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Letters | World can live without more Western tech, but not without Russian fish and oil

  • Readers discuss the impact of Western sanctions on the West, how wasteful travel restrictions are, a commonsensical way to raise the elderly vaccination rate, and why it’s pointless to promote Hong Kong tourism

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A shop owner batters fish for frying in Brighton on March 25. Britain’s fish and chip shops are running low on white fish after cutting off supplies from Russia. Photo: AFP
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In 1990, on learning that I was going to travel to England, my father told me that I would be reminded there of the very first sentence in Das Kapital by Karl Marx: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’”.

So I was, particularly on noticing how global that country’s economy had become since the publication of the book in 1867. I remember thinking that the only purely local product was its famous fish and chips. I may have been right then, but the economic reforms in Russia have since resulted in the UK increasingly importing cheaper Russian fish and vegetable oil.
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Your editorial (“Sentiment stirred by war needs to give way to a rational approach”, April 10) sums up how that “immense accumulation of commodities” was influenced by a wave of anti-Russian sanctions this year. Indeed, a Moscow TV correspondent in London found that, with supplies from our country being abruptly severed, that emblematic British meal was on the brink of disappearing.

The fact is that a hi-tech product is more expendable than a low-tech one: I can recall being in an almost empty computer shop here in Moscow after an earthquake in Taiwan led to a hike in computer prices, but I can’t imagine the same fall in demand for our oil, gas, grain, etc. That makes Russia less vulnerable than the West. After all, the English expression goes “bring home the bacon” and not iPhones, Androids, BMWs, Boeings and what have you.

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Mergen Mongush, Moscow

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