Samizdata

The socialist charity and political lobbying group Christian Aid, has a new campaign called Vote for Trade Justice.

Free Trade: some people love it.

Imagine getting mugged after a tough day’s work.
Every. Single.Day.
By the same muggers.
Grind you down, wouldn’t it

That’s what it’s like for people struggling to make a living in the world’s poorest countries. Why?

So called Free Trade. Our government claims Free Trade is the solution to the world’s problems. But that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say. Why? Because it allows the world’s richest countries and their fat cat companies to profit.

Ok, so let me get this straight… Western farmers, their operations subsidised with other western taxpayer’s money and their own domestic markets distorted by ‘protective’ tariff barriers which increase the price of imports, sell to African countries and that is… Free trade? FREE TRADE?

What the hell is free about it?

Western agricultural producers are a nightmarish mix of tax subsidy and production quotas, with bizarrely priced surpluses that are occasionally and erratically dumped on Third World markets… and at the same time western consumers are denied access to both First and Third World products at their true economic cost by a vast raft of arcane state and super-state imposed regulations. Please explain who exactly is engaging in laissez faire here. The only intelligent bit is calling it “so called” free trade.

The problem is that vested economic interests (big business and big labour) have zero interest in free trade. They do not give a damn about the Third World, all they see is the extremely low labour costs in the developing countries and what that implies for their own narrow sectional interests… and they have the state to protect those interests with laws.

So is Christian ‘Aid’ screaming “Remove all tariffs to imports NOW”?

Of course not. They are calling for an end to “Free Trade”. What is needed is not democratically sanctified politically managed trade (which we have now) but real, genuine, non-government regulated free trade. The fact that Kenya actually does manage to sell significant quantities of very high quality green beans in Britain is a testament to how some people will succeed in spite of western regulatory systems which would rather their producers just lived in abject poverty and that westerners pay more for their food than they need to.

If Christian Aid really cared about people in the Third World rather than just posturing for their own self-important gratification, they would be demanding true laissez faire free trade in which low labour cost agricultural nations could take on the western open air industrial chemical factories, sorry I mean farms, without having the state/super-state controlling access to the target market tilt the scales against them.

Demand for more ‘organic’ produce increases by the year and many Third World countries are well suited to serve that premium high margin market. That is where the foolish self-appointed Paladins of the Oppressed should be directing their attention rather than calling for mere tinkering with the statist system of trade controls that is so integral to the problem in the first place.

With friends like Christian Aid, people in the developing world do not need enemies.