The vaping company Juul is under intense pressure from regulators and politicians. It’s spending more on lobbying, public relations and grassroots campaigns to stir up opposition to new vaping laws.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The vaping company Juul Labs finds itself under siege by politicians, regulators and doctors. It’s happening amid reports that a dozen people have died after using vaping products, and hundreds of others have become ill from products related to vaping. As efforts to regulate the industry have increased, Juul has poured millions of dollars into lobbying and public relations campaigns. NPR’s Jim Zarroli has this report.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: Juul was founded four years ago, promising it could help smokers quit. And it quickly became a vaping powerhouse. At first, the company faced hardly any regulation, and it had to spend very little money on lobbying – just $120,000 in 2017. But as efforts to regulate vaping have intensified, Juul has ramped up its lobbying. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics says the company spent nearly $2 million in the first six months of this year alone.

SHEILA KRUMHOLZ: As a new company, it’s striking how much they’re spending in just a very short period of time.

ZARROLI: Among tobacco companies, only Philip Morris and Altria spend more on lobbying. Meredith McGehee, executive director of the campaign finance reform group Issue One, says the money helps Juul get in the door to speak to regulators and lawmakers.

MEREDITH MCGEHEE: They’re out there trying to convince people that Juul is a good alternative to smoking, and they want to be able to go in, get in front of policymakers and make that case.

ZARROLI: And that’s just what Juul spends at the federal level. As the tobacco executives who now run Juul know all too well, many anti-tobacco laws have originated in cities and states, and Juul has hired dozens of lobbyists in statehouses and city halls across the country. Denise Roth Barber directs the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

DENISE ROTH BARBER: They spend copious amounts of money lobbying the lawmakers who get elected. And that’s where the rubber really hits the road, and they are swarming the capitals in a way that regular citizens are not.

ZARROLI: And this doesn’t include expenditures the company doesn’t have to disclose, like the money paid to public relations firms or to independent groups that may support its agenda. For example, Juul’s website contains links to the Switch network. It helps members of the public find a pro-vaping rally to attend or write a letter to their members of Congress. Stanford’s Robert Jackler researches the impact of tobacco advertising.

ROBERT JACKLER: It sounds as though it’s an upswelling of the population, but it’s actually driven by the company to simulate it, make it look like it’s something that came from the grassroots amongst the voters.

ZARROLI: But it’s not clear how well any of this will work. Although it’s not known what exactly is causing the lung illnesses, Jackler says concerns about vaping are growing.

JACKLER: This recent rash of acute and very serious and sometimes lethal e-cigarette-related illnesses in the lung have very much focused and changed the national dialogue.

ZARROLI: As criticism has mounted, Juul has agreed to stop advertising in the United States and has fired its CEO. It’s also promised not to lobby against a proposed Trump administration ban on flavored vaping products. But the company is still hoping to push back against other proposed anti-vaping regulations, and that seems to be getting harder to do as time goes on.

Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.

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Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Calling yourself a tech company doesn’t work like catnip on investors anymore. Startups riding the tech boom are facing skepticism as they move to sell shares to the public.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

WeWork is putting off its initial public offering, meaning it will not be selling shares of its stock to the public anytime soon. The company leases office space and then rents that space out to other businesses. Not too long ago, it was seen as full of promise. But as NPR’s Jim Zarroli reports, investors are rethinking their love of new, high-growth companies with slim chances of making a profit anytime soon.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: WeWork has always had a definite Silicon Valley vibe. Its charismatic co-founder Adam Neumann favors black T-shirts with frayed collars. And when he speaks about the company’s business, leasing workspace to young entrepreneurs and mature businesses, he has a casually messianic zeal. Here he is in 2017 at a conference.

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ADAM NEUMANN: Being surrounded by a group of like-minded individuals, being part of something bigger than yourself inspires people to work harder, spend more time at work and just have fun doing it.

ZARROLI: When WeWork announced its initial public offering, it generated lots of excitement. Then investors began looking at its books, and they didn’t like what they saw. Not only was WeWork burning through billions – much more than anyone thought – but its corporate structure and Neumann’s leadership were fraught with problems.

Lise Buyer is founder of Class V Group, which advises companies about IPOs.

