Cartel control

A black market developed for the yellow element to make black powder. Until then, sulfur had been only a curiosity to the esoteric alchemists. The Church set out to limit the spread of the WMD by keeping sulfur and the other gunpowder ingredients out of the hands of the infidels. In 1527, Pope Clement VII (1478 -1534) issued a papal bull excommunicating those who traded sulfur to Saracens, Turks and other enemies of the Christian name. Similar decrees were issued by Pope Paul III (1468 - 1549) and Pope Urban VIII (1568 - 1644). These Papal documents are the earliest, but not the last, examples of cartel control over the international trade of sulfur. 

The availability of a resource depends on the degree to which it is localised in one or a few countries (making it susceptible to production controls or cartel action) on the size of the reserves, or, more accurately, the resource base (explained shortly) and on the energy required to mine and process it. The influence of the last two (size of reserves and energy content) can, within limits, be studied and their influence anticipated. 

In the 1930s Adolph Hitler combined these companies into a cartel called 1 G Farben (Farben means colors) that rapidly dominated prewar chemical production and then produced Germany s chemicals, munitions, and synthetic fuels during World War 11. After the War, in an effort to control the power of this conglomerate, the Allies spht 1 G Farben into three separate companies BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst, which specialized in commodity chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and fine chemicals, respectively. These companies have continued to grow since the war so that now the three of them are the top three chemical companies in the world. 

Fig. 1. Concentration of dissolved silica as a function of time for suspensions of silicate minerals in sea water. Curves are for I g (<62 u) mineral samples in silica-deficient (S1O2 in water was initially 0.03 ppm) and silica-enriched (Sit) was initially 25 ppm) sea water at room temperature. Notice that the minerals react rapidly and that the dissolved silica concentration for individual minerals becomes nearly constant at values within 01 close to the range of silica concentration in the oceans (from Mackenzie. F. T., Cartels. R. M., Bricker, O P, and Bickley, F., Silica in sea water Control by silica minerals Science, 155. 1404 (1967)).

Crude oil prices have been pushed by healthy demand led by China, which has outstripped new supply. Political concerns about the stability of the Middle East have combined with this tight supply-demand balance to enable the OPEC cartel to keep control of world oil pricing at a higher level than forecasted as recently as 2002. While a full examination of crude market prospects is beyond the scope of this chapter, the long-term outlook is for OPEC to continue to hold crude oil prices above USD 30/bbl due to the revenue needs of major OPEC member countries. At the same time, the expectation is for oil prices to continue to exhibit considerable volatility around that price. 

There are two points of special relevance for diamonds to the international heroin traffic. The first is that, in value relative to size and weight, diamonds are the closest approximation to heroin as a store of value for furtive use. Secondly, the De Beers-controlled international diamond cartel operates according to a pyramidal structure identical to that of the world heroin trade. 

This gunman from the Medellin cartel poses in Colombia in 2000. By maintaining tight control over the export of cocaine to countries like the United States, Columbian cartels dictated the supply and pricing, and reaped huge profits, from the cocaine business. 

If international air travel is to continue to flourish and expand as projected in the face of definite prospects that some countries may be unable to obtain adequate supplies of petroleum at all times, it becomes mandatory either that all nations agree to share their petroleum fuel supplies or that they adopt an alternate fuel that can be commonly produced without hazard of control by a cartel. 

We face three major problems as a consequence of our dependence on fossil fuels for energy. First, fossil fuels are a nonrenewable resource and the world s supply is continually decreasing. Second, a group of Middle Eastern and South American countries controls a large portion of the world s supply of petroleum. These countries have formed a cartel known as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries OPEC), which controls both the supply and the price of crude oil. Political instability in any OPEC country can seriously affect the world oil supply. Third, burning fossil fuels increases the concentrations of CO2 and SO2 in the atmosphere. Scientists have established experimentally that... 

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