It is being reported that enthusiastic Tory Party donors Tate and Lyle stand to be the sole beneficiary of the abolition of EU tariffs and quotas on raw cane sugar imports, to the tune of over £70 million a year. This is a good anti-Tory and anti-Brexit story, but deeper thought raises some extremely interesting ethical issues around agriculture, trade, the developing world and environmentalism. Let me just unpack a little of it for you to see and start thinking about. I do not claim to have all the answers, but I do have some interesting questions. I want you to indulge me if I start by going back over thirty years to recount an experience of my own.
I was in charge of agriculture and water in the British High Commission in Lagos back in 1986, and in that capacity paid several visits to the state owned Nigerian Sugar plantation and factory at Bacita, Kwara State.
I loved Bacita. Nigeria in the 1980’s was a disheartening place. A ridiculously over-valued Naira allowed the elites who could access the official exchange rate to live lives of sumptuous luxury and buy up top end properties all over London (the nobs’ estate agent, Knight Frank and Rutley, opened a Lagos office staffed by British expats to sell Holland Park mansions and Dockland penthouses). The overvaluation destroyed Nigerian agriculture, as imported food became cheaper than local. In a decade, Nigeria went from being the world’s largest exporter of palm oil to the world’s largest importer of palm oil, and hundreds of thousands of acres of palm oil, coconut, cocoa, pineapple, lime and other plantations withered away and closed down.
To import, you needed an import license and these were a principal source of corruption in probably the most corrupt country in the world. The most valuable of all were the sugar and rice import licenses, controlling the import of a daily staple to a country then of 200 million people. The duopoly right to import sugar to the whole of Nigeria was given to just two Northern families, Dangote and Dantata, well connected to the military regimes. They became billionaires several times over. I was most amused in 2014 to see Aliko Dangote being fawned over at Davos as an example of a great African entrepreneur.
The Dantatas and Dangotes had unlimited access to Nigeria’s oil dollars at the official exchange rate – which was an amazing three to four times more favourable than the real or black market rate. So not only did they have the duopoly on a diet staple, but the system worked like this. For the sake of example let’s say sugar was a dollar a kilo. They could exchange a naira for a dollar at the official one to one exchange rate and buy the kilo of sugar. They could then, given their duopoly position, sell that kilo of sugar to the public for eight nairas, worth two dollars in the real world. They could then exchange that eight nairas at the official rate for eight dollars. Making a 800% markup if you start from the first dollar, or a 3,200% markup if you start with the real value of the first Naira they bought that first dollar with.
I am not trying to recreate the actual sugar price or exchange rates in 1986. I am using notional values to show how the system worked and how the Dangote family originally became, as loudly proclaimed at Davos, the richest in Africa.
So in 1980’s Nigeria, it may appear that the situation for their domestic sugar industry could not have been worse. But it could, and it was the European Union that made it much, much worse. Dantata and Dangote were able to buy beet sugar from the European Union typically at around 70% of the cost of its production. The EU was dumping massive volumes of export subsidised sugar on to Africa as part of the Common Agricultural Policy, destroying much of African sugar production in the process.
One of the abhorrent things about today’s politics is that Brexit has made any sensible discussion of the EU impossible. It ought to be perfectly possible to discuss things the EU has historically done wrong without being labeled a Trump-loving Farage supporter, but that is not how public discourse is going. The EU’s record on effectively dumping did improve substantially with successive reforms to the CAP.
The general problem has not gone away, however. In 2000 I recall the USA dumped vast amounts of subsidised chicken on Ghana while I was working there, putting numerous good quality Ghanaian producers out of business. Africa remains subject to the whims of western politicians seeking to subsidise their farmers either for reasons of food security, or because the Idaho soya bean farmer suddenly became a key voting demographic.
The Common Agricultural Policy was designed to encourage food security and reduce price volatility in Europe. In original concept that functioned through large scale over-production of staples, taxpayer subsidised, and food stability in the rest of the world was not part of the remit.
