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Diplomatic gaffe? Really? Charles Crawford, the British ambassador to Poland, is in hot water for an e-mail which says several entire true things:
He describes the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as “the most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism”.
He also ridicules French leader Jacques Chirac for “nagging the British taxpayer to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa”.
He also suggests Blair gives EU leaders one hour to make up their minds on the budget because “If anyone says no, we end the meeting. The EU will move on to a complete mess of annual budgets. Basically suits us – we’ll pay less and the rebate stays 100 percent intact”.
Oh, but he was only ‘joking’ of course. Riiiight.
Yes, this guy should indeed be fired from his job as an ambassador… he belongs in 10 Downing Street doing Tony Blair’s job!
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Oh yes!
This bloke warms the cockles of my heart!
Stuff Cameron, vote Crawford!
My sincere apology for intruding on the other thread.
I don’t know anything about this gentleman except the memo, joke or not.
Whatever his official position on official policy, his unofficial thoughts sound remarkably sensible.
I’ve often wondered over the years why it was so utterly unforgivable for someone in the West to speak frankly, while every petty tyrant and/or lunatic who opposed us could say the most ridiculous and intemperate crap and get a pass.
As much as I disagreed with many of his policies, I sometimes wish that Teddy Roosevelt was around just to do a little plain speaking on occasion, and cut through all the BS.
Nice one Perry
I wonder if UKIP has given any thought to canonisation?
If not, I might have a candidate for them…
A diplomat speaking the truth? A diplomat?
No, no, no, this will never do! Next thing you know we’ll be seeing water running uphill, cats and dogs living together, Tories making two rational policy statements in a row and all manner of other freakish occurrences that risk tearing a hole in the space-time continuum.
No, he will simply have to go.
Oh God,
You couldn’t get better, even with Verity in Charles Crawford’s position.
He also ridicules French leader Jacques Chirac for “nagging the British taxpayer to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa”.
This is a complete myth and, sadly, one accepted even by free market people. African poverty is the fault of the Africans themselves and has nothing to do with EU agricultural policies. Blaming the EU for African poverty is just an extension of the PC ‘blame the west’ game. Propagating this myth only allows the Africans to decieve themselves about their plight and excuplates the African politicians and the African political and economic milieux in which these politicians exercise their power.
The actual victims of EU agricultural policies are EU net taxpayers, not Africans.
I agree Paul that it is not ‘the’ cause (or even a major cause) but it is a exacerbating factor to Africa’s sundry woes because any restriction on free trade is. Plus, when you have a useful political weapon that undermines the moral high ground the left presumes it occupies, it is worth a great deal of airtime.
The biggest victims of EU agricultural policies are EU net taxpayers, but are Africans also affected.
Perry,
Actually not only do I not think that it is any kind of ’cause’ I don’t even think it is an exacerbating factor in African poverty. Indeed, if anything, EU agricultural policies are a net advantage to Africans – consumers there can buy goods subsidised by European taxpayers.
Restrictions on free trade do not cause universal misery, there are winners and losers, overall the losses outweigh the gains but for every restriction on free trade someone or some group makes a gain. In the case of EU agricultural policy African consumers are marginal gainers at the greater expense of European net taxpayers.
Now trade barriers will certainly be an inconvenience to African producers who wish to export to the EU and EU agricultural subsidies will make some agricultual enterprises in Africa uncompetitive. These difficulties to some, particularly agricultural, producers in Africa is what is alleged, falsely, to exacerbate African poverty. The error lies in assuming that economic growth in Africa is constrained by W.W. Rostow’s five stages of economic growth theory, that agricultural development is an alleged precondition for further growth.
Rostow’s theory has had a huge and damaging influence, it is utterly false. There is no need nor reason for Africa to rely on agriculture. It could leap straight to high technology like the far east if it offered a secure environment for foreign investors. Entrepreneurship can take manifold avenues to drive economic growth, the reason it doesn’t happen in Africa is the fault of African politicians and the African political mileau.
My view is that this ‘African poverty’ meme as a way of attacking the CAP is completely wrongheaded. In so far as it gains any traction with EU power mongers it is a result of mutual misunderstanding and confusion about economics and economic development and the effect it has on Africans is to mislead them into thinking that they are the victims of evil western conspiracies rather than the authors of their own misfortune.
What Paul Coulam said.
The poor African nations are mostly in desert or jungle areas that are not suitable for agriculture. There is no agri business in Africa that suffers from European tariffs.
But the phrase “it’s for the Africans” is used like “it’s for the children”. Pure bs and demagogy.
But in the here and now, Africa is overwhelmingly argicultural and many Africans cannot afford even subsidised European foodstuff. Certainly I agree that Rostow is nonsence and there are no inevitable ‘stages’ to economic growth but that does not mean the subsidies do not cause difficulties in Africa. Anthing which distorts investment decisions usually has all manner of knock-on consequences.