LISE BUYER: The terms were so egregious. The governance was an embarrassment. And it took magic – it took a leap of faith greater than the Grand Canyon to see how that business could be profitable anytime soon.

ZARROLI: Last week, Neumann was ousted as CEO. And today, the company said it was shelving its IPO.

IPOs are supposed to be a way for new companies to raise a lot of money in the stock market. But lately, some high-profile offerings have become duds. The Hollywood power player Endeavor Group also scrapped its IPO last week. Companies such as ride-hailing giant Uber and Peloton, which streams exercise classes, started with a lot of buzz. But almost right away, their stock price fell victim to gravity.

Lise Buyer says investors have become much more skeptical about young companies that aren’t turning a profit and don’t know when they will.

BUYER: Investors are less willing to believe in the smoke and mirrors and, trust us; someday this will happen. And they want to understand what needs to happen between today and Day X.

ZARROLI: This shift in sentiment calls to mind the dot-com boom of 20 years ago, when investors threw all kinds of money at young startups, only to lose their shirts when the market crashed. The IPO market is nowhere near that bad today.

Renaissance Capital has an IPO investment fund, and it’s still up for the year, but it’s fallen 12% since the end of July. Renaissance co-founder Kathleen Smith says the mood on Wall Street has definitely changed.

KATHLEEN SMITH: Investors basically said, no more. And I would characterize it as an IPO buyers strike or a boycott of IPOs that look like the ones that have been failures so far.

ZARROLI: Smith says this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Investors are getting more realistic. She says, eventually, the IPO market will rebound, but it will take a while.

SMITH: We anticipate that the IPO market will be pretty much virtually shut down for the next couple months.

ZARROLI: As for WeWork, the company says it plans to do another IPO later, though it’s not saying when. That means it’s not going to get the huge infusion of cash that it was hoping for anytime soon. And The Wall Street Journal reported today that it will have to compensate by laying off thousands of employees and selling off Neumann’s $60 million corporate jet.

Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.

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Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Washington Post‘s Lisa Bonos about Facebook’s new dating app.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Yesterday, we talked about how Facebook has decided to monitor political speech. The answer – very little, if at all. Today, we want to tell you about an area where Facebook is boldly going forward – dating. Facebook recently launched this new feature in the U.S. after testing it overseas. We wanted to know how people should feel about trusting Facebook in this particularly sensitive area since the company has long been under scrutiny for the way it handles users’ data, so we’ve called Lisa Bonos. She writes about dating and relationships for the Washington Post.

Lisa, nice to have you back on the program.

LISA BONOS: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: So, first of all, tell us a little bit about how Facebook dating works. And how is it different from the apps people might already know like Tinder or Bumble or Grindr? I take it there’s no swiping, but please tell me that Facebook doesn’t stroll down your contacts like your nosy relatives at a wedding and announce to everybody you’re single, you’re dating, you’re looking.

BONOS: (Laughter) No. You do have to opt into Facebook dating and create a separate profile. And you won’t be swiping left or right, yes or no on people. But it does work pretty similarly to other dating apps that are out there.

MARTIN: Does somebody have to match you in order for you to send that person a message…

BONOS: No, most…

MARTIN: …Or something like that?

BONOS: Yeah. Most dating apps do require both people to say yes, I like this person before you can exchange messages. But Facebook dating seems to not require that. You can like their photos and send a message.

MARTIN: So in a way, basically narrows your – it creates another Facebook universe for you. I mean, it basically says that these are the friends who are single and who are looking.

BONOS: Yes, but it actually doesn’t show you existing Facebook friends as potential dates. There’s a special feature called Secret Crush where you can put in names of people you are currently friends with, and if they also put your name on this list, you – it will tell you you have a match.

MARTIN: Wait. Wait. So you said – well, you wrote about this. You said, it appears to be hatched by your middle school nemesis who still acts like they’re 13. So please tell me, do they – they don’t have, like, a do you like me? Yes or no. Does it really do that?

BONOS: That’s essentially what it is, except the other person will never know that you put their name down unless they also put your name down.

MARTIN: OK.

BONOS: I mean, I make fun of it. I’m probably still going to use it, right? OK (laughter)?

