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Monday, September 28, 2009 10:15 AM
Quebec doc shines at Prix Italia awards
Woody Allen said “80 per cent of success is showing up.” Quebec’s ARTV showed up at the Prix Italia, a TV, radio and web programming competition sponsored by the Italian national broadcaster RAI, and walked out Saturday with the top award for “Creativity in high definition.” Canadians and Americans almost never submit programs to the Prix Italia. They should, because the event is at risk of becoming a Euro media-prize ghetto and needs to become more competitive, that is, more international, to survive. The Prix people are thrilled when North Americans enter.
“Flow” was ARTV’s winning program. The 52-minute documentary, directed by Oana Suteu Khintirian, was produced by the Cirque de Soleil and was billed as a “metaphorical musing of human presence on the blue planet.” I was a judge at the Prix, in another category, and only saw a short clip of “Flow.” It was visually stunning.
Even though the Prix Italia is hardly known in North America, ARTV should be proud of its achievement. That’s because the Prix is one of the oldest, and most prestigious awards in the industry. You don’t hear about it because it doesn’t come with Hollywood-style glitz, parties and paparazzi. The delegates and judges who attend the Prix are mostly sober minded media buffs in bad suits who appreciate fine programming and are passionate about public broadcasting. No klieg lights for them. But this being Italy, everyone gets treated to fine, wine-soaked meals.
The Prix started 60 years ago in Capri as a radio-only competition. Europe had just emerged from the Second World War and radio had been used primarily as a propaganda tool. The BBC, RAI, Radiodiffusion Francaise, UNESCO and other media and cultural organizations agreed the time had come to promote radio as a cultural and creative force. The Prix was born. TV was added in 1957. Recently, web and high-definition categories were added. The event is held in a different Italian city every year – it was Torino’s turn this time. Former CBC boss Robert Rabinovitch has been the president of the last two Prix.
There was a time when the Prix had a virtual lock on the high-end programming prize market, at least in Europe. In the early years, programs associated with some of the century’s biggest cultural names were submitted. They included works by Samuel Beck, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Harold Pinter, Italo Cavino, Igor Stravinskij, Ken Loach and Sidney Pollack. Today, the Prix is lost in the clutter of awards ceremonies and doesn’t attract the big names of previous decades. That doesn’t mean the winners can’t use the Prix to bolster their marketing efforts. It does mean the Prix has to try harder to remain relevant.
I was a judge in the special prize category called “Programs that effect social change,” a hard-to-define category that was largely made up of documentaries. Fine reportage was not the most important criterion. The goal instead was to present a fresh approach to a familiar topic or trigger an emotional response – anger, surprise, joy – that made the viewer want to change the way he or she lives.
In my category, the winner was “Women bear Africa,” a short, elegant film from the Ivory Coast about women bearing the burden of the continent’s development. It was not my favourite submission in the category (the five jury members have to reach a consensus). My fave was “Recipes for Disaster,” from Finland. It was about a family’s humorous and entertaining effort to tackle climate change – out went the car and the plastic. So how do you brush your teeth if you can’t use a plastic toothbrush? In the end, the film shows that substantial carbon reduction can be made without destroying cushy Western lifestyles or ripping apart marriages. If it comes to Canadian television, don’t miss it. And don’t miss “Flow.” Bravo ARTV!
Link to this postWednesday, September 16, 2009 10:49 AM
Fiat rolls out the talent
We figured it out. Italy’s Fiat and its sister companies – Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo – have a secret, skunk works factory. It does not produce dazzling automotive technology; it produces beautiful women.
That was my conclusion, and the conclusion of roughly 1,000 other reporters, after visiting the vast Fiat exhibition hall Tuesday morning at the Frankfurt Auto Show. Where other car makers employed models who looked like flight attendants, with conservative, below-the-knee skirts and dresses, the Fiat family rolled out the talent. The dozens of girls hired by Fiat looked like they were auditioning for the spring/summer catwalk shows in Paris or Milan. They were universally tall and slim with long hair and provocatively short skirts. Some wore leather dresses, many wore knee-high leather boots, all had 4-5 inch heels.
