If your problem with tax payer subsidised food being sold to India – then argue against the subsidy, not the idea that the consumer, regardless of location should be free to buy what they want when they want it.

As to the supermarkets, yes they will drive overpriced inefficient operators out of business, but they will also drive down the cost of food for the many tens of millions who are forced to waste limited money on buying from those same overpriced inefficient vendors.

Street vendors are an unfair tax on the poor who lack the ability to buy cheaper foods from larger wholesalers.

These reforms will lower food prices and lift tens of millions out of poverty.

Surely that is a good thing?

Quick note that there is a slightly fuller verision of this post at Though Cowards Flinch http://tinyurl.com/83l847y

Surprised to find I agree with Mandy too. Good piece.

Trade….sole EU competence.

So nothing that is done in the Westminster Parliament has anything to do with it, does it?

Am I allowed to accuse an MP of grandstanding? You know, given that whatever the Westminster vote on this is it makes no difference at all?

Tim @4: My understanding is that theEU-India FTA would require ratification by member states. This certainly seems to be what the formal answer to John McDonnell’s earlier parliamentary question suggests:

John McDonnell: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what assessment he has made of the compatibility of the EU-India Free Trade Agreement, with (a) article 25 of the General Declaration of Human Rights 1948, (b) article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the UN, (c) article 21 of the EU treaty and (d) article 207 of the treaty on the functioning of the EU. [89572]

Mr Jeremy Browne: We have an agreed position with EU partners which is to push for clauses making compliance with UN human rights instruments an essential element of all EU bilateral free trade agreements (FTA). We are monitoring the current EU negotiation with India but, as this is not yet finalised, it would be premature to comment on the final text. Once the EU-India FTA is agreed, the FTA will be scrutinised by Parliament in the usual way.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201212/cmhansrd/cm120117/text/120117w0004.htm#1201185000855

It’s true that dramatic changes in the pattern of economic activity have human costs – people who find their way of living undermined, and may not be able to take advantage of new opportunities elsewhere.

However, McDonnell “skirts round the brutal reality” that the people who pay the price for inefficient agriculture, supply chains and high import prices, are also hundreds of millions of poor men and women, going hungry because they are poor. Inefficiency means poverty.

Take this, from a recent FT article of food security:

“For India and much of Africa, the bigger issue is access and waste. New Delhi reckons that every year up to 40 per cent of Indian fruit and vegetables rots in the fields or on the way to market. Thousands of tonnes of grains such as wheat and rice are also rendered inedible because of a lack of rodent-free cool storage.
The cost of this wastage rings in at almost $20bn, according to government estimates. It is one reason why many welcomed recent – and still faltering – plans to open up the country’s retail sector in the hope that big supermarket groups would establish better supply chains.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6ed52738-4746-11e1-b646-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1kYUJMxbO

So long as India is populated by millions of poor, inefficient, borderline subsistence farmers, these people will remain poor. It’s obvious that “protecting” these jobs is in these peoples’ best interest, at least over the long-run.

Now it may well be that phasing in changes gently, with some mechanisms in place to help those who bear the short-term costs, should be a prerequisite for change. I don’t know what McDonnell specifically has in mind there.

Hello John

Good to see the Labour Party campaigning for the poor and the vulnerable who are ruthlessly exploited by multi nationals. I take it Labour’s private polling has indicated that most people, including Labour voters, are strongly opposed to this Free Trade Agreement? I assume that your in tray is full of letters demanding that India’s poor be protected?

Given the way Labour has caved in to pressure from multi millionaires regarding the most vulnerable in our society over recent weeks, I wouldn’t get too attached to this campaign.

Time is short. I hope we can build a coalition for the defence of the Indian 99%

Given Labour’s success in defending the British 99%, I think those Indians living in shanty towns can rest easy tonight. No-one in the British Labour Party will these people shunted out of their houses for short terrm electoral gain.

Simply bizarre. We must not allow the current system to change because it apparently will adversely affect the poor. FFS, it is the current system that makes them poor in the first place. Of course, dumping subsidised EU and U.S. agricultural produce in the developing world is an outrage. The solution is to get rid of the subsidies, which in the U.S. ends up in the hands of huge agricultural producers rather than small producers.

Of course some people will go out of business, that is the point. Others will flourish, that also is the point. The UK left indicating their inherent conservatism have now gone a full circle to the position of the early 19th century Tories. Protectionists to defend the incumbent vested interests. In that era of British history the progressive cause was free trade. During that period if a politician had stood before a working class audience and opposed free trade they would have been pelted with something unpleasant. Transport the modern left back in time and they would side with the Tories in a ‘ conspiracy against the public’. Well done.

Agriculture and retail is no different from any other type of industry. Every incumbent will argue that they have a fundamental right to stay in business forever. Moreover, everyone else should pay for their fundamental right to stay in business forever. Throughout the realm of nature we see the lesson that the new can’t grow without the incumbent old giving way. Yet, we are so resistant to the fundamental lesson when it comes to the economy. Take a walk through a forest and see how many new trees will grow without the old trees dying and falling to leave space.

All my life I have listened to people saying how every incumbent job should be defended. Every industry and business should be saved because to not do so would leave someone worse off. I have heard precisely zero union leaders saying, you know it is probably best that this clapped out business making crap products goes bust. Yet, if we had applied that type of thinking since the industrial revolution we would still be making the same products they made 200 years ago. No creative destruction, and still producing steam locomotives because the end of that industry would leave someone worse off.

