Pasta is now a common food, with some people liking its taste and some not. But what people never expected was that in the yellow sandy Sahara Desert, there were many vehicles shuttling back and forth, and the items on their cars were spaghetti.
It is no exaggeration to say that smuggling pasta in Africa is already a very lucrative business.
Historically, many parts of Africa were colonies of France, and the French colonized the food that brought pasta to Africa. At that time in Africa, the food that ordinary people ate all their lives was corn, but also corn, so they had a strong interest in the pasta that the French ate, and it has not decreased to this day. Eating pasta is seen as an elegant way of life, no less than drinking Starbucks in China.
This has led to the very expensive price of pasta in some african countries.
If you want to buy a 500-gram bag of pasta, you'll need $0.15 in Libya in North Africa and nearly $1 in West Africa. This has made many people think of smuggling.
Not long ago, Nigerian Customs detected a shipment of $550 million worth of smuggled goods, more than half of which were pasta, which alone contained 1963 containers. Nowadays, the customs of African countries have regarded pasta as an important inspection target. Since sea freight is not possible, some people have thought of a more absolute way, that is, to cross the Sahara Desert.
The Sahara is the largest desert in the world, with a depth of 1500 kilometers from north to south, and the harsh climatic conditions, making crossing it a great survival challenge, but it is not a problem for the peoples who live here. Many people have found the Tuareg nomads living in the Sahara Desert and asked them to guide them through the Sahara Desert. Today, this has become an important way to feed the nation, and many Tuaregs have even begun smuggling their own pasta.
Smugglers use specially made vehicles bought for $6,000, which can carry about 1,000 bags of pasta at a time, weighing about 600 kilograms, and smuggling from North Africa to West Africa can earn $1,300 at a time, which is already a very high income in Africa. With money, they would switch to bigger vehicles, even form convoys, smuggle more pasta, and it seemed that no matter how much pasta they reached West Africa, they would be able to eat it. More people will use 3-ton trucks to smuggle, and they can smuggle 5,000 bags at a time, making a profit equivalent to the income of ordinary Africans in half a year.
I didn't expect that the little pasta was so popular in Africa, so do you like pasta?