Vogue trader

IT sounds like a cross between a game show and Dragons’ Den.

Conor Woodman takes the £25,000 made from the sale of his flat and tries to double his money dealing in all kinds of products while travelling across four continents.

It’s certainly not an easy task, and puts to shame those suited and booted contestants who couldn’t even sell sandwiches for Alan Sugar, on The Apprentice the other week.

Woodman certainly knows a thing or two about economics, having studied the subject at university before spending ten years working in finance.

“Some of the brightest minds are there, but it limits your own self-expression and creativity,” he says of his former job.

“When I started working in the City, I didn’t believe in corporate culture, and that different firms would have their own identity. I thought ‘how can 20,000 people take on a single identity?’ But they do.

“It happens by making you work 80 hours a week, and eventually it chips away at your own self-expression. I didn’t really like that.”

So, he decided it was time for a change.

His eureka moment came when he was on the border of Tibet and saw some men loading up yaks.

“They took goods from Nepal and sold them in Tibet, and vice-versa,” he says.

“And I thought ‘that’s the real story’. It’s not the cow bells and the mountains, though, of course, that’s part of it.

“But it would be great to get in there, see if anyone can trade. And because I see the world as an economist, and in theory know how to make money, it all came together and made sense.”

He was lucky enough to sell his flat at the top of the market, and immediately changed his profit into US dollars when the exchange rate was strong. “When I realised I had all that money in the bank and a one-way ticket to Khartoum, that’s when it really hit me. That’s a pretty far out place to go to,” he says After a tricky beginning, things began to fall into place.

“The first break happened when we got to Zambia. I met a guy who invested his whole life turning a rundown coffee farm into a working coffee estate. But it takes up every minute of his day, and he had no time to do the selling. And that was the first time that I thought, ‘here’s an opportunity’.

“I was blazing trails for people. I was taking risks for people and I could give them the contacts that I made. So people gave me really good prices because of the opportunity for future trade.”

Now he’s in China, where he picks up a newly-carved piece of jade. It’s cost him a whopping £5,000, but he’s sure wealthy collectors in Taiwan will be falling over themselves to give him twice as much for it. But is he right to hold out for a top price once the bids start coming in?

Unfortunately, his next task, selling Taiwanese tea to the Japanese, doesn’t go well, thanks to some red tape. But that’s a walk in the park compared to catching and then selling fish at market.

WHO Killed The Honey Bee? is the question posed in the BBC4 documentary, fronted by Martha Kearney. Well, who indeed? One thing’s for sure – there aren’t as many honey bees buzzing about as there used to be.

Who or what’s to blame? Could it be global warming or perhaps the bees have moved to pastures new. According to this documentary, the bee population has been decimated by a mysterious affliction known as colony collapse disorder, which sounds rather painful.

There’s a serious issue here: what will happen to nature and the world’s food supply if bees are no longer around to pollinate plants? Now, that’s a very scary thought indeed.