By all means criticise free trade if it is not truly free. However, criticism along the lines of that someone is worse off only leads to stagnation.

Richard W @9

You have hit on a subject that I am amazed the Left appear to shy away from and the Right seem to get a clear run at.

We have seen the Post War settlement with regard to coal etc ripped into tiny pieces. The miners and the steel workers vilified and described as the enemy within. Yet the huge subsidies and import tariffs that protect farmers go completely unchecked and without comment.

Okay, the benefit cap is one thing but what about a cap on farmer’s handouts? Why are these greedy, good for nothing bastards getting away Scott free? Why are the Left so reluctant to go after the fraudsters and cheats in that system?

I mean, those Labour Party members are so keen to see fraudsters pummelled into the ground, why not examine the handouts to farmers?

Sorry, sorry about that, did I say ‘farmers’? Oh, I meant ‘disabled’. Can we drag someone out of their wheelchair so the Labour front bench can kick the living shit of them? Best leave the Labour heartlands of the farmers alone and go after the real enemy.

Jim,

I suspect all free-marketeers (and the associated libertarians, pseudo-Whigs etc) would support you in ending subsidy to farmers. However, and this is devil’s advocacy, you do realise that there would be costs – in terms of maintaining the landscape (in one year without sheep after foot and mouth was mishandled (on behalf of the large farmers…), large areas of the lake developed thick undergrowth for example) and in terms of environmental policies (reducing subsidies would make imported food much cheaper in relative terms, increasing imports). I am quite happy with those costs (which might all be short-term anyway), and they would help those same poor Indians John thinks would be better as peasants than as consumers, but there will be those who find them unacceptable.

Watchman @ 11

Of course, I have no problem in other Counties continuing to subsidise their farmers and us, rather than the third World taking the surplus. I have no problem with the EU subsidising poor farmers in Romania, for example. I can say instead of paying British farmers money to employ Romanians, Polish and Estonians, we could pay Eastern European farmers to employ them and import the food.

There would be costs in maintaining the Countryside, but we could employ people to do it and create jobs in the process. The forestry commission could employ people to do it. If enough farmers go bust, perhaps we could employ them on a ‘workfare’ basis?

Oh and by the way? Sheep? Sure, if the free market allows foot and mouth to ravage the flocks, who are we to gainsaay that?

Amazing how the countryside managed just fine before anyone was looking after it.

@14 – If by “fine” you mean “torn up by regular wars”, sure.

Oh, is THAT the plan to control the population now?

What a bizarre non-sequitur @15.

@14. Richard W: “Amazing how the countryside managed just fine before anyone was looking after it.”

You are not a fool, Richard W, but that statement was daft. The natural state of England is coppice, woodland and forest. Englanders cut and burned it all down to deliver the industrial revolution, opening up land for agriculture.

If England does not have agriculture, wildness (coppices) will return quickly. Who will maintain dry stone walls?

17. Charlieman

You are not a fool, Richard W, but that statement was daft. The natural state of England is coppice, woodland and forest. Englanders cut and burned it all down to deliver the industrial revolution, opening up land for agriculture.

If England does not have agriculture, wildness (coppices) will return quickly. Who will maintain dry stone walls?

First of all, a coppice is an entirely artificial phenomenon. When you cut down trees some species will sprout again from the stump. Producing a coppice. Through the process of coppicing. Presumably from the French coup, meaning a stroke or a cut.

Second, your comment is irrelevant. I assume that the original poster meant that British farmers and others down in the countryside got on fine before the State decided that agriculture had to be micromanaged. The invisible hand and all that. There is no reason I can immediately see that would suggest the Indian countryside would suffer if we ignored it.

Although it would be nice if there were urban jobs to go to. As in China. Which would require the State to lift some of the stupidest labour laws in the world. Why should anyone who employs more than five people need permission before they can hire or fire a sixth?

@18. So Much For Subtlety: “First of all, a coppice is an entirely artificial phenomenon.”

Has anybody mentioned this to trees? SMFS is correct to observe that coppice is a verb, but trees grow up in natural coppices, constrained by other trees and the environment. As scale increases, bunches of trees become woodland and forest, with or without human intervention.

“Second, your comment is irrelevant.”

You assume that it was irrelevant. I disagree. To settle this argument, we might observe how nature takes over land that is disregarded by mankind.

Would you like a few photos of suburban wilderness? Look at the view to the east of the National Gas Museum in Leicester in aerial photos on your favoured search site. You may observe that the wild deer there have not evolved sufficiently to build dry stone walls.

BTW I never expressed any desire (which would be contrary to my instincts) to micromanage farming or land. I merely suggested what would happen to land if it was not farmed.

@19 – you missed “some species will sprout again from the stump”

Some species, see!

…Ministry of Truth, I’m telling you.

I tried to comment earlier but maybe my comment was lost. I have an unpopular view of globalisation: it is the source of many of our problems, not the cure.

The way that the WTO takes account of tariff barriers but does not fully account for internal subsidies and social policies is just one example of how globalisation can wreak havoc. But even if you remove all of these hidden inequities between countries and have a totally level playing field for trade there are still immense problems.

The most serious problem is that if the world has a single economy it will fail everywhere at once. We have already seen this twice with globalised banking. Banking was became globalised in the 1920s and 2000s and in both decades banking failures spread across the world. Globalisation is inherently unstable. A stable world requires many semi-independent economies trading moderately, not a globalised economy.

See The Future of Globalization.