Judith Enright on fri 28 aug 98
Our local paper reported that terrorist financier Osama bin Laden has a key
investment in the Sudan firm that controls the world's supply of gum arabic.
The Khartoum-based Gum Arabic Company Ltd. purportedly has a monopoly on the
gum's extraction and export. (About 80 percent of the world's gum arabic comes
from the sap of the Sudanese acacia tree; Nigeria and Chad produce the remaining
20 percent, but their gum arabic industries are considered relatively
unsophisticated with little capacity for quick growth.)
The Gum Arabic Company denies that bin Laden has any connection; terrorist
experts are quick to point out, however, that bin Laden could easily profit from
a distance, without the knowledge of the gum company itself.
When the trade ban against Sudan was enacted in 1997, companies like Coca-Cola,
Bristol-Myers Squibb, Procter & Gamble and most major newspaper companies
lobbied Congress to exempt gum arabic because their products would be crippled
without it (products like Coca-Cola, pharmaceuticals, candies, printing, etc.).
So Congress created a special exemption for gum arabic. The exemption is now
coming up for renewal.
Just thought I'd pass this all along, since potters, too, are users of gum
arabic, albeit in relatively tinier quantities.
Judith Enright @ Black Leopard Clayware
This email may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of
Marvin S. Flowerman on sat 29 aug 98
You might like to know that the first information on this subject had a gross
error.
The company that bin Laden was supposed to be involved with was the gum Arabic
Exporting Company, set up to compete with the Gum Arabic Company which had and
still has the exclusive rights to export sudanese Gum Arabic. It is easy to
see how the two names could be confused by unsuspecting reporters and also
easy to see why that name was chosen by that group. Incidentally, their
efforts to dislodge the Gum Arabic Co.'s export monopoly failed.
The U. S. State Department has since acknowledged the error, CNN was to have
aired an interview with the US representative of the Gum Arabic Company but
during the last four evenings this interview was not aired, pre-empted no
doubt by more pressing things like the stock markets of the world, the Russian
problem and such.
There is plenty of gum arabic in the US; shipments from the Sudan are still
coming, sanctioned by the US State Department, and Gum Arabic from other
African Sahara belt countries is also arriving (Chad, Senegal, for example).
So, potters using gum arabic need not worry; it is a pity that news media are
quick to pick up on "dramatic" stories like the one we are talking about, but
slow to correct mis-statements.
Good luck.
Marvin Flowerman (been in the Gum Arabic business for many many years.)
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