Taming, harnessing and exploiting the environment. The case of Norway

I was in Norway as I earlier posted, this world is not short of interesting things to see and learn from. I came to learn that china is the biggest exporter of sea food in the world and Norway is the second largest exporter. Today china is the world’s biggest producer of everything. China has been able to take leadership in everything except of course financial markets and innovation where the US still beats china and will do so for some time. For a five million people country to compare with an over 1 billion population country, it means that the Norwegians are exporting a lot of sea food and how many people are in this industry, I was told about 10,000 Norwegians. If you think a lot about this, you will understand how much wealth the 5 million people in Norway are creating. It takes me back to what the Norwegians are doing and we do not do. The night I left Norway, the temperature was about -20 degrees and during the day it was about -3 degrees centigrade. This is their country, they can’t trade it for anything else. They live there and they will continue to live there. What they have done beautifully is tame the environment. I was told that in there are people who live somewhere in the North of Norway, there job is to herd reindeers. And there temperature goes to -46 and are quite happy to live there. My host narrated to me the Norway of 1000 years old and I was impressed. That Norway is not a young country but has been growing though in a controlled manner.  Norwegians do not regret being Norwegians. They actually love it but there work culture has enabled them take control of the hostile environment that they are in. It is interesting to learn that some of the roads are heated during the winter. Interesting to learn that the difference between the professor and the lowest person to be paid in Norway may not be more than 100%.  What is interesting that they have a strong work culture and generate enough production to feed themselves and also give away some to the poor countries. I was in Norway submitting a proposal to NORHED for finding, our proposal was one of the 80 or so proposals from universities that were seeking the generous funds from the Norwegian governments. Besides education, they fund many other things. As a country they are committed to supporting development worldwide. Back to the hostile environment, most of Norway is full of snow for about 6 months of the year that means there is nothing that you can produce out in the fields. But that aside they are able to harness that hostile environment and make money out of it. Norway exports electricity to Europe. They harness the hostile environment to be able to make money out of it. They exploit the opportunity that other people need electricity and they are able to supply it. Looking back at Uganda and indeed many developing countries, the reason why we are poor is because we are unable to produce something to sell especially in the export market. There is a theory that because we live in an easy environment we therefore do not work because it’s easy to live even without working. I do not buy this argument, yes we do not work but it’s not about our work environment. It is something else which we must think about and be able to put a stop to. What is true is that the 5 million Norwegians produce in hundreds of times what the 30 million Ugandans produce. Norway is wealthy, Uganda is poor. To be able to get out of this situation, we must increase our production and our productivity, which is the challenge on our house.