MARTIN: So – well, to that end, though, what kind of feedback are you hearing about this so far from the other countries where it rolled out? And I know it just started here, but – so what are you hearing so far?

BONOS: Twitter was full of dread and skepticism about this because Facebook’s had so many problems with misinformation and security lapses and all of that. So people were not eager to do this very intimate thing on Facebook and to spend more time on Facebook and all of that. And also, none of the features are all – are any different from what you could currently find on dating apps that are already out there.

MARTIN: You’ve been following this for some time now. What about those privacy concerns that many critics, not just in the dating realm, have raised about this? has Facebook done anything to address those concerns?

BONOS: Yeah. I mean, they say that the feature is going to have safety at the forefront and security. But we won’t really know until people get in and start using it and that sort of thing. And I think the bigger issue is that there’s not a lot of trust out there in the public for this company and this platform, so it makes it hard for people to want to do something so personal on there. I mean, you think trust is the backbone of relationships, right?

MARTIN: So before we let you go, though, because you cover this area, and you’ve been covering it for some time – I mean, you’ve been covering the whole, you know, single life and relationships for some time now. I just wondered if this says anything bigger. Does it say anything about single life, the single life, that this is here? Does it meet some need that isn’t being met? What do you think?

BONOS: Unfortunately, it doesn’t. I mean, dating apps have been out there for about five years, and when they came out, people were a little bit excited about them. Now we’ve reached this point of extreme dating app fatigue and frustration with the way that people can connect easily on these apps but then discard each other very quickly. And because this new platform doesn’t seem to change that in any way, I don’t know that it’s going to meet a need that wasn’t already met.

MARTIN: That is Lisa Bonos. She writes about dating and relationships for The Washington Post, and she was kind enough to join us here in our studios in Washington, D.C. And I do want to mention that Facebook has been a recent financial supporter of NPR.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Amazon is opening new stores — in the real world. And in true Big Tech fashion the experience is meant to emphasize convenience. All you need to do is walk in, grab your stuff, and go.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Amazon’s move from the digital to the physical world started with brick-and-mortar bookshops. Now the company is opening convenience stores. As you would expect, there is a high-tech twist. In these stores, you don’t have to take out your wallet to pay. Cardiff Garcia and Sally Herships from our daily economics podcast The Indicator From Planet Money look at what this development means for the market.

SALLY HERSHIPS, BYLINE: In the new stores, there are no cashiers. There are no checkout counters. You take stuff off the shelf and out of the store. And somehow, Amazon figures out what you have, and it charges you.

CARDIFF GARCIA, BYLINE: Amazon’s system represents a tradeoff that we often make when we use technology. As consumers, we supply our data in return for convenience. When we shop at Amazon and other online retailers, those companies are collecting information on you, which they think they can sell or use to bombard you with targeted ads or ideas for what to buy next.

HERSHIPS: So far, shopping in the real world has been a holdout, right? It’s a place where you can still use cash. You can still buy stuff that maybe you don’t want tracked.

GARCIA: Amazon told us that they only hold onto customers’ data just long enough to send them a receipt. So if humans are no longer checking us out at the register, what’s going to happen to all those jobs – all those cashier jobs? Heidi Shierholz is senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: In the early 1800’s, over 80% of our labor market was in agriculture. So if you would have been sort of a futurist at that time, you would have gone, oh, my goodness. We’re going to lose all of these jobs. And you would have, in some ways, been absolutely right.

GARCIA: Instead, they now work in other industries. Heidi says that what we find is that automation has never caused sustained decline in the overall number of jobs. And you might be wondering, how is that possible? Well, think about it. When a company like Amazon uses tech instead of human workers, it can now sell its products more cheaply to consumers, and that starts a process where consumers have more leftover cash to buy other things. And when they buy those other things, that generates economic activity, and that brings new jobs to those sectors.

HERSHIPS: Which brings us to a question – how are small business owners, the kind that often run convenience stores, going to be impacted by Amazon moving in on their turf?

GARCIA: Jonathan Bowles is executive director at the Center for an Urban Future.

JONATHAN BOWLES: We survived 7-Eleven. We survived the expansion of all these national drugstore chains, and now we’ve got to deal with this.