And they knew how to pout. Point a camera at them, and they immediately went into model mode – hips forward, shoulders back, as they leaned against the sleek Italian cars. When they weren’t being photographed, they looked bored, unapproachable and vaguely pissed off. How perfect.
The girls at the Fiat display attracted the most attention, not because they were more glamorous than their rivals at Ferrari and Alfa, but because of the way they were dressed: Short plaid skirts, white bobby socks, tight green vests over white blouses. You guessed it – Fiat went out of their way to make them look like high school girls with things other than homework on their minds. I guess it was supposed to fit into youthful theme of Fiat’s presentation.
But even some of the most jaded hacks thought Fiat had gone too far with school girl get-up. Eric Mayne, of Wardsauto.com, said “this would never fly in Detroit.” The Italian journalists, of course, barely noticed. To them, it’s impossible to imagine Italian car displays without the sexy women.
For more from the Frankfurt auto show, read Jeremy Cato's blog, Driving It home: Bet on Polo for Canada
Monday, September 14, 2009 07:45 AM
Driving a Trabi is 'real driving'
It is two days before the Frankfurt Auto Show, the premier showcase of rolling industrial art, and I am driving the contender for the worst car ever produced – a Trabant. We rented one to tour Berlin for a couple of hours. I loved it.
The Trabi, as it is affectionately called, was built in East Germany before the Berlin wall was torn down 20 years ago. It was that country’s exceedingly primitive answer to the VW beetle.
A Swiss army knife has more moving parts. The two-cylinder, two-cycle engine is air cooled and has no electronics or computer controls. It has power nothing. There is no gas gauge. That role is fulfilled by inserting a dipstick in the tank under the hood, so placed to ensure maximum pyrotechnics in a front-end collision, and measuring the wet bit.
The body panels are made of cotton soaked in resin – I am not making this up – so the car is very light and cannot rust. In that sense, it would be the ideal car for Canada’s salt-encrusted winter roads.
Driving the Trabi is the equivalent of wrestling a dead sheep. The four-speed shifter, mounted on the steering column, is mush. There is absolutely no feedback, so you can never tell what gear you are in. I would just smash the shifter here and there and hope for the best. When I floored the tiny beast, clouds of foul-smelling blue smoke erupted from the tailpipe as pedestrians held their noses. The time required to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/hr is unknown. No driver has lived that long.
So why did I love driving the Trabi? Because it felt like real driving. It demanded total concentration and physical exertion. Every corner, every stop light was a challenge. It made me realize that modern cars are not cars at all, but mobile living rooms, completely isolated from environment for which they are designed. It also made me realize that modern engines are unnecessarily powerful for city driving. The Trabi’s 26 horsepower is adequate for urban journeys.
About 40,000 Trabis are still on the road and their owners adore them. In a few years, they may get the opportunity to buy a new Trabi – one being engineered to be a technological marvel. It will be an electric car, a true green machine, the polar opposite of the ones that put impoverished East Germans on the road during the Cold War.
A prototype of the new Trabi is to be unveiled at the Frankfurt Auto Show. The company planning the car’s comeback is called Herpa Miniaturmodelle. This is a big leap for Herpa, which makes the German equivalent of Matchbox toy cars. It will be a big leap for Trabi owners too. What is the point of a Trabi that drives like a dream when the nightmare is so much more fun?
Monday, August 24, 2009 10:06 AM
The trillion-dollar buyback threat
What might the biggest threat to sustained economic recovery be? A new banking crisis? Deflation or rising oil prices? Runaway government borrowing?
How about stock buybacks?
These babies are supposed to be the best things since spray cheese. They raise share prices, making investors happier and more confident. When that happens, they buy iPods and Fords, airline tickets and thick barbecue sirloins. Tax receipts go up. Corporate bosses smile because their stock-based compensation plans becomes richer. Merger activity rises, keeping the bankers and lawyers in Brioni suits, their lips wet with fine chardonnay. Pension fund portfolios rise in value. What's not to like?