There I must disagree completely. If we wait for the chattering classes to develop a sophisticated unerstanding of real-world economics, we will wait until hell freezes over. Political change often happens because someone has come up with a better set of buzz lines while the other guy is pontificating about demand curves or ‘surplus value’.
Likewise, if some Africans with a ‘victim complex’ start demanding free trade because that is something those wicked European are denying to Africa as a way to keep them subservient, well, that would be a fine bit of meme-jitsu in my book. Let them start viewing Marx and just another evil European import stiffling Africas natural entrepreneurial impulses if that gets them where they need to be on the bigger issue. Hell, if someone wants to “re-imagine” Great Zimbabwe as the world’s first pre-European private sector supermarket, that might appear to those who need some virtuous myths to cling onto.
As in warfare, when you find the weak point in the enemy position, that is where you attack.
Really? Have you ever been to Kenya or Tanzania or Ghana? I think you really need to get yourself a decent atlas. They are quite suitable for agriculture (and in fact almost all the green beans I see in British supermarkets come from Kenya).
There is no agri business in Africa that suffers from European tariffs because of European tariffs.
Sure, there are many much bigger reasons Africa is fucked up but that is no excuse for us to add to them.
Ghanaean tomato producers have been wiped out by dumped Italian tomatos.
Ghanaean tomato producers have been wiped out by dumped Italian tomatos.
If true then this is something that Ghanaeans should be celebrating. They get to eat cheaper, or even free, tomatoes than would otherwise be the case and the erstwhile tomato producers are now liberated from the pointless burden of producing unwanted tomatoes to expend their talents and energy on satisfying some new human want. And all this benefit to Ghana paid for by the victimized taxpayers of the EU.
Of course and they take their now useless land and build a microchip factory on it or they set a a clog-dancing accadamy for visiting Norwegian tourists, right?
Back in the real world, what happens is the empoverished Ghanaian farmers simply become destitute because they have neither the capital nor the education to do anything else.
Wow that is spot on; telling it like it is. No wonder he is in trouble. Such honesty has no place in modern goverment…its bloody dangerous!
Cameron needs to sign this guy to run for MEP immediately.
Back in the real world, what happens is the empoverished Ghanaian farmers simply become destitute because they have neither the capital nor the education to do anything else.
More piffle from W. W. Rostow. Neither capital nor education is a precondition for entreprenurial activity. Wherever human desires go unsatisfied there is opportunity for entreprenurial activity. Besides, education is just another consumer good and investors will supply capital wherever they spot a chance for profit.
The reason little of this happens in the ‘real world’, as Askari seems to want to call Africa, is everything to do with African politicians and the African political mileau and nothing to do with EU agricultural policies.
That is silly. i’m not saying african governments are not main problem but the social development needed for people to just create new jobs does not appear without many other other things also happening. who is going to provide education to destitute ghanaian tomato farmers? Where is the capital for this wonderful consumer good going to come from? what will they use to pay for it? Tomatoes?
Entrepreneurship is simply alertness to opportunities on the market and the creative response to them. Investors can supply capital.
who is going to provide education to destitute ghanaian tomato farmers?
Why do you assume that destitute Ghanaian tomato farmers either want or need any ‘education’? What they want and need is an income and the world is full of people with very high incomes who have little or nothing in the way of education.
The world is also full of people who have an abundance of education and hardly any money at all.
because i am half-ghanaian? if all you know if farming, it is hard to know what else to do. i aM not so disagree with you as maybe you thinking but think that you don’t understand that it is much harder than you think to move from farmer to bisnessman and damage of subsidided food is bigger than you think.
Paul Coulam,
Tariffs, subsidies and other price distorting mechanisms in the developing world destroy the competitive advantage of developing nations.
Every economic entity, from geographical regions down to an individual, can produce something better than others given all the possible economic parameters. Allowing each entity to freely sell what it can produce more efficiently than everyone else benefits everyone. Its economics 101.
If state intervention prevents an entity from utilizing its competitive advantage then the entity may be able to fallback on a secondary product but the entity will not be as efficient at producing the secondary product! If it could produce the secondary product as efficiently as the primary it would do so without state intervention. The secondary product will inherently trade for less and the entity will always be poorer than it would have been absent state intervention. Again, its economics 101.
Africans have an enormous competitive advantage in the production of labor intensive agricultural commodities. Destroying their ability to use that advantage makes them poorer, period.
Africans are not themselves blameless in all this. African-autocrates of all stripes have long used price controls on food to placate the politically dangerous urbanites at the expense of rural farmers. Yet this fact doesn’t absolve the developed world for the poverty created by its own selfish policies.