Despite all of the odds, the Nigerian Sugar Company in Bacita kept going through the 1980’s, employing tens of thousands of people a year and producing some 20 to 30,000 tonnes of refined sugar (out of a nominal capacity of 60,000 tonnes). I loved spending time there. I admired the tenacity of the workforce who struggled every day to maintain both field production and factory with almost no available cash. I marveled at the ancient, massively wrought, crushing, boiling and refining equipment all manufactured in Glasgow or Motherwell, and chatted with the blacksmiths who hammered replacement parts using old matchets as raw material. I would sit with the cane cutters enjoying a drink of fresh cane juice, as the burning prior to cutting drew black feathers across the vivid red of the setting sun. I loved the fact that the entire plant and town were powered by using cane waste as fuel.
You have to understand that Nigeria in the 1980’s had massive societal problems, and honest endeavour and agro-industry were not exactly its hallmarks. Bacita was my haven. I should point out that Bacita had never employed either slave or imported labour, lest you feel my nostalgia for a sugar plantation was misplaced.
I tried very hard to persuade both DFID and the Commonwealth Development Corporation to help update the plant, but both said that the EU dumping policy made Nigerian sugar unsustainable. Bacita somehow limped on another two decades until it closed in 2006. It closed because the international donor community insisted it was privatised.
Once put into the hands of a wealthy owner, international aid was finally forthcoming and the African Development Bank put an amazing 60 million dollars into expanding field production. This was entirely wasted as the new owner decided it was most cost effective to take advantage of tariff advantages of raw versus processed sugar. They simply shut down the field operation, making 10,000 people redundant, and ran the processing plant on imported raw sugar. That lasted a couple of years and then they lost interest and the whole thing went bust. The joys of privatisation.
Sugar is fascinating, because temperate beet sugar is the original and most striking example of industrial selective breeding of a crop deliberately to provide import substitution in temperate countries of a tropical food. Modern sugar beet typically contains 15 to 20% sugar. At the end of the 18th century, when serious breeding started, it was around 8 to 12%, similar to sweet potato today. Industrial scale production of sugar from sugar beet started around 1820.
Contrary to popular belief, sugar beet in a temperate climate can in fact yield more sugar per hectare than sugar cane in the tropics, because of its shorter growth season. Nitrogen fertiliser inputs for the two are comparable. Cane sugar production costs are substantially cheaper than beet sugar, but higher yield in the field is not the reason. Nor is cheaper labour as large a factor as you might think, given the mechanisation of the beet industry.
The reasons cane sugar is cheaper are more complex – for example, sugar beet factories in the UK typically run 100 days a year, whereas a sugar cane factory factory is almost a year round operation, thus giving a better return on the capital employed. The UNFAO argues that in a liberalised market some beet production would be competitive, particularly major scale producers in France and Germany. I am dubious; the general rule that without protection cane sugar is more financially viable, by a wide margin, is not in doubt.
As the UK leaves the EU, the EU quotas and tariff barriers that kept out cane sugar are vanishing and Tate & Lyle are now free to import raw cane sugar for processing. This is where that £71 million tariff reduction comes in. This could theoretically be an advantage of Brexit – sugar ought to get cheaper. But actually, it won’t. You see, Tate & Lyle are the only refiner of raw cane sugar in the UK. They have a monopoly, and the capital costs are a significant bar to market entry. So what will happen is that Tate & Lyle profits will go up, very substantially.
The British sugar market is dominated by British Sugar, who produce beet sugar, and Tate & Lyle, who finish in the UK imported “raw” cane sugar. In theory, Tate & Lyle should now be in a position to put British Sugar out of business and end UK beet production. That will not happen. What will happen is the duopoly will continue to fix the price, with Tate & Lyle simply making mega profits.
As you will have realised, this is all predicated on the fact that the UK intends to maintain high tariffs on the import of fully processed sugar from abroad, to maintain the protection of the processing operations of both British Sugar and Tate & Lyle. The only reason it makes any sense for Tate & Lyle to import raw sugar from Brazil or Pakistan and process it here, is that fully processed sugar from Brazil or Pakistan is subject to a deliberately prohibitive tariff.
This means that extra bulk is being transported across the sea for no good reason. It also keeps the most profitable part of the entire value adding process in the developed world and not in the developing world. I visited a sugar factory in Pakistan last year, where it is a massive industry, and access for their refined sugar to the UK market could be a major economic boost.
It is of course not just sugar; this system of protection aimed at keeping developing countries as raw material exporters and keeping the high value processes in the developed world applies to many commodities. If we take the case of cocoa, my friend President Nana Akuffo Addo of Ghana states that Ghana loses over half of the value of its cocoa by exporting beans rather than processed cake and butter, or still better chocolate.