HERSHIPS: Right around the corner from Amazon’s new store is a local deli. It’s a small business. And, Cardiff, you know, they told us they didn’t want to go on tape, but they were not psyched about Amazon. The company represents major competition for them.

BOWLES: When you shop at a bodega or a small business, your money is staying in the community. Oftentimes, that small business or bodega owner is sponsoring a Little League team or being part of the community, investing or spending money on local workers. They’re putting money into the community by spending things that they earn at the business.

GARCIA: Jonathan says that if too many national chains move in and displace small businesses, that could cause another problem.

BOWLES: When it tips too far in that direction – when the unique independent small businesses are so crowded out – it’s just a much less interesting place to be.

HERSHIPS: For now, I think I’m going to head to my local deli for lunch.

Sally Herships.

GARCIA: Cardiff Garcia, NPR News.

SHAPIRO: And we should say Amazon is an NPR sponsor.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Audie Cornish speaks with Instagram head Adam Mosseri about how it is adding protections for users, while preserving influencers’ ability to make money through the platform.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

With All Tech Considered.

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CORNISH: The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, knows what it’s like to be bullied. He also knows that today kids are likely to be bullied on Instagram. That’s why he says he wants to lead the industry in the fight against online bullying.

ADAM MOSSERI: I had, like, Coke bottle, Corbusier glasses at 5 years old that made my eyes as big as – I don’t know – lemons.

CORNISH: I can picture that.

MOSSERI: I had a haircut that made me look like Harry Potter long before Harry Potter existed or was cool. It was not a good look. I was made fun of a lot. But yeah, I probably would have been made fun of on Instagram.

CORNISH: Yeah, there would have been an Instagram account that was like Adam’s Glasses.

MOSSERI: Yeah. Oh, man. You’re really bringing me back.

CORNISH: (Laughter) I’m just saying.

MOSSERI: (Laughter) I got to find those glasses.

CORNISH: I had a rough time of it, too. And I have to admit, I look at social media; I look at things like Instagram. And I say – thank God it wasn’t around when I was a kid. It would have been worse.

MOSSERI: I don’t quite feel that way. Obviously, I’m biased given that I’m sitting in the situation that I’m sitting in. I have two kids. They’re too young to use Instagram. They’re 3 and 1 right now, but they will use Instagram when they get older.

I think that certain things would absolutely be worse. Other things would be better. For me right now, the way my kids appear on Instagram is they have private accounts. They don’t use them; they’re literally 3 and 1 years old. But I manage them, and I share basically their upbringing with my family who lives all around the world. I have family in Pittsburgh. I have family in New York. I have family in Israel. I have family in Germany. I have family in LA. And they can stay up to date on what my boys are doing and how they’re growing in a way that they wouldn’t have been able to do just 15 years ago.

And so there’s good and there’s bad that comes from connecting people. Technology is not inherently good, and it’s not inherently bad. For those of us who work in the industry, it’s our responsibility to magnify the good and address the bad as effectively as we can.

CORNISH: Mosseri took the helm of Instagram almost a year ago, coming from its big brother Facebook. Shortly after, The Atlantic published a story headlined “Instagram Has A Massive Harassment Problem.” People said it was too easy to set up anonymous pages just to taunt someone. They said the company wasn’t responsive when they tried to sound the alarm about abuse, so now Mosseri is overseeing a rollout of new features that Instagram hopes will protect its users from bullying and keep them on the site.

I asked him what he learned about bullying on the platform over the past year.

MOSSERI: A few different things. One – a lot of it happens. Actually, most of it seems to happen between people who know each other in real life. Another is that the controls that we had before or have today are insufficient. So specifically, I and our researchers talked to a bunch of teens and we asked them, why don’t you just block someone who is bullying you on the platform? Because you can block someone right now – they can’t see you. You essentially don’t exist on Instagram to them.

And there were two reasons that came back. One was – often, that can actually escalate the situation. They’ll figure that out. They’ll know, and they will bully more, either on Instagram or elsewhere. And two is that you need, as a target of bullying, to see what the actor is actually doing. Teens would often say, like, they’re talking about me. If I blocked them, I won’t be able to see that.