A lot, at least in the opinion of William Lazonick, a Canadian professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he directs the Center for Industrial Competitiveness. He thinks buybacks are the Antichrist.
The hundreds of billions – make that trillions – collectively spent on buybacks eliminates the equivalent value that could be plowed into innovation, R&D, job creation or lower product prices.
Perversely, some companies announce lavish buybacks even as they demand government research funds, even as they fire workers, even as they create jobs overseas as the expense of domestic employment. He wants them controlled or banned for the sake of overall competitiveness and economic recovery.
In spite of his compelling arguments, our man is a lone voice in the woods, no doubt doomed to rage like Lear at the tree bark for eternity.
His views have no support in Congress or anywhere else on the planet, as far as he can tell. This is not for lack of trying. His new paper, titled “The New Economic Business Model and the Crisis of U.S. Capitalism,” to be published shortly in the Capitalism and Society journal, deals in good part with the evils of buybacks. His views, in vastly truncated form, appeared last week in a column he wrote for BusinessWeek.
Buybacks are almost as old as stock markets. There were times, in Europe and in Japan, where they were considered the devil's brew and regulated tightly. No more. The American-bred cult of shareholder return has turned buybacks into a global phenomenon, nowhere more so than in the United States, where they are worth more than the GDPs of the lesser continents.
Mr. Lazonick's research reveals that 438 companies on the Standard & Poor's 500 index spent $2.4-trillion (U.S.) on buybacks between 1997 and the end of last year. In 2007, when profits were still rising and before anyone knew the world was on the verge of brutal recession, the average buyback for each of these S&P companies was a record $1.2-billion.
Between 2000 and 2008, Exxon alone spent $144-billion on buybacks.
Next in line were Microsoft ($94-billion), IBM ($73-billion), Bank of America ($56-billion) and Cisco ($53-billion).
Of course the recession has slowed the buyback pace, but not to the point you would think. Mr. Lazonick calculated that the buyback-to-profit ratio more than tripled in 2008, the year of the stock market meltdown, over 2007. Obviously, companies couldn't resist snapping up shares they considered table-thumping bargains.
While fresh buyback data is elusive, the financial wires are full of buyback notices. Last week Netflix, the online movie rental company, announced it would buy back as much as $300-million of its shares.
Telecom equipment maker Tellabs plans to buy back $200-million of its shares. In Canada, the value of buybacks is not tallied by the Toronto Stock Exchange. But, again, the number of buybacks is not as low as you would suspect. Through July, 155 buybacks (known as “normal course issuer bids”) were announced, putting them on pace to meet, perhaps even exceed, the 331 TSX buybacks announced in the 2007 boom year.
Some buybacks make you cringe. General Motors spent more than $20-billion on them between 1986 and 2002, an era when the company was shedding great gobs of market share as Japanese competition came on strong. Imagine if those bucks had been devoted to making cars that drivers actually wanted to buy.
Intel is another example. In 2005, in a masterpiece of cynicism, Intel lobbied Congress to boost the funding of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), which sponsors research into nanotechnology. That year the NNI budget was $1.2-billion. Intel's buyback budget at the time was $10.6-billion. The same year, then-CEO Craig Barrett said that “U.S. leadership in the nanoelectronics era is not guaranteed.” Well, no wonder, buyback boy.
It's no mystery why Mr. Lazonick has no takers on his idea to banish buybacks for the sake of the economy. They appeal to the greed in every shareholder and every stock market company executive, most of whom are loaded to their Alain Mikli eyewear in stock options. Certainly, Michael Jensen, the American economist who, in the 1970s, advocated the use of stock options as a compensation tool, would consider Mr. Lazonick a crazy man.
So would the army of economists, shareholder activists and fund managers who support the starve-the-beast approach. If you give executives a bankroll to spend, they will spend it on stupidly expensive takeovers, so don't tempt the egomaniacs. Force them instead to dole out the profits on buybacks and dividends. Indeed, buybacks have become one of the most notable features of North American, Japanese and American capitalism. The cure for a sinking or flat share price is not better management or better products; it's giving shares the Hoover treatment.