President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, says Ghana no longer wants to be dependent on the production and export of raw materials, including cocoa beans.
According to President Akufo-Addo, Ghana intends to process more and more of its cocoa, with the aim of producing more chocolate, “because we believe there can be no future prosperity for the Ghanaian people, in the short, medium or long term, if we continue to maintain economic structures that are dependent on the production and export of raw materials.”
He, thus, reiterated the commitment of his Government “to add value to our raw materials, industrialise and enhance agricultural productivity. This is the best way we can put Ghana at the high end of the value chain in the global market place, and create jobs for the teeming masses of Ghanaians”.
That the UK in leaving the EU is lifting the barriers to raw sugar import but not to processed sugar import, is indeed a sign that the Tory government is favoring the interests of its donor Tate & Lyle above the interests of the developing world (who still cannot send us more valuable processed sugar), the interests of the consumer (who will not get cheaper sugar from the tariff reduction) and the interests of beet farmers (who will have competition from cheaper imported raw sugar). It really is a spectacularly bad policy decision designed solely to benefit Tate & Lyle, and nobody else.
Now this is where I do not know the answers.
A couple of years ago I would have written with arrogant certitude that the correct policy would be to lift all tariffs on import of fully processed sugar, thus greatly benefiting the consumer while opening opportunities for value added in the developing world. But how do the food miles involved factor into climate change? On top of which, has the effect of covid-19 given a warning that the EU’s original ideas of food security and local production had more value than we had lately thought?
Now those are some really meaty questions. There is no reason my views are any more valuable than yours, and indeed, I do not know the answers.
——————————————
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:
Paypal address for one-off donations: [email protected]
Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:
Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
I am afraid the whole of the UK is run on the lines you describe here, Mr Murray.
You would do well to look at UK medicine and ask why on earth so much of its activities are centred in the ludicrously expensive city of London. There is absolutely nothing done in medical research nor in medical treatment that requires you to be in London rather than Glasgow, Manchester, Cardiff, Bristol or Nottingham. The cost of research facilities in London is sky high compared to the rest of the country, staff have to be paid more and have to commute further to work. There are just as many sick people in less well-off areas, so patient pools for clinical trials are in no way skewed toward London. Medical Schools have no competitive advantage being based in London and the cost of living there for students is demonstrably higher.
To be brutal, the private practice market is biggest in London, the wealthy foreigners only really want to fly into London to be treated so their relatives can go shopping in the top end boutiques.
People need to ask whether medical treatment is better by doctors having to commute every day from Brighton or further afield to work when comparable professionals would have a 30 minute commute in a regional centre. I quite frankly doubt it. You select not for excellence rather for bullish stamina. All very well for the routine stuff, but cutting edge innovation needs fresh minds, good nights of sleep and the like.
Anyone who raises these truths (and the same can be said for biomedical research science as well) gets smeared by the London cabals who rule Medicine like a mafia. If anyone has any doubts that medicine is filled with salt-of-the-earth types, they need to get an education very rapidly.
My comment will probably get deleted since I don’t comply with Craig’s leftist agenda but the truth is most of the brightest minds in medicine want to study, live and work in London.
So,John Smith you are the arbiter of the ‘brightest’ minds.It is unusual for such banal thoughts to emanate from such a banal name.
In your worldview-we could abandon peer review and just have papers reviewed by post code. Ludicrous inane tosh. On the other hand it may be something to do with the concentration of money and those who dispense it, in the metropolis.
OOPs but isn’t that what the SQA has done and Nic. sturgeon has apologised for? Soon to be followed by the same error in Englandshire, and its lesser colonies in Wales and Ireland.
Deepgreenpuddock, I am surprised that you did not ask how Smith came to know what most of the brightest minds in medicine thought. That is networking on an industrial scale.
I don’t see why you can’t both be right. Network effects and economies of density make London attractive to the young and able as a centre of aspiration, culture, status and so on, and the concentration of people piling in with all their needs and demands creates inefficiencies, stresses and long commutes.
Great article. Nothing like real world experience. Thank you.
Great, informative piece.
The Tories being selfish and short-termist,.. wan’t it ever thus?