So I need to track what’s actually happening. Which is why we’ve been developing this new control called restrict, which allows you to restrict an individual – it means that if they comment on your post, you’ll see it, and it’ll look to them as if they’ve – it’s actually been commented on, but you have to approve it before anybody else sees it. It means that their messages are going to go into your other inbox, and you have to go there to see them and that they won’t actually get read receipts – a whole bunch of different little nuanced ways to give a target of bullying a bit more power over the experience, which allows….

CORNISH: So it’s not about changing their behavior. Right? It’s about giving the person who’s the victim a few more tools to protect themselves.

MOSSERI: Yeah. Restrict is not about changing their behavior. There are other things we’re doing to try and adjust people’s behavior by changing incentives.

CORNISH: One of them is very interesting. It’s an alert that flags a mean-spirited post. Right? It essentially asks you – hey, are you sure you want to post this?

MOSSERI: Yes.

CORNISH: It’s very polite (laughter).

MOSSERI: It is.

CORNISH: Why do you think that will be effective? I mean, if someone’s about to say something cruel (laughter), saying think about it – like, I don’t know.

MOSSERI: I think it’s going to be somewhat effective but not very effective. I actually think that’s true of all of the work that we’re going to do. All of these problems are not solved by any one solution. They are complicated. I’ve also seen in the actual data that a minority but a significant minority of people do rewrite their comments, and they rewrite them in a much more pleasant way. Now, do most people rewrite their comments? No – because if you have an intent that’s really intense to harass an individual, a polite comment from Instagram is not going to prevent you from doing so.

But sometimes people get caught up in the moment, and a lightweight reminder can actually help them rethink what they’re doing or what they’re saying. And so it’s not supposed to be the solution that we hang our hat on for all of bullying. It’s supposed to be one of many tools to try to prevent bullying from happening in the first place.

CORNISH: One controversial idea that I know you are thinking about is the idea of making the number of likes private. Right?

MOSSERI: Yeah.

CORNISH: So when a person posts to Instagram their image, lots of people can click on a little heart that shows I love this thing. And some people get a high off of that – right? – when they – ’cause it’s a big popularity contest in a way. If you make that private, doesn’t that get to the heart of what Instagram is?

MOSSERI: In some ways, yeah. When I said before that…

CORNISH: That sounds bad for business.

MOSSERI: It might be. But ultimately, if we make decisions that are bad for business but that keep people safe or are good for well-being more broadly, I have to believe that those are going to be good for the business over the long run, and so I’m going to make those decisions. The idea with making like counts private is to try and depressurize the experience a bit. It can sometimes feel like a popularity contest, which is why we…

CORNISH: How likely is this to actually happen, though? Am I speculating with you right now, or is this something you’re going to do?

MOSSERI: I’m bullish on it. It’s a big change. We’re working through all the challenges. One challenge is for creators. They use Instagram to make a living. Likes are a sign of how relevant they are, so we have to figure out some way to make sure we preserve that.

CORNISH: You’re talking about influencers. Right? I mean, there are people who now essentially make a living off of their social media presence. And the way they show potential advertisers – look, I’m a good bet – is how many likes I get.

MOSSERI: Absolutely. We’ve actually had a pretty mixed response from influencers. So I think – I’m optimistic to answer your question very directly. We aren’t there yet. We’re still iterating on the experience. But I am personally optimistic and really personally invested in making it work.

CORNISH: So the boss is bullish. (Laughter) That’s the take so far.

MOSSERI: The boss is bullish, yes.

CORNISH: Well, Adam Mosseri, thank you so much for speaking with us.

MOSSERI: Absolutely. Thank you so much for the time.

CORNISH: Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram. We should note Facebook, which owns Instagram, is among NPR’s financial supporters.

Tomorrow Mosseri tells us what his time leading Facebook’s News Feed taught him about social media abuse.

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Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Most pink Himalayan salt comes from one source: Pakistan. And that country now would like everybody to know.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

You may have spotted pink salt in your supermarket. Himalayan pink salt is used to season food and is believed to have health benefits. It’s used in spa treatments. You can even buy lamps made of the stuff. Well, now the country that produces most pink salt wants to claim it as its own. NPR’s Diaa Hadid reports.