But this time it's different. American-style capitalism is in trouble.
Economies everywhere are in the tank. Competitiveness is suffering.
Innovation is needed desperately to create new businesses, new products, smarter ways of doing things. Instead, companies are obsessed with spending every spare dollar, euro, pound and yen on an activity that is essentially useless, competitively speaking. This will not change unless the stock option-based compensation model is taken out behind the barn and shot.
Thursday, July 9, 2009 12:44 PM
Silvio's got the gift
Silvio Berlusconi’s G8 summit in Italy will not go down in history as a class act. The location, on a bleak modern campus near L’Aquila, the city struck by a killer earthquake on April 6, could have been anywhere in the world. The sherpas and delegates complained of epic disorganization. The toilets were filthy. Access to important people was virtually non-existent.
But Mr. Berlusconi got two things right – the food and the lavish presents for the G8 leaders.
Tight security meant there was no way any of the 2,500 or so journalists could leave the media site for a bowl of linguini, al fresco, washed down with a bottle of local Abruzzo white wine. With that in mind, Berlusconi’s people set up a vast tent and filled it with equally vast amounts of Italian culinary delights – prosciutto, salami, mozzarella, melon, rice and mushroom salad, the freshest tomatoes, thin slices of beef, simple pasta and so on. Of course, there was wine and beer and better than decent coffee. It made the stale, mayonnaise-soaked sandwiches served at April’s G20 summit in London look barbaric.
The gifts to G8 leaders were even more lavish. No “I survived L’Aquila” T-shirts for Stephen Harper, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and the rest of the G8 crew. What they got instead was a stunning work of art.
Mr. Berlusconi commissioned the Italian fine-art publishing house, Fondazione Marinela Ferrari, to make a special art book. But not just any art book. This baby weighs 24 kilos. The cover is a bas relief made from flawless white Carrara marble, the preferred marble of Italy’s finest sculptors, past and present. The relief is a copy of Antonio Canova’s exquisite work, Graces and Venus Dancing. The Italians consider Canova, the Venetian sculptor who created The Three Graces (now in the Hermitage) and who died in 1822, to be one of their greatest ambassadors of beauty.
Inside the book are 77 museum-quality photos of Canova’s works by the Neapolitan photographer Mimmo Jodice. The gift includes a hand-inscribed dedication to each of the leaders, and their countries’ anthems. Silk, silver, gold leaf, vegetable dies are among the materials used in the book and the box in which it is contained. In total, 23 Italian and European artists contributed to the project.
Good thing the leaders came in their private jets, because the creation, when adding its casets case, tips the scales at 49 kilos – more than 100 pounds.
Silvio Berlusconi's gift to the G8 leaders
The bad news for Canada is that Mr. Berlusconi’s gift ups the ante considerably. Canada is the host of the next G8 summit, in Muskoka, Ont. Whoever is prime minister at the time will have to think twice before sending the leaders away with a bottle of maple syrup.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:41 AM
Addax's founder has more cash for his passion
Jean Claude Gandur, the founder and CEO of Addax Petroleum, was already one of Europe’s richest men before today’s agreement to sell the company to China’s Sinopec. Now he is about $3-billion wealthier. Mr. Gandur and his private holding companies control about 38 per cent of Addax’s shares, which are going to Sinopec at $52.80 apiece. That’s 170 per cent more than the 2006 initial public offering price.
What will he do with his fortune? He might start another oil exploration and development company. He will certainly indulge his passion for antiquities.
Mr. Gandur owns one of the world’s finest collections of Egyptian, Hellenistic and Roman antiquities outside of museums. The Egyptian bronzes are said to be second to none. In an interview with The Globe and Mail a year and a half ago, he called antiquities his “passion” and only half joked that he wanted to sell Addax at a blockbuster price so he could buy more of them. “Money in the bank is no fun,” he said.