Basically the story of the UK over the last 40 years; from the wasted North Sea oil bonanza, to deindustrialisation and financial deregulation, to the ‘quick fix’ Brexit referendum aimed primarily at thwarting UKIP.
Whatever else is wrong with my country, at least we had the sense to get free of these British machinations in 1776. Unfortunately, 180 years between then and West African decolonization was enough time for John Bull to make sure a little thing like independence wouldn’t unduly impede the imperial plunder.
And both the US and UK publics should have figured out by now that whatever barriers used to keep the unadulterated looting from targeting them are long gone.
“I was in charge of agriculture and water in the British High Commission in Lagos back in 1986, and in that capacity paid several visits to the state owned Nigerian Sugar plantation and factory at Bacita, Kwara State.”
Just curious – what exactly did you do? At the end of your time in the job there, how had the British (Scottish, English or whatever) taxpayer benefited from your efforts compared to when you started?
I promoted British exports to the sector, and Nigerian economic development. With the odd success. I would think it was of more benefit to the UK taxpayer than the large majority of government jobs.
Thanks for that. I’m inclined to agree with you – my dealings years ago with British diplomats led me to think they should all be fired. It’d save a ton of money (especially on their gold plated pensions) & we’d be better off without them.
Again, just curious: How were your quotas or targets set? Were they in terms of money, market share or what? Presumably the mechanism was/is standard across the World.
Another point I’d be interested in your views on – Nigeria has the highest engagement with cryptocurrencies in the world. It seems that 1 in 3 Nigerians own or use cryptocurrencies in their everyday lives. Do you think it would be sensible for organisations dealing with them to trade in, say, Bitcoin rather than usual fiat money?
Than you, a fascinating insight of a self serving, money making for some global
web. Sugar is so not good for us but I see how hard it would be to make it go away.
I was pretty obviously referring to the less savoury history of bonded and other not entirely voluntary labour in the colonial sugar industry, not free migrant labour.
Importing raw sugar from Pakistan…………what could go wrong ?
According to this, American Sugar Refining are now the owners.
‘In July 2010 the company announced the sale of its sugar refining business, including rights to use the Tate & Lyle brand name and Lyle’s Golden Syrup, to American Sugar Refining for £211 million.[17] The sale included the Plaistow Wharf and Silvertown plants.[17] The new owners pledged that there would be no job losses as a result of the transaction.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_%26_Lyle
After the war, Lyle, later Lord Lyle of Canford Cliffs, lived in great style there overlooking Poole Harbour.. He was a customer of my father who was a radio and electrical engineer and who saw the arrival of television into the country. The transmitters were at Crystal Palace and Wenvoe in Wales in those days and the customers had to have large aerials installed on their houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Lyle,_1st_Baron_Lyle_of_Westbourne
How about his crest! ‘Crest – Upon a mascle fesswise Or interlaced with two sugar canes in saltire a cock Proper.’ !
His photo – https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/leonard-lyle-1st-baron-lyle-of-westbourne-with-some-of-the-news-photo/886639450
Henry Tate – Sugar refiner and benefactor – https://images.app.goo.gl/1BLsNUd9yXEYkxnH7
Better not mention the slave trade in this connection!
https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/history-tate/tate-galleries-and-slavery
Interesting article Craig,
Its been known for a long time that EU policy has been about keeping the added value aspect of any production within its boundaries and control whilst “exporting” the lower value, manual aspects to developing nations, chocolate, coffee, sugar all subject to high import duties as a finished product but low duties for raw materials. However this is not limited to food production, Dyson, with its high value R+D in the UK but low value production in low cost countries ( yet still charging huge sums for a badly made wobbly bit of plastic) is another example, I’m sure that there are far too many to list if the subject was deeply researched.
The argument could exist that it is a governments duty to protect its own citizens employment over the citizens of a foreign nation, and the import duties do exactly that, but there is a counter argument that doesn’t seem to be counted. Food miles are of course a new source of concern, but its a recent addition to the equation, a far bigger issue, especially for those who see large scale or uncontrolled immigration as a danger is that by keeping the value added away from developing nations you set in motion the large scale migration of people seeking a better life in western societies. If the value added was left in developing nations they could, well, develop. That would provide better employment opportunities and reduce the desire to risk life and limb to reach Europe.
