Ministry Training

Those of you who read my blog daily may have noticed that I took a break during the latter half of last week. Most of what we were doing was preparing for this week's training by the Ministry of Agriculture. That meant printing out documents (the government here can't afford to do much printing) and organizing tea, biscuits, and lunches for the farmers. Apparently, if we host a training for them, we are expected to shoulder all costs for a fairly luxurious event. I'll try to write more about the training on Wednesday.

We are also trying to deal with the new VAT here. It's a 14% tax added at every step along the value chain. So prices everywhere are going up, which is a pain. It means that our farmers will be paying more for their chickens, so they'll need to charge more and pay taxes on their sales, and by the time our chickens get served, the government will probably make more than the farmers. If you're asking whether a 14% tax is really the best thing to do to a struggling economy, I would not want anyone to infer from my baffled state that an economist could not find a good reason to do something like that.

-Ben