Posted on 09/12/2013 1:39:29 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The struggling nation of Somaliland is betting these beasts of burden will be on the menu far and wide.
From early in the morning until midday, the streets of southern Hargeisa, Somaliland periodically shut down as hundreds of camels trundle along the narrow city streets. Taxi drivers give way, milling on the side of the road, wiping their cars clean of the dust and mud kicked up by the procession. Ultimately, the beasts file through the gates of the Hargeisa Camel Market.
No one really runs the market. It’s just one of dozens of sites across the country where nomads, locals, and traders converge daily to buy and sell thousands of live animals, some for the neighborhood butcher’s block, others for export. And to most folks in Hargeisa, it’s just a fact of life—a reflection that, despite the boom in the city’s population and the development of modern, multistory office buildings, Somaliland is still a largely pastoral economy.
But downtown, in the knot of government offices near the presidential palace, the ministers are eyeing this market with new ambitions. They have analyzed the country’s resources, crunched the numbers, and decided that these nomads may offer the safest and quickest passage for taking this fragile economy from relative poverty to a more thorough modernity.
Actually, it’s not as if Somaliland has many options. A self-declared but officially unrecognized nation, Somaliland is a little smaller than Idaho, with twice the population, but less than 5 percent of the annual budget. The de facto nation is rich in natural resources beyond livestock, but its infrastructure—potholed roads and no central electrical grid or water system to speak of—can’t get the goods to market. If that doesn’t deter intrepid investors, the place’s legacy of violence and piracy probably does.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
And I’ll bet here is a bodacious barbecue afterwards.
Left in the Middle East with their Muslim lovers.
Camel. Other white meat.
We have such a large feral camel population in Australia that there are a couple of large abattoirs that slaughter them and send the meat to Arab countries. Supposedly camels have to be thoroughly disinfected or they carry salmonella on their skin and it can infect the meat in the butchering process if they are not cleaned immediately before slaughter. My sister-in-law was a quality inspector in one of these joints.I cannot imagine I would trust a M.E. slaughterhouse to do the job properly. All Halal of course!
Irradiated.
The GEICO camel is upset....and BTW..check out this hilarious remix of the GEICO hump day commercial..
I prefer the camel toe myself.
Nuked
Northern Somaliland is a whole different story than Somalia land of pirates & ungrateful immigrants.
N.S. has relative law & order, a stable currency, & is attracting foreign investment. And apparently enough of a business elite to consider turning nomadic trade into a national export.
If camel meat brings foreign exchange, more power to them.
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