That of course creates another “issue” for developed nations, who in truth don’t want developing nations to become developed. That would lead to a serious erosion of the developed worlds power and control over the developing. Which in turn would ultimately lead to job losses and job insecurity within the existing developed economies. Not to mention the military power plays that could lead to all sorts of issues for the existing developed nations.
It is the same issue with high value labour, we encourage high value immigration into the developed world, we take away the brightest and the best from developing nations and then offer / bribe them the chance to remain. If these intelligent / educated people returned to their home countries they could speed up the development of said nation. Even better would be to support their education within their own nations. Again, we essentially “import” the raw material from Africa and other developing nations and keep the added value within our own systems.
The Global economy is based on the myth of continuous growth, which is clearly impossible let alone unstainable. The reality is that the myth could be perpetuated for another 50+ years if real effort was made to allow developing nations to truly develop. What would happen beyond that point is anyone’s guess.
National wellbeing is universally short sighted and run around short term election cycles, Global wellbeing would require a completely different mindset, not just from the UK but every developed nation. That said there is no reason that the UK could not set the new standard and allow the high added value work to remain in the developing world without pricing it out with excessive duties.
You make some very good points. It all comes down, of course, to unregulated global capitalism and the interests of western governments in maintaining economic and political hegemony.
The answer is to diversify the source: Sugar can be produced in scores of countries around the world. Here in Thailand we produce palm tree sugar, which is delicious and with low glycaemic factor.
Also, you miss the point that if you bankrupt African farmers, you push them across the Mediterranean to the shores of Spain, Italy and Malta, and doing so feed Farage, Le Pen and Salvini.
Thank-you for your blog
Not only food security but medical security, we depend on China for much of our PPE which proved ours, and may other countries undoing. I wonder how many died as a result of this policy of buying Chinese instead of at home?
Food, medicines and any other staple will have to have an assured supply. Will the government take sensible steps to avoid being caught out, or will they do what nets them (personally) and their donors more cash in the short term? I think we all know the answer to that
And then our government ignored offers from local suppliers of PPE and instead cobbled up deals with companies which had no experience of making such goods and which, oh, how unexpected, had ties with the Tories and their advisers instead. They carried off tax payers’ cash while the PPE they supplied could not be used.
They corruptly wasted government-created money, by handing it to cronies, often without receiving the right kind of goods, or any goods at all.
But taxpayers have nothing to do with it – taxes don’t fund spending in the UK, they flow back to the Treasury automatically at each transaction after the initial spend, to prevent inflation.
Taxation withdraws money from circulation, effectively destroying it so that public spending can continue, at the stroke of a, govt-instructed, BoE keyboard In the normal way, without causing inflation. It doesn’t “pay for“ anything.
The irony in all this is that sugar in particular is not an essential nutrient and also contributes hugely to metabolic related illnesses across the world. I anticipate sugar will be viewed similar to tobacco in the future. Meanwhile, it will be subsidized and sold in all shapes and forms driving up the cost of health provision in the treatment of a huge range of illnesses.
“I anticipate sugar will be viewed similar to tobacco in the future.”
I hope you’re right.
It is spectacularly ironic that so many people are behaving in ways right now that they believe help them and their fellow human beings healthwise, whereas efforts to spread knowledge about things like keeping your immune system strong (how do people think our bodies actually fight viruses – by obeying “experts” maybe?), and not eating lots of sugar etc. that increases the risk of heart disease, still mostly fall on deaf ears.
Sales of sugar may possibly be down given the lockdown and presumed fall in consumption of harmful sweet “foods” by children. A responsible government that really gave a toss about public health would run a campaign saying “Don’t go back to consuming so much sugar”.
Ironically people with metabolic syndrome are particularly susceptible to covid infections among a myriad of other pathology
“Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It” Dr John Yudkin
“The Case Aginst Sugar” by Gary Taubes
While it is common to associate sugar with metabolic syndrome the evidence is rather more complex. Which is why numerous diets and advice can coexist with contradictory messages. While sugar is unessential, diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardio vascular problems appear to be a combination of too many calories and lack of exercise. Whether those excess calories are sugar, carbs or fat make relatively small differences. A little treat of sugary stuff is fine, a large sugar dessert or drink every day, yeah that’s bad.