Shannon,
You are quite right to say that:
Allowing each entity to freely sell what it can produce more efficiently than everyone else benefits everyone. Its economics 101.
But the point is about the distribution of the costs of restrictions to free trade. The costs of EU agricultural policy fall overwhelmingly on the net taxpayers of the EU.
Africans have an enormous competitive advantage in the production of labor intensive agricultural commodities. Destroying their ability to use that advantage makes them poorer, period.
Suppose that, instead of the EU dumping food on Africa, God delivered all their agricultural goods like manna from heaven. Certainly this would mean that the producers of the agricultural goods lost their competitive advantage in this sector and had to move into secondary industries but this is only because the primary consumer needs are already met. Your analysis looks only at things from the point of view of the costs to African producers and not the benefits to African consumers.
Of course from the point of view of the whole world then subsidies are not like manna from heaven, they are paid for by Europeans so free trade is always the best policy overall but it is a myth that EU or western subsidies are selfish and damaging to Africans overall. They are in actuality self destructive of the developed world overall and a marginal benefit to Africa overall.
The benefits of restrictions on free trade go disproportionately to governments, in the form of tariff payments and political influence with producers, who become arms of the state. The best argument for free trade is that it gets bureaucrats and politicians out of the business of setting prices and production quantities. Those economically disastrous Italian tomatoes benefit politicians from tomato-producing areas. And since tariffs increase the price of imports, prices of domestic goods go up as well, producing more taxes for governments. As always, the EU wannabe totalitarians are mostly interested in their own benefit.
Paul Coulam,
Suppose that, instead of the EU dumping food on Africa, God delivered all their agricultural goods like manna from heaven
It would prove devastating in the short term. An economy is a system of organic complexity. You can’t simply destroy one section of the economy without serious repercussions.
Conditions very much like your thought experiment actually do occur in disaster areas that receive floods of relief supplies. Relief agency have learned that sending to many supplies can destroy the local economy. People eat the relief supplied foods instead of spending money on the products of local fisherman and farmers. This can cause the local economy to seize like an engine that runs out of oil.
One factor I think you maybe overlooking is that in sub-sahara Africa %50-%90 (depending on region) of the population is engaged in agricultural production. While it might be theoretically correct to say that collectively, Africans receive a net benefit from subsidized food, the reality is that a minority receive the benefit while the majority are affected negatively.
I think the major problem, however, is that Africans don’t really have a competitive advantage in any other sector. They can’t just switch gears at will. Few places can. Destroying their competitive advantage in agriculture effectively means knocking them out of the economy entirely. This in turn creates a host of political problems.
Shannon,
To my thought experiment:
Suppose that God delivered all their agricultural goods like manna from heaven.
You reply:
It would prove devastating in the short term.
Which I find puzzling. The immediate effects of the spontaneous appearance of all agricultural goods in an economy based 90% on agriculture would be the immediate liberation of 90% of people from the burden of work. Everyone still has as much consumable produce as before but 90% of the workforce are now liberated from the disutility of labour. They can benefit by either merely enjoying the extra leisure for its own sake or, more likely and even better, they will employ their energy and talents in secondary ways to fulfil even more human needs on the market. No matter how hopelessly inefficient they are working in these secondary industries compared to agricultural production everyone is still better off since the primary consumer needs are now met.
In all of your analysis you are forgetting that the whole point of work and economic production is to meet the demands of consumers. Work is leisure forgone in order to produce, but if the produce appears spontaneously or, in the case of EU dumping, is paid for by some other sucker, then we can exchange the burden of work for leisure. Employment is not in tself a good thing, it is a means only to an end.
I don’t deny that there aren’t real problems in Africa which stop their economies adjusting to new industries as fast as they might in response to EU dumping but my point is that these are problems of the Africans’ own making and not a consequence of EU agricultural policy as is naively assumed by even many free market people up to and including you.
Perry:
Paul wrote: “My view is that this ‘African poverty’ meme as a way of attacking the CAP is completely wrongheaded.”
You responded: “There I must disagree completely. If we wait for the chattering classes to develop a sophisticated unerstanding of real-world economics, we will wait until hell freezes over.”
You seem to be saying that you are happy to use a false argument (“European trade policies cause African poverty”) to further a desirable end (elimination of European tariffs and subsidies). Is this really your preferred strategy? I would hope not.
If I agreed with Paul Coulam that it makes no real difference, then I would be using a ‘false argument’, but as my comments have demonstrated, I do not agree the two are unrelated, just that African governance is more important as a reason explaining African poverty. Thus I am happy to play up the more minor but more emotive issue in order to discomfort my enemies and advance a cause I support. No apologies for that.