shackle the free market, resort to food aid
The EU is now being forced to send even larger shipments of food aid to developing countries:
Making the announcement in the European Parliament, the commission’s development chief, Louis Michel, said: “The rise in basic food prices is a worldwide humanitarian disaster in the making. Ongoing humanitarian food programmes are under enormous pressure with less food available for people already on the brink of starvation.”
Jeremiah notes, bitterly, “European agricultural protectionism of course plays no role in this. It is
the (not actually) free market’s fault.” Nor does the Green+farm lobby pushing ethanol in those nations. Even more perverse is that the developing nations still have strict controls on imports (it takes an average parcel over 3 months to go through customs in the Central African Republic) that make normal market shipments of food difficult and failed legal regimes that discourage capital investments in their own arable land.
Both sides have locked their doors to trade and are shocked that they now have to crawl out their windows.
addendum Sherrod Brown pens an ignorant and petulant op-ed in the WSJ trying to defend trade barriers, operating under the myth that trade is a zero-sum game. Funny that he never mentions the merits of not-starving-poor-countries or of the capital investments those evil foreigners make in American industry.