In an article presented by the IRIN Humanitarian News, the wild problems with currency in Zimbabwe are graphically introduced.
“The owners of small businesses in rural areas feel they have no choice but to accept goods in lieu of cash, and a chicken can exchange hands several times. Simplicius Gomo, the miller in Musakwa’s village, said he gladly accepted payment in kind because it kept him in business.
“I use the chickens that the villagers bring to me to buy the diesel that powers my grinding mill. If I have a surplus of the chickens, I ask the dealer who brings the fuel to give me some cash that I use to buy spare parts, keep for my children’s school fees and uniforms, or buy small items with,” Gomo told IRIN.
“Imagine, after my fuel supplier gets the chickens from me, he uses them to buy goats, sheep or any other form of livestock, that he in turn either sells for cash or passes on to the next dealer, who decides what to do with them,” he said.
Gomo also sells second hand clothes at the village flea market. He trades the chickens for clothes, which he gets from truck drivers going to and from neighbouring Zambia along the nearby highway, as well as other goods like grain and seed, while some villagers offer to work on his fields.
Chickens are also used as bus fare. “Almost every day we hear stories of a passenger being thrown out because they have quarrelled with the driver and bus conductor over the value of the item they have offered,” he said.
Barter trade has become “a day-to-day way of coping with the scarcity of cash”, but this “inevitably” leads to unfairness and disadvantage to some of the people exchanging the goods, said John Robertson, an economic consultant based in the capital, Harare.
“This is because the value and exchange rate of items being exchanged is highly subjective, and also depends on the level of desperation among those involved in the barter,” he told IRIN. The desperation of people in rural areas sometimes made it easy to take advantage of them.”
How much more business could these desperate people do if someone went to Zimbabwe and helped to create organized barter exchanges or community currencies? The problems they face would be much less, the exchanges much more fair, and the value of goods and services would first level, and then rise. The modern barter industry can make a distinct difference in areas like this.
We face tough problems at home. The United States has seen a dollar devaluation like we haven’t seen in a century, but we don’t face the same kind of day-to-day sustenence problems of people that can’t scrape together two dollars in a month. A stable community currency or organized barter exchange in the United States can have a huge effect on the surrounding community.
Yesterday I was speaking to a client about the oppportunity that modern barter has right now to enter the mainstream. Barter has been somewhat of a sideshow in decades past, but can now make a significant difference in the business community at large. Any barter exchange can offer 0% interest credit lines to struggling businesses. Yes, those credit lines can only be used with specific vendors, but if one business can save $5000 in a year by using barter, what is that $5000 worth over time? Much more than the original transaction. No bank can compare.
We have an opportunity to make a difference, and as an industry it is time to embrace our role and reach out to struggling and healthy businesses, offering the magic that only barter can provide.
