Word: phils
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Tunisian farmer Afif Elphil was in the south of the country scouting a new crop of watermelons one morning when a call arrived from the Port of Tunis. El Phil, the young chief of the Jinene Agro farming business, figured the customs agent was calling to report a problem with his latest load of peaches, bound for Marseilles in a refrigerated truck aboard a cargo ship. But the paperwork and produce were all in order. The problem, the customs officer explained, was that an electronic scanner had detected something moving inside - the farm's two night watchmen, stowed away among...
Trade across the Mediterranean Sea has gone on from time immemorial, well before the Phoenicians grew rich on the Greeks' passion for purple dye. But El Phil's anecdote sums up the current dilemma faced by this ancient cradle of commerce. Today an enormous economic gap separates the northern and southern shores of the Med. Too often it is bridged by the illicit and perilous transit of desperate human beings, instead of by the sanctioned flow of commerce...
That's hardly news to El Phil, as he stands between two long rows of peach trees on his Grombalia farm, 22 miles (35 km) south of Tunis. Just four years after starting to export to Europe, Jinene Agro now gains half its profits from foreign sales. Tunisia's sunny latitude allows El Phil to ship fresh peaches and plums during the weeks from mid-March to mid-April when there's space on supermarket shelves throughout Europe. "We harvest after the end of production in Chile and South Africa, and before Europe begins," he says. "We exploit that...
...success of El Phil's enterprise should not obscure how much remains to be done. Pierre Beckouche, a senior researcher with IPEMED, a Paris-based think tank on Mediterranean issues, says that regional economic advantages have been well exploited elsewhere over the past decade: by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in North America and the ASEAN free-trade area in Southeast Asia. But the E.U.'s 1995 "Barcelona Process," which was meant to encourage deeper ties across the Mediterranean, has largely been a Brussels-driven dud. "What's missing is a network of firms, of experts, of political...
...Stuart Smalley, Pat, Mary Katherine Gallagher and the Roxbury guys went, not always justifying their films' running time. Leaving SNL for movies means you can't go back, which deprives the show of some brilliant sketch talent - Dan Aykroyd, Joe Piscopo, Martin Short, Molly Shannon, Dinitra Vance, the irreplaceable Phil Hartman - and consigns those actors to movies and TV shows that don't show them off to their best advantage...