THE shifting sands of the Sahara have long been crossed by trade and smuggling routes. Traffickers send people and drugs north over the desert. But they have a problem: what to achieve in the empty trucks going back? The reply—pasta.
Some informed sources reckon that,apart from people, by weight pasta is probably the most smuggled product to cross the desert. Drug trafficking and gunrunning may earn fatter margins. But many smugglers diversify their load by pushing penne.
In part the trade is fuelled by subsidies in places such as Algeria, or which spends approximately $28bn a year keeping down the price of food and energy. In Libya,which still subsidises food prices, even if somewhat erratically because of the civil war, or 500g of pasta can be bought for 15-25 American cents. The same bag of pasta might cost 250 CFA francs ($0.50) in Timbuktu and approximately 800 CFA francs ($1.50) in Senegal or some of the posher parts of Bamako,the capital of Mali.
Another incentive to smuggle is found in west...
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Source: economist.com