Apparently the actions of the European Union mean that scores of thousands of dirt poor Cambodian farmers are being thrown off their land. This could indeed be something that we could become righteously outraged about: despite the fact that the information source is The Guardian.




OK, yes, I am righteously outraged. The EU gives trade preferences to Cambodian sugar, these trade preferences lead to evictions and further impoverishment of some of the poorest people in a very poor indeed country.

The question is, what should we do about it? The suggestion in the article is that the EU should refuse those trade preferences for Cambodian sugar until there is evidence from the various NGOs that such abuses have ceased to happen. Hmm, forgive my cynicism but that sounds like a great way to embed the NGO budgets in the Brussels one.

So why not have a truly radical policy? Why don't we just abolish sugar trade preferences for everyone? Including, of course, all those sugar beet farmers within the EU who currently get vastly over the world price for their sugar. And the massive import duties imposed upon cane sugar from elsewhere that allow that sugar beet price to stay high. For if there are no import duties upon cane sugar then there will be no benefit to thowing Cambodians off their land in order to grow sugar that doesn't have to pay those import duties, will there? Cambodian sugar would be worth only the world price and that's not enough to encourage these evictions: clearly not, for the evictions didn't start until the sugar barons could get that vastly higher EU price for the Cambodian sugar.

That is, the whole problem really starts with the way that the EU makes the intra EU price of sugar some multiple of the world price. Remove that distortion and we remove the Cambodian one.

Oddly, that's not a solution that the NGOs suggest: but then I'm already sufficiently cynical to have an idea why.