4/10/83

Tuesday morning and I'm a vegetable. We had Jim Rutherford over for a “farewell” dinner last night. That guy is a riot. Witty, intelligent yet sensitive. I guess we are always attracted to people we think are like us. I like him. wish Deb & I had met him sooner. We hope to visit him (if/when) we go to England. the more people we meet here, the more we want to visit them in Europe should we go. And greater’s the reason for going. The really amazing thing is that we could be COS’ing in a little more than a year if we went early. That becomes a new carrot at the end of the stick. It would also be nice to travel to Europe in the fall. But, of course, of course, it's much too early to even guess what next fall will be like (but it's always nice… to dream).

Job situation is slowly becoming more convoluted and ambiguous rather than more clearly defined. But that's often what happens here. You get just the opposite of what you expected. My talk with Liz & Jethro raised more questions than it answered. Now it seems Jethro thinks I should be with the Marketing Corp rather than Trade and Ag. I see his point but what I need is action not indecision. I'm still not sure what he wants. He's looking more to demand-side information generation and hoping that supply can be developed on a selective basis. I agree. But the mechanisms for pulling all this together is where the problems arise. I guess I will have a counterpart, who needs training, but my question is why and in what manner? Why isn't he contacting external market info suppliers already?  A phone, a typewriter and some addresses & phone numbers is about all you need to start. ORD or Ministry of T&A would develop the contacts and contracts with local reliable farmers and the job is done. Slowly more extensive local Market info could be generated and linked up to the farmers so that gluts and shortages on the local market could be evened out. But that would take time and could be long-term. In the short run, marketing links could be generated by phone calls and letters. Why that hasn't been done as yet, I don't know.