“Good Calories, Bad Calories” (published in the UK as “The Diet Dilemma”) by Gary Taubes
Obesity Statistics
August 06, 2019 Carl Baker
28.7% of adults in England are obese. A further 35.6% are overweight but not obese. This briefing provides statistics on the obesity among adults and children in the UK, along with data on bariatric surgery and international comparisons.
Obesity statistics – full PDF report (PDF, 5 MB)
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03336/#:~:text=The%20Health%20Survey%20for%20England,is%20classified%20as%20%27overweight%27.
In my youth I spent a lot of time in the tropics and relished a lgass of pure cane juice as Craig did, or a small ‘cake’, a piece of sponge soaked in liquid sugar. You lose so much energy because of the heat you need the sugar. There is nothing wrong with sugar as long as you don’t binge, even in this country.
It may now be an extremely profitable thing to smuggle low priced sugar from the UK into the EU… if you can get away with it. Wasn’t that ‘thick as mince, lazy as a toad’ guy something to do with Tate and Lyle?
Have you seen the price of 1 kg of white sugar at local discount supermarkets (like Lidl) in the EU? Even at the more expensive supermarkets here in the Netherlands the price is around 0.75 euros per kg.
I wish you luck with your smuggling endeavours.
Fascinating article!
The Tate & Lyle sugar refinery business is now owned by the US company American Sugar Refining, itself owned by the Florida Crystals Corporation and the Sugar Cane Growers’ Cooperative of Florida. The FCC is owned by the billionaire Fanjul brothers, who are “Florida Cuban”. They’re especially notable in Palm Beach. In 2016 they raised funds for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
Got to wonder whether they’re making any political donations in 2020.
Brilliant article with a lot of dilemmas and real life examples.
In a such short space politics, free market, protectionism, globalisation, ecology, developed world v developing.
Yes fascinating article, but it appears Mary & N found a weakness in the argument that Tate & Lyle are set to benefit.
There are many books on empire and the role of Sugar. One worth a read is The Unfortunate Colonel Despard: And the British Revolution that Never Was by Mike Jay. Despard was the last man sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. Sugar plays a major role in the story and it notes how powerful a drug sugar is not so much on an individual basis but on a societal basis and suggests that the global economic system is based on the trinity of sugar, slavery and private capital.
British Empire seems to have been founded on the magical ideas of Dr John Dee and the philosophical ideas of Francis Bacon, but unfortunately was paid for by opium, sugar and tobacco as well as slavery and theft of continents of land. I suppose the lesson is if you want to be free at home then it pays to make someone not free elsewhere whether through addiction or slavery. Is it ever possible to be able to afford fine principles and fairness at home without someone paying the price out of sight and out of mind?
I have no reason to suppose Russian or Chinese empires are any better.
Presumably an ethically more acceptable form of empire is one that simply extorts a reasonable sum of money for defence and lets you get on with whatever you want to do without selling you addictive drugs or seeking to enslave you or change your ways of thinking.
An honest political group would be one who presents as merely a sort of noble aristocratic mafia and says that they will defend you from the occasional physical attack, from the sale of addictive drugs, extortionate money lending and fake money, will facilitate clean water, fair markets, education and health and in return require % of all turnover or profit. As for the rest sort it out within the family unit.
Perhaps it is possible to set aside a surplus for public works and emergency welfare funds but If they promise they will print money so that you do not have to work would you trust them? The MMT is simply a variant on hiding where where the money is coming from: if it can’t come from opium, tobacco, sugar, oil, slavery, piracy, weapons, or war and land theft (all out of sight and out of mind) then why not just make it out of nothing. Who is the sucker then?
Great Article, thanks.
The so-called united kingdom is a cesspit of incompetence and corruption. Scotland must escape the stench by ending the union with England.
Just to confirm Craig that Tate and Lyle and Tate and Lyle Sugars are two different companies. The second is part of a large USA group of sugar companies. The original company no longer refine sugar but concentrate on artificial sweetners and food additives.
Interesting indeed ! I’m wondering how many more US Trojan Horses will be revealed as we tread the primrose path of Britain Reborn 🙂
I’ve often wondered why countries like Cote d’Ivoire never processed cocoa beans into chocolate so learning that it’s mostly due to tariffs on value added products that contributes to that is eye opening.
