Chatting to Ash on the phone yesterday, we’ve decided to go ahead and do some research into importing and selling palm-leaf baskets on behalf of Educate for Life and the women who make them. Ash reckoned that they could be really popular, as do I but I didn’t manage to say as the phone cut off. I’ve been coveting one since I first got to Bakhel two years ago and saw Buriya’s wife making one but I didn’t want to ask, so I was very happy last week when they offered me one.

My little research I’ve done thus far suggests that import duty is a percentage of the purchase price. In this case it is about 25p per basket, so the tax will be minimal and then we have only the shipping to worry about. One potential problem is that if you are sharing the profits of sold products with the original seller or reseller, you have to pay import duty on that too. We’d be giving part of the profit back to the women. It’s a sensible law as far as tax cronies go, but not great for us considering that extra money is taxing the women and Hunar Ghar. I’ll phone customs when I get back to the UK and see if there are exemptions for situations such as ours, or if that fails I think we should be able to re-jiggle Educate for Life as a non-profit company, so we can purchase at only 25p to keep tax down, but we could pay the women extra through a different scheme in the charity.

If, reader, you know anything about this, please get in touch.

Update: It seems that the baskets come under import commodity code 4602199110, with 3.7% duty to pay and 15% VAT, which comes to a staggering 4.68p per basket. Even better though (although I need to confirm that this applies to trade imports as well as private), VAT isn’t payable if the consignment value is less that £105. In that case we can ship 419 baskets at a time and pay only £3.87 duty on the whole lot.