Mr. Gandur is a French-born Swiss citizen and the son of an Italian pediatrician who lives in a lakeside mansion outside of Geneva. He began his love affair with history and antiquities in Alexandria, Egypt, where he grew up. He speaks Arabic. The Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa have been intimate parts of his life since then and he knows where to find the best pieces from the best collections.
The pieces have been on display only once, in 2002, at a special exhibit at Geneva’s Musee d’art et d’histoire. The descriptions and photos of the hundreds of works were enough to fill a 160-page catalogue. An intensely private man, Gandur’s name was not associated with the exhibit. Today, the only way to see the collection is by way of personal invitation from the man himself.
The antiquities range from ivory figurines from about 4000 BC to a bronze Roman lamp decorated with a Medusa head from the second or third century AD. Among Gandur’s favourite pieces is 62-centimetre gold Egyptian funeral mask.
With a few extra billion in his pocket, Mr. Gandur can afford to compete with the world’s leading museums for the historic objects he covets. As a double bonus, the recession is reducing the asking prices. Gandur’s collection is about to become even more splendid.
Friday, June 19, 2009 12:36 PM
UN announces food summit
The food crisis hasn’t gone away. And in case you haven’t been paying attention, the United Nations has called a new food summit to remind you.
On Friday in Rome, the three UN food agencies said they have approved a food summit that will take place in November, precise date to be determined.
But didn’t we just have a food summit? Well, no, said Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
True, last year’s “High Level Conference on Food Security” attracted 43 heads of state and government, and was universally called a “food summit” by the media. But it wasn’t really a food summit because its alleged focus was on the threats of climate change and bio-energy to food security.
This one will be a real summit, the UN food chiefs promised.
You can’t blame the UN food agencies – FAO, World Food Program and International Fund for Agricultural Development – for wanting a little more attention. The planet is glutted with summits (I have covered three or four since February), most focused on the financial crisis and the recession and how to eliminate them. There have been G20 summits and G8 summits for heads of government and their finance and foreign ministers. The BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China – just had a summit in the Urals.
So why not a food summit?
The UN actually made a good case for one. While the world has been obsessed with auto bailouts, waning Porsche production and sacked bank chiefs, the number of undernourished people is climbing at an alarming rate. That’s because food prices remain stubbornly high, in spite of the fall of energy prices, and because the recession has made millions of people poorer and thus unable to afford the nourishment they need. The UN estimated that slightly more than one billion people, about one-sixth of the global population, will suffer from hunger this year. That’s up 11 per cent from last year.
Not only is the raw number of hungry people the highest in history, the rate of hunger (which measures the proportion of the global population that is afflicted) has reversed course. From 1969, when the Green Revolution began to kick in, to about the middle part of this decade, the hunger rate halved to about 17 per cent. Now the proportion is going up again, in spite of rising crop yields.
What is needed, said the UN food chiefs, is more agricultural investment, which has plummeted in recent years as aid agencies took the view that a food glut, not shortage, was the more serious threat.
Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the World Food Program, said she hopes that just a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars in stimulus spending and other recession-busting efforts will find its way into food development and social safety nets. “Without food, people have only three options,” she said. “They riot, they migrate or they die,” she said.
Mr. Diouf called the rising number of hungry people “the silent hunger crisis.” The risk is that a world growing weary of summits will fail to pay attention to the one he has called for November.
Monday, June 8, 2009 10:51 AM
Italian voters shrug off wannabe-scandal
If Italian voters disapproved of Silvio Berlusconi’s friendships with young showgirls and underwear models, it sure didn’t register in the polls.
In the European Parliament elections, which wound up Sunday night, the Italian prime minister’s centre-right Popolo della Liberta (PDL) party snagged about 35 per cent of the vote, well more than any other party. In second place was the centre-left Partito Democratico (PD), with just under 27 per cent. Given the PD’s efforts to turn Berlusconi’s apparent obsession with women between half and a quarter his age into a scandal, this represents a defeat for the Opposition.
