Le protectionisme

One thing is clear from the history of trade: protectionism makes you rich

However much Peter Mandelson bullies them, poor countries know his equation of fair trade

and free trade is nonsense

o George Monbiot

o The Guardian, Tuesday 9 September 2008

It is not often that a bureaucrat makes a major scientific discovery. So hats off to Peter Power.

The European commission's spokesperson for trade, writing to the Guardian last week, has

invented a new ecological concept: excess fish. Seeking to justify policies that would ensure

that European trawlers are allowed to keep fishing in west African waters, Mr Power claims

that they will be removing only the region's "excess stocks". Well, someone has to do it. Were

it not for our brave trawlermen battling nature's delinquent productivity, the seas would

become choked with these disgusting scaly creatures.

Power was responding to the column I wrote a fortnight ago, which showed how fish stocks

have collapsed and the people of Senegal have gone hungry as a result of plunder by other

nations. The economic partnership agreement the commission wants Senegal to sign would

make it much harder for that country to keep our boats out of its waters. Power maintains that

"the question of access to Senegalese waters by EU fleets ... is not part of these trade

negotiations".

This is a splendid example of strategic stupidity. No one is claiming that there is a specific

fish agreement for Senegal. But the commission's demand that European companies have the

right to establish themselves freely on African soil and to receive "national treatment" would

ensure that Senegal is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and foreign

firms. It would then be unable to exclude European boats. Is this really too much for a wellpaid

bureaucrat

to

grasp?

After that column was published, several people wrote to suggest that the problem is worse

than I thought. Senegal's fish crisis is part of a bitterly ironic story. As Felicity Lawrence

shows in her book Eat Your Heart Out, the people of Senegal have become dependent on

fishing partly because of the collapse of farming. In 1994, Senegal was forced to remove its

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trade taxes. This allowed the EU to dump subsidised tomatoes and chicken on its markets,

putting its farmers out of business. They moved into fishing at about the same time as the

European super-trawlers arrived, and were wiped out again. So fishing boats were instead

deployed to carry economic migrants out of Senegal. Lawrence discovered that those who

survive the voyage to Europe are being employed in near-slavery by ... the subsidised tomato

industry.

But this is just one aspect of a scandal that has been missed by almost every journalist in the

UK. While we have been fretting about house prices and the Big Brother final, the European

trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, has been seeking to impose new trade agreements on

76 of the world's poorest countries: the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) nations. Posing

as "instruments for development", the economic partnership agreements threaten to beggar

them.

The people of these countries know that trade is essential to pull them out of poverty. But they

also see that unless it is conducted fairly, it impoverishes them more. Many are aware that the

European equation of fair trade with free trade is nonsense.

Neoliberal economists claim rich countries got that way by removing their barriers to trade.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As Ha-Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away

the Ladder, Britain discovered its enthusiasm for free trade only after it had achieved

economic dominance. The industrial revolution was built on protectionism: in 1699, for

example,

...