Few days back, while googling EMU (Euopean monetary union), I came across a bird called emu – articles after articles claiming how this wonder bird is making poor farmers rich overnight. Eureka! No need to worry about the real EMU, just open an Emu farm and become a millionair, I said to myself, and started googling “emu bird” instead of EMU. Here is the story that I found.
There was once a farmer who had few exotic autralian birds-Emus. Its eggs were beautiful and sought after by artisans from all over country. Since they were in extremely short supply they sold for a fortune. So, he thought, why not make others rich too. He explained to his closest friend, “ Each pair of Emu gives 25 eggs every year and each egg sells for 1000 Rs. I will give you a pair only for 25000 and you can earn your entire investment in a single year. From next year onward every year you will earn 25,000 almost for free.” His friend was impressed and buys a pair. Lo and behold! a ponzi scheme has just been born. Why? Lets see what happens next.
The new owner is suddenly rich selling those eggs. This catches attention. Suddenly there is great demand for these birds and their price soars. This also reduces supply of eggs further because everyone wants to hatch the eggs and earn him 25 grand instead of selling the egg itself. So the price of eggs goes up further. This creates a chain reaction. Birds are in demand because eggs are in demand and eggs are in demand because birds are in demand! This attracts more people to buy these birds sustaining the demand. Of course, all owners get rich and soon media is all gaga over how smart farmers are transforming their life by farming Emu. This leads to explosion- from few farms, number of farms jumps to 1400 in a year.
Unfortunately, like all pyramids, farmers soon start to feel lack of new “suckers”. This reduces demand for birds. So, farmers start selling eggs without waiting for them to hatch. Egg’s prices crash too. So much so that last batch of farmers don’t even have money to feed the birds. They remember that even skin, meat and oil of these birds are valuable. Unfortunately, they don’t have equipments to slaughter and process these birds. Finally, when they manage to process it, they find that scarcity of these “valuable items” is gone and so is demand!
That is how it ends.
However much I sympathize with these poor farmers, rational thinking prints a bad picture. People just don’t change their age-old eating habbits easily. Also, “medicianal property” of Emu oil is all folklore if FDA is to be believed.
Still hoping for the best, I go back to google God to find out how emu farms are doing in their native place. I hear same ponzi scheme was played on Australian farmers few years back. In fact, according to a massive survey by Australian government, ALL of the surveyed Emu farms lost money the previous year.
How I wish our farmers had access to google.
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