Why did the Italians not care about Berlusconi’s desire to “frequent minors,” as his wife Veronica Lario charged a few weeks ago, when she announced she is seeking to divorce her husband? Lario made the statement after learning Berlusconi had attended the birthday party of aspiring, 18-year-old model named Noemi Letizia. She was also a guest at parties hosted by Berlusconi at his Sardinian villa, where an enterprising paparazzo with a long lens snapped several hundred interesting photos. Berlusconi screamed invasion of privacy and had prosecutors seize the photos. But five escaped and were published last week in the Spanish newspaper El Pais. Among them are pictures of topless women cavorting around the villa.
Italians shrugged off the wannabe-scandal because, it appears, frolicking with semi-clad women who are not your wife is no big deal; it’s accepted as a perk of political power. Indeed, the story was bigger outside of Italy than within (though Berlusconi’s foes would say that’s at least partly because Berlusconi, through ownership of the family’s Mediaset channels and his role as head of the government, essentially controls most of the Italian TV market).
Italians wanted to know why their prime minister was singled out for alleged bad behaviour -- Berlusconi denied having a sexual relationship with Letizia -- when it is so blatantly common elsewhere, and often ignored or played down by the local media. In a column called “Cherchez la femme,” journalist Pierluigi Battista noted that Francois Mitterrand’s secret second family, whose existence was known, but not reported, by the French press, didn’t slow down his career. Ditto the Kennedys’ infamous womanizing. And don’t forget Nicolas Sarkozy, who split from his wife so he could marry the former model Carla Bruni.
While Berlusconi has survived the Letizia and Sardinian party affairs, one little thing could come back to bite him. The Italian taxpayers’ association wants to know how all those lovely women got to Sardinia. The answer: In the prime minister’s official plane. Prosecutors are now investigating whether the flight was a possible misuse of public funds. Berlusconi, for his part, does not seem to be worried. He said the prime minister is free to take guests with him. The investigation, he said, will be “swiftly shelved.”
Monday, June 8, 2009 05:59 AM
Sowing the seeds of regret?
If July's Group of Eight summit in Italy is looking for an issue beyond the recession, offshore farms is it. Denounced by some as neocolonialism or land grabs, praised by others as delivering investment to poor countries, this form of food outsourcing is in sore need of an international code of conduct, all the more so since it is spreading rapidly and is bound to involve Canada at some point.
International farm investment, to use its blandest description, has become a phenomenon in recent years and new reports about its "risks and opportunities," to use an even blander United Nations description, are filling agricultural and rural-development watchdog websites.
The concept is simple. Countries short of productive agricultural land but rich in capital are acquiring farmland in countries, most of them poor, with land to spare, or allegedly so. In many cases, the food grown on the farms is effectively removed from the world market and exported back to the country that did the deal. Not surprisingly, China and OPEC's Middle East members, which have more oil than irrigation water, are the most prolific deal makers and Africa is their juiciest target.
A fresh report commissioned by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that 2.5 million hectares, an area almost the size of Belgium, has been acquired since 2004 in five African countries alone.
A recent report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington says between 15 million and 20 million hectares of farmland in poor countries has been snapped up by foreigners since 2006. The land, it says, is worth as much as $30-billion (U.S.). Offshore farms are a big, global business.
As far as anyone can tell, China pioneered the offshore farm game about 10 years ago, when it leased land for food production in Mexico and Cuba. The acquisition pace has quickened in recent years because of rising commodity prices, culminating in the "food crisis" of 2007 and 2008, when mass starvation seemed a real possibility.
While the oil price collapse and the record production of some crops have since downgraded the crisis, China, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, India, South Korea and other countries short of farmland are taking the long-term view. They have burgeoning populations, are short of water and realize food prices could resume their upward trajectory at any time. So they are preparing for the worst and snapping up land wherever they can find it.
There is no set formula for the acquisitions. Some are purchases, others leases. Some land is acquired by sovereign wealth funds, some by private investors, among them Morgan Stanley, which acquired a vast spread in Ukraine in March. Few of the deals are transparent; some are truly strange. Recently a former investment banker named Philippe Heilberg, now chairman of Jarch Capital, gained leasehold rights to some 400,000 hectares in Sudan by taking a majority stake in a firm controlled by a former warlord who fought on both sides of Sudan's civil war.
