they are afraid of is to compete with our own Chinese enterprises, no matter whether they win or lose, it is our own people who suffer. ”

"Why have you never told me about such a thing?" Feng Xiaochen said with a sinking face.