Russia is fabulously rich! It is selling its gas, oil and coal and other minerals to its neighbours at a profit. With the profits Russians receive, they design and manufacture engineering goods which they also export to other nations. Under President Putin, Russia has contained inflation and now people work for real wages. Income exceeds expenditure, corruption is defeated and the Russian people are slowly gaining real prosperity. It is a textbook example of economic success!
But there is a serious problem – Russia is cold and dark for much of the year and the people yearn for the Sun, sunlight and bright colours to cheer up their lives! Russians thirst to escape their bleak environment where night time temperatures often fall to minus 50 degrees centigrade in winter. With snow on the ground for four-months of the year and with deep cold, the Russian people struggle along, year after year in difficult circumstances.
As a contrast, Sri Lanka is warm and can grow all kinds of tropical fruits, flowers – orchids, and even timber for making fancy goods, all of which are of great interest for the Russians sealed up in their apartments in winter.
Russia and Sri Lanka are opposites in many aspects: size, temperature, wealth of natural resources, geography. Therefore, Russia provides Sri Lanka with a great opportunity to export tropical fruits and other tropical resources. With modern day air transport, this demand, backed by Russian Rubles, can be easily met.
Also, Russians consider it to be unlucky to give flowers when visiting each other’s houses, but they love to receive chocolates! Here is an opportunity for Sri Lankans to export chocolate gifts of many sorts. There are trade opportunities galore in Russia! But instead of visiting Russia on business, our top ministers prefer to visit the Olympics!
In the longer term, President Putin has ideas of building his own rail access to the warm south, through Iran and down to India and, perhaps even Sri Lanka. In Russia, he is building railways for trains that can travel at 250 km an hour across the Siberian flatlands. He wants to use these trains to open up a north-south transport corridor down to south Asia to get access to this source of attractive imports. But, businessmen, why wait for him? Air freight is available almost immediately!
P.H. August 8th. 2021