Your question about food miles is a pertinent one although when choosing where your food comes from its more important to consider the type of food and its production. For example eating meat is substantially more impactful than eating a meat free diet. It doesn’t matter if the meat is produced at the farm down the road. The big impact from food miles is if that food has air miles instead of road or sea miles.
I have always understood that making chocolate is a cool climate activity.Hence UK, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany becoming big chocolate producers.Opportunity creates the expertise so these countries become dominant.Of course air conditioning and refrigeration are now possible but the entire production and supply chain requires a/c. I imagine that is expensive in Ghana and must push the scales towards raw material production/export rather than the value added product.
Have you ever tasted Hershey’s chocolate, so renowned for its 2nd World War role in demonstrating the largesse of the GIs and the greatness of US in general?
It is shit, to put it mildly- a sort of sweetened hard,evaporated baby-sick taste.The reason is that the recipe substitutes cheaper high-melting point fats for cocoa butter and the sugar content is greater.This gives the chocolate a longer shelf life and is easier to transport. My guess is that Ghanaian or Nigerian chocolate would need to be similar and simply couldn’t compete with European chocolate although it might go down a storm in the US, used to its horrible chocolate.
Funny you should mention that. Upon my first trip to America, I had on my to-do list, the Hershey Bar, probably because of my interest in WW2 history. I bought one, and it was so revolting I have never eaten another.
I once saw a reply by a chap who owned a speciality “gourmet” chocolate business. The way he told it, chocolate of any kind remained an expensive luxury for the wealthy until Hershey came on the scene. He realised that he could dilute chocolate with as much as 80% sugar and milk (or vegetable fat) and sell very large amounts of it – especially as the poor, who had never tasted chocolate – wouldn’t know the difference.
One of the best things about American food law used to be that faking was harder than in Britain. When I first visited Wisconsin in the 1970s, I was delighted to learn that the proper legal term for “ice cream” made with vegetable fat was “mellorite”. And it had to be labelled that, by law! At that time (and still today as far as I know) the leading British manufacturer (and I do mean “manufacturer”) Walls made its ice cream with vegetable fat and not a trace of dairy. I heard a journalist asking how they could justify that, and a company spokesman replied that “British people like their ice cream made that way”.
The “Walls” brand is owned by the same people that make your soap and washing powder and has been for about 100 years. All those things you think are British are, um, not.
Walls made their ice-cream with surplus pig fat left over from their sausages.
Interesting article Craig.
But please don’t lump individual animals together in an amorphous blob (‘chicken’).
Most of the birds alive in the world today are farmed chickens.
They have perhaps the worst quality of life of any animal who has ever lived, and this is thanks to the financial backing of possibly the majority of the world’s human population.
What was it about the Ghanaian producers that made them ‘good quality’?
On a family visit to Portugal, just after joining the EU, we noticed immediately the superior quality and taste of food. This was due at the time to the much less developed agri-industries. I imagine something similar in Ghana.Quality is a more defining characteristic in food when technically ‘advanced'(aka cheaper) methods are not used.Of course this situation is complicated by the fact that at that time we had the financial wherewithal to eat well compared to the native Portuguese, with their then lower wage economy. In other words cheap food comes at a ‘price’ in the form of less humane methods and poorer welfare standards.The chicken we ate in Portugal was probably coming from a non-intensive farm.We can do that here of course but one has to be prepared to pay the premium.It is a very dreary ethical situation we are all becoming locked into.
“The chicken we ate in Portugal was probably coming from a non-intensive farm”.
Damn straight. Ah, frango asado – how your very name makes my taste buds yearn with “saudades”.
In the 1980s I lived for several years in Tanzania which had, at the time, a nominal ‘socialist’ government that managed to limit the outright no-holds-barred plundering of the country by local elites in tandem with western business interests.
While widespread corruption was nonetheless a reality and the people were desperately poor, their quality of life was markedly better than in the more western-oriented countries of the region.
Alas, Tanzania has since been fully integrated into the globalized neoliberal order. Its biggest city Dar-es-Salaam has undergone a construction boom and gained many shiny new office buildings and a tiny percentage of the population conspicuously flaunts its opulent wealth on Instagram, giving the country a sheen of false prosperity. When I travelled there in 2015 life for the vast majority of its people had become markedly bleaker and more pitiless than was the case when I lived there in the 80s.
