Al-Shamali, Al-Mazidi and Swiss made watches
Businessmen Adel Al-Shamali and Tariq Al-Mazidi ventured into a pioneering project. Many hesitated to contribute to it, but they proved that persistence creates success and highlights energies.
The “Green Life” project began about a year ago, and is considered the first in smart aerobic cultivation in
Kuwait. Its production started recently, and it aims to provide highquality vegetables using Swiss aerobic technology.
The project aims to reduce dependence on imports, avoid the disadvantages of air, sea and land transport, and the resulting carbon emissions, reduce irrigation water consumption by 97%, not use any pesticides in agriculture, and provide fresh vegetables throughout the year, and this type of agriculture only needs a very small number of workers.
On this occasion, and based on the interest of the Swiss embassy in this new technology, the distinguished Swiss ambassador, H.E. Dr. Tiziano Balmelli, invited those interested and a group of businessmen and diplomats to watch a presentation showing how this distinguished project works, which we hope for, and for similar projects, whether horizontal or vertical farming, success for many reasons, health, environmental and security.
In almost the same context, the Swiss embassy, on the day before the presentation of the “Green Life” project, hosted us to listen to senior Swiss bankers, and to meet a Swiss “watchmaker”, which the world has known for decades, in the Swiss city of Geneva, to the exclusion of other cities in Europe or the world.
The Germans are seen as the first to make pocket watches. In the same period, large numbers of Protestant Huguenot followers left France to various tolerant countries of the world, to escape persecution by the French Catholics, at the end of the 17th century.
Their emigration left a void, as they were people with high technical expertise, scientific and financial wealth, and those of them who went to Geneva contributed to transforming the city into a cradle of high-quality and valuable watch-making.
It took nearly 300 years for the watch industry to develop in Switzerland, and with the end of the 19th century, America began producing pocket watches, and it threatened Switzerland’s position, before American hegemony stopped at the beginning of the 20th century with the conversion of its watch factories into weapons factories for the First World War, during which the Swiss started producing high-tech watches at a reasonable price, so brands such as Longines, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron Constantin appeared, and Americans became the largest buyers.
In the 1970s, the Japanese developed the quartz watch technology, the cheapest and most accurate, and completely controlled the watch market. 60,000 Swiss watch workers lost their jobs in less than a decade, before the Swiss-Lebanese Nicholas Hayek came to the rescue of the Swiss watch industry in the 1980s, through his design for the Swatch watch, a quartz watch in which the Swiss beat the Japanese, to return to dominate the arena, and then to become the masters of luxury in the world of watches.
China has also recently entered the world of watch-making, but they still have a long way to go before ousting the Swiss.
❑ ❑ ❑