Increasingly, the land deals are coming under the scrutiny of the UN and watchdog groups such as Grain, the International Land Coalition and the IFPRI. That's because it is not obvious that they are win-win situations. An increasing number of land deals are facing local resistance. In Madagascar, Daewoo Logistic's effort to lease 1.3 million hectares - fully half of the arable land - to produce maize and palm oils contributed to the turmoil that overthrew the government earlier this year. The Daewoo deal was scrapped.
The UN and the watchdogs have valid concerns. The UN published a report in May called "Land Grab or Development Opportunity?" which had a lengthy list of concerns. It said some of the deals lack transparency, which "creates a breeding ground for corruption." Many countries lack the legal systems to protect local rights - farmers may get thrown off land they can't prove they own. Environmental issues, such as high water use of new crops planted by absentee owners, can often be ignored. The big question, of course, is: Where does the production go if the host country develops a food shortage? Sudan, bizarrely, has welcomed farmland seekers- the same country that relies on the UN's World Food Program to feed millions of its people.
To be sure, some deals can benefit both sides. If jobs are created, if better technology boosts yields, if roads and irrigation are built to help the entire local community and if some food is left on the local table, life can be pleasant. The problem is that it's hard to tell whether deals struck now are abusive or will benefit the host country as well as the investor. This is why oversight is needed, and why guidelines have to be drawn up.
To its credit, Japan, which is playing the farmland game too, has suggested the July G8 summit be used to draw up a code of conduct for foreign farmland deals. It would be in Canada's best interests to support such an initiative. Canada has vast amounts of arable land, ready equipped with water. The land is incredibly cheap by global standards. Foreign investors have tried to buy prairie farmland, but have been stopped by foreign ownership rules. But, in time, Canada may not be able to resist the demands from overseas investors. Best to have guidelines in place before the For Sale signs go up in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 04:41 PM
Italian sports cars outrace recession
The recession is putting the brakes on the auction values of classic American muscle cars, but hot-blooded Italian racing machines are still selling for outrageous prices.
Proof came when a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa sold for €9.02-million ($14.2-million) at the annual Ferrari auction next to the Ferrari factory in Maranello, in northern Italy, Sunday. The price was a world record for a car sold at an auction.
RM Auctions of Chatham, Ont., which conducted the auction in association with Sotheby's, said the black, open-top Testa Rossa with a red nose, one of 22 made, was bought by an anonymous buyer who bid by telephone.
A 10-per-cent buyer's commission was included in the price. "The price was within our estimated range, but at the low end," said Ian Kelleher, RM's president and chief operating officer. "Prices might be leveling off, but demand for great cars like this one has not subsided."
The Testa Rossa smashed a record set last year at the same event, when British radio personality Chris Evans, then 42, paid €7-million for the black convertible 1961 Ferrari 250 California Spyder once owned by James Coburn, the star of The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven.
The RM auction was not without its disappointments, however. The 1967 Ferrari 330 P4 racer, which was used by the Ferrari team in the Le Mans and Dayton 24-hour races that year, did not get the price wanted by the owner, Canadian businessman Lawrence Stroll, the co-founder of Tommy Hilfiger. The car was withdrawn from the auction when the bids topped out at €7.25-million.
RM said 27 of the 36 cars sold at the Maranello auction. The total value of the 27, plus the Ferrari memorabilia sold, was more than €21-million, the company said. The larger 2008 auction, in which 35 of 46 cars were sold, produced €28-million in sales.
Mr. Kelleher said prices for classic cars are holding up better in Europe than in North America. The auction values for classic American muscle cars such as Camaros, Mustangs and Corvettes have fallen by about a third since the recession started. The European cars such as Ferraris, Porsches and Jaguars seem to attract wealthier collectors. "The reality is that no one is safe from the recession," he said. "But I think the worst is over."
Reguly In Europe Contributors
Eric Reguly
Eric Reguly is The Globe's European business correspondent, based in Rome
