Hypocrisy and Other Western Crimes in Africa

When was the last time you ate an apple from Zimbabwe? Unless you are of a certain age or you have been to southern Africa, almost certainly never.

Why not? You don't like apples? Zimbabwe orchards are among the best in the world. What about bread made from the wheat grown in those fabulous highland farms? No?

Ian Smith's snub to the Empire, the unilateral declaration of independence in 1963, when the European elite took control of what was then Rhodesia in order to block a democratic constitution, was in part racism. But don't be too self-righteous. Smith and his backers did after all live in Africa. They were not master-race fantasists.

What white Rhodesians meant to protect was their own close control over their remarkably successful agricultural economy. When Britain abandoned its African relationships and joined its super-rich neighbours in the European Economic Community, it had to switch its agricultural suppliers from Africa (and Asia and Australia and Latin America) to France and Italy and eventually to Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Now, dear friends, if you really think you can save your political modesty with a hijab of nice-sounding words like 'independence' or 'freedom' - or anything else that gives you a warm-fuzzy feeling - I am going to have to insist on a strict dress code. It does not take economic analysis of any depth to understand that a business is likely to decline in value when it loses its customers, and that when it can no longer sell its goods it will be unable to maintain its workforce any more than its shareholders.

Robert Mugabe was in many ways justified in expelling white owners from farms that no longer had an economic use, and giving the wreck of what was left to his political supporters.

Zimbabwe's orchards and wheat-fields are worthless because you don't eat their produce. You don't eat their produce because you are not given the choice. It is the European Union's refusal to open its markets to African business that is destroying Zimbabwe - and Congo, and Ghana and Nigeria and Mozambique and Kenya and Uganda.

Imposing sanctions and talking sanctimoniously about human rights, freedom and democracy while imposing what is effectively a vicious economic blockade is tasteless beyond words. If we want to bring Africa into the modern world, we should do there as we have done in Eastern Europe and invite them, on the same conditions as were required of Bulgaria and Roumania, to join them our Economic Union.

Guardian - BBC - Times

Yes, I Don't Grow Bananas

An open market in EU farm subsidies is the latest thing in speculative booms.

Do you live in a bedsit in Islington, or a bijou studio apartment, if you prefer? And you don't grow bananas, or rape seed, or wheat or husband milchcows? Well, fool on you - you should be claiming EU agricultural set-aside subsidies, the brilliant twist on the Common Agricultural Policy that pays cash to people who do NOT farm!

Do you need a farm not to farm? What is this, some kind of crazy Eurospeak? Of course you don't need a farm not to farm! All you need is to own an entitlement to a set-aside subsidy, which can be sold separately to the land to which they originally attached.

'Entitlements' as they are coyly called, are one of the best - that is, the cheapest, highest yielding - financial assets currently on the market. The present yield - the annual payback relative to the initial cost - is hovering at 70%. This compares to a yield on UK government bonds of around 4.5%.

There's your pension problem solved! Snap up entitlements! Eurogenius!

Links

Did You Know Tangier Is Closer than Bucharest?

Did you know Tangier is closer to London than Bucharest? Of course you did. Why then is Roumania our 'neighbour' - that is to say, eligible for membership of the European Union - while Morocco is not?

In the 1970s, the rationale for joining the European Economic Community, the EU's predecessor, was that 'Britain is part of Europe'. And so it is. But should sharing a continental plate determine our economic, social and diplomatic relationships?

Roumania and Bulgaria emerged into the modern world as provinces of the Sultanate-Caliphate, which they remained until 1878, when they were given 'independence' at the Conference of Berlin, a period on which one of our erstwhile Islington Council Leaders, Derek Sawyer, happens to be a world-expert. The two states failed first as nation states and then as part of the general failure of European communism. When they acceded to the European Union, last year, there was dancing in the streets to celebrate what I am sure the majority of people in both states hope will be the permanent end of nationalist-isolationism.

Ghana is currently 'celebrating' 50 years of isolation. For Ghana, the success of 'national independence' is an economy that is 1/35th what it was in 1957. Most of the population survives on $2 a day.

West Europeans, Portuguese, English, Dutch and French, have been involved in the Ghanese economy since the early decades of the 15th century. It was 1482 when Diogo Cão planted a stake at the mouth of the Congo to claim it - whatever 'it' might be - for John II Bragança.

No west European state has ever had any deep or meaningful relationship with Roumania or Bulgaria. Yet we are to believe that they are our 'neighbours', while Ghana and Congo, on whose resources we built our industrial wealth, and with whom we have traded for over half a millennium, are apparently not.

Why can Ghana and Congo not apply for membership of the European Union?