DIAA HADID, BYLINE: In Pakistan, Himalayan salt is shrouded in legend.

SHAHID IQBAL: When Alexander the Great invaded the Indian subcontinent…

HADID: That’s Shahid Iqbal, a Pakistani geologist. He says Alexander’s horses began licking the rocks.

IQBAL: The army was curious what they are licking at. And they found it was salt.

HADID: Himalayan pink salt. And folks here believe it’s been mined ever since. But it really took off a few years ago…

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: In today’s video, we’re going to be talking all about Himalayan pink salt. It’s really good for your body, your aches and pains, cramps.

HADID: …When it found popularity as a wellness product because it contains dozens of trace minerals giving it that pink hue. But the salt’s actual origins are rarely highlighted or even mentioned. Iqbal, the geologist, says the salt overwhelmingly comes from Pakistan. And we drove there. You see red brick hills emerge from marshlands. These are the furthest tendrils of the Himalayas. We’re hundreds of miles from the iconic snowy peaks.

It’s hot here. An engineer takes us inside a mine shaft, and a mile in, we meet miners in a soaring chamber. Their methods are basic. They crank levers to bore a hole in the rock face. Another miner packs the hole with gunpowder. The engineer lights a fuse, and a miner calls out, beware.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking foreign language).

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: OK. OK.

HADID: That’s terrifying.

(LAUGHTER)

HADID: Boulders of pink rock tumble down, and miners hurl them into trolleys. Until quite recently, much of that salt was exported just across the border to India, Pakistan’s enemy and neighbor.

Qaisar Mahmood is a salt exporter.

QAISAR MAHMOOD: (Through interpreter) India buys salt from here. They process it and export it to Europe. They say it’s made in India, and they charge people like you 10 times the price.

HADID: He used to sell his salt for $40 a ton to India. He could make $300 a ton selling it to Europe. But it’s not that easy for a man like him.

MAHMOOD: This language problem also.

HADID: He doesn’t speak English well. He doesn’t have contacts. And he can’t navigate his way around Pakistan’s complicated bureaucracy for exporting products, and he can’t meet European standards.

MAHMOOD: (Through interpreter) If they find even a strand of hair, they will reject the entire batch.

HADID: Those sales recently became controversial in Pakistan. It’s hard to imagine salt as a matter of national pride, but that’s what happened. A social media campaign against the sales to India went viral in June, and then it became a national issue.

SHIBLI FARRAZ: It was being sold for a song.

HADID: That’s Senator Shibli Farraz. Pakistan made just over $50 million exporting salt last year, and he believes they can triple that with reforms.

FARRAZ: There was lot of concern as to – we were exporting it at a very, very low price, and most of it was going to India.

HADID: So when tensions flared in August over the disputed territory of Kashmir, Pakistan banned all trade with India, including salt. Farraz is now advocating legislation to discourage crude salt sales and encourage the production on high-value finished products.

FARRAZ: Let this be an opportunity to kind of diversify and substitute for imports.

HADID: Farraz says in coming months, he’ll introduce legislation that will trademark Himalayan pink salt and force companies to list it as a Pakistani product. Farraz says that will allow Pakistan to accrue revenue when companies use the name, and it will tie Pakistan’s name to an upmarket product.

But traders like Mahmood, whose business has been devastated by the ban on exports to India, says that could hurt business. He says Pakistan doesn’t have a good reputation as a producer of high-end goods, and the country is associated with violence.

MAHMOOD: (Through interpreter) India works on its image; we don’t. We have neglected our branding.

HADID: But one Pakistani salt producer says things can be different. He’s built a rare business selling high-end products to the United States. Niaz Siddiqui shows me around his showroom. There’s lamps, tequila shot glasses, sushi platters and his most popular product.

NIAZ SIDDIQUI: They are called the Zen Cubes.

HADID: This is a Zen Cube.

SIDDIQUI: This is a Zen Cube.

HADID: It’s a cube of salt, and it costs 16 bucks. He says profits like this should be going to Pakistan. And it’s possible, he says, if the country improves its branding, to have a world where Himalayan pink salt is proudly Pakistani.

Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Kherwa.

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