Confessing Evangelical

Christopher Fildes has written an illuminating piece on how (contrary to popular belief) the biggest problem facing the third world is not globalisation, but in fact quite the opposite: hypocritical protectionism by Western countries.

Fildes points out that:

Free trade is seen [by many] as oppressive and fair trade its virtuous opposite. The labourer is worthy of his hire and in a just world would be rewarded with a better price for his coffee. Catering to this instinct, Tesco now advertises its own brand of fair-trade coffee - which is, in its own way, a free-market response.

The calls for greater justice for Africa and other regions are then met by action plans, G8 "partnerships", increases in aid (which, as Fildes points out, "transfers money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.") and so on. But what Africa needs is something quite different: "the chance to trade its way to better times." That would mean that the rich countries would need to practise what they preach:

They tell everybody else to adjust, liberalise and respond to market forces, in the true spirit of globalisation - but do they take their own advice? Only when it suits them. At other times they make it harder for poor countries to supply them. Against the menace of imports from Bangladesh, the cowering United States protects itself with tariffs which average out at 14pc.

Which is a pretty astounding - not to mention shocking - statistic. But there is one industry more than any other to which this applies:

Farming, in rich countries, is the industry from which market forces have been driven out. Instead it is surrounded by tariffs and ruled and rigged by a system of quotas and subsidies. Cows, in these countries, belong to a privileged class. Thanks to the Common Agricultural Policy, every cow in Europe has a private income of $913 a year, and Japanese cows are even richer.

That compares with the World Bank's definition of "extreme poverty" as an income of less than $365 (a dollar a day). A billion people meet this definition. Yes, that's right: a billion human beings on this planet have have an income at least 60% less than a European cow.

Something more than lecturing and gesturing will now be needed if globalisation is to continue to work and if its enemies are to be won over. Its friends now need to dismantle the barriers that stop the aspiring labourer from being worthy of his hire. The farming regimes of rich countries would be the right place to start.

As Fildes points out earlier in the article that much of the world has enjoyed thirty years of increased prosperity, largely thanks to freer trade:

Given the chance, and spurred on by technological change, goods and services and money and information and people have all learned to flow more freely round the world. They had the knack a century earlier, they lost it when a suicidal war broke out in Europe, now they seem to have regained it. Free trade and prosperity have gone together.

As Fildes once put it elsewhere: "fair trade gives you a warm cosy glow, but free trade delivers the goods". It's clearly about time we started giving Africa and other third world countries the opportunity to benefit from that lesson.