Russia To Accept Mandarins Instead of Money Amid Payment Difficulties – The Moscow Times

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/10/02/russia-to-accept-mandarins-instead-of-money-amid-payment-difficulties-a86543

12 Comments

  1. Summary:

    Russian companies have established a barter trade system with Pakistan to bypass challenges posed by Western sanctions on Moscow, enabling economic exchanges without monetary transactions. The deal, signed at the Pakistan-Russia Trade and Investment Forum in Moscow, allows Russia’s Astarta-Agrotrading to supply chickpeas and lentils to Pakistan, while Pakistan’s Meskay + Femtee Trading will send mandarins and rice in return. One contract involves 20,000 tons of chickpeas for an equivalent amount of rice, while another includes an exchange of 15,000 tons of chickpeas and 10,000 tons of lentils for mandarins and potatoes. The barter system was developed due to payment difficulties amid sanctions, offering a way to trade without attracting attention from monitoring organizations.

    Barter trade between Russia and other countries, including China, has been explored previously as an alternative to conventional payments. Though discussions with China about resuming barter trade in metals and agricultural products have been slow, Russia and China are also working on a BRICS Bridge payment system, expected to be operational by 2028.

  2. The workers are gonna be happy about their new salary, 15 kilos of mandarins. They surely can pay their rent with those same mandarins before they start turning brown? *

    Sounds like super-smart Putin has this whole economy thing all figured out!

    *Yes, i’m joking. The workers will be paid with worthless rubbles that are worth less then toilet paper. Which russia has to import from abroad and pay for with the mandarins…

  3. I hate to say this, I really do … but, this can actually scale. Not nicely, and with significant inefficiencies, but it can.

    After Roman coins became worthless, Diocletian stopped accepting them as payment for taxes. Just let that sink in. He created one of histories first CPIs, enormous interlinked tables of what different things were worth in terms of other things. It was messy, but it was scaled up to the Roman Empire size scale, and for a while it worked. This was without modern computers and communications networks. It wouldn’t be pretty, and how profit incentives and share-holder returns figure into something like that I have not the first idea … but weirder shit has happened.