In Kenya, Tanzania’s neighbour to the north, where even in the 1980s poverty and corruption were appalling the situation has since become downright horrific.
Africa’s colonial masters made sure to entrench their influence before granting countries their independence and partnered with corrupt local elites have continued plundering the continent to the detriment of its people. The few countries that, like Tanzania, escaped the worst of post-colonial looting could not resist relentless globalization and the neoliberalizing of their economies that began in the early 1990s.
It angers me that the prevailing attitude in the west is one where Africans are seen as backwards no-hopers who just couldn’t cope with their post-colonial responsibilities and thus need to be ‘saved’ from themselves by the benevolent kindness of western charities and NGOs. Meanwhile local elites empowered by their erstwhile French and British masters, the resource extraction racket led by Canadian mining conglomerates, free trade blocs like the EU and the neoliberal enforcement squad of the IMF and World Bank (backed up, when required, by the power of NATO and the US military) all work in tandem across the continent to prevent Africans from looking after their own interests.
When a wealthy independent African country called Libya began using its oil money to limit the power of foreign wealth extraction operations on the continent and its eccentric leader began talking about using that money to build a self-sufficient Africa that looked after the needs of its people…he was brutally murdered and the country destroyed. This is what happens to direct challengers of the imperial order. It has been happening since overt colonialism came to an end. Remember Patrice Lumumba.
As the late Mark Fisher wrote, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And as long as this trend continues there will be no salvation from the present order, whether for Africans or for the non-elite class in the west.
Bleak, but appreciated. Thanks, Baalbek.
Thanks Baalbek for an interesting, first person perspective on some of the countries within Africa. Recently I have seen people accuse China of similar behaviour in Africa. Using loans and business to subjugate the poor of Africa. Do you have any experience or thoughts on China’s involvement in African countries?
“Using loans and business to subjugate the poor of Africa. Do you have any experience or thoughts on China’s involvement in African countries?”
I have read Western media and foreign policy think tank articles and reports accusing China of practicing usury and horribly exploiting African countries under the guise of development assistance….and while I don’t think any country has an altruistic foreign policy, the ‘Atlanticists’ have chosen China and Russia as their new enemies and I take all of their claims about these countries with a generous helping of salt.
Imperialist foreign policy and exploitative trade practices do not bother the BBC or outfits like the Brookings Institution when the US aligned bloc and the IMF/World Bank are behind them and that alone guarantees that articles about these issues are propaganda because they leave out the west’s long history of ripping off and exploiting the world.
As someone in another forum said, most of the things the media and western politicians accuse China and Russia of doing are exactly what the west has been doing for very long time. There is a lot of projection going on. They also assume that ‘rival’ nations have the same hegemonic world domination goals that the US and European imperialists have, and this makes them extremely paranoid.
If China simply copies the western model and sets up an IMF/World Bank type scam of its own and lets its companies freely plunder poorer countries and suck resources out of them, it wouldn’t get very far. That system destroys the countries it purports to help and turns them into permanent debt slaves while the people get shafted and only a tiny corrupt elite benefit (and western business interests of course). China presents its foreign aid system as a better alternative to the bait and switch scam run by the west so it has to offer at least some tangible benefits to the countries it is helping with development assistance. In Africa this translates into building infrastructure like roads, railways, airports and investing in urban renewal projects, housing etc. Of course it also expects something in return, that’s a given.
But if China practiced straight up plunder and hyperactive resource extraction, like the west does, there would be a lot more evidence of this and Africans would be complaining a lot louder than they are. As it is, most of the committed critics are westerners or people affiliated with western governments or NGOs. Gordon Chang often beats that particular drum…and nothing he says about China can be taken at face value.
When Yanis Varoufakis, hardly a raving neoliberal or sinophile, was Greece’s economic minister and negotiating with China over its bid to invest in several Greek ports, he presented the Chinese delegation with a comprehensive list of demands, including wage guarantees and job protection for Greek workers, that he never expected them to accept without amendment. But they said “ok” and signed the documents as is, leaving him standing there with his jaw hanging open. He said no western bank or company would have agreed to those terms and it completely changed his attitude towards China. (The EU, in its infinite wisdom, scuppered the deal.)
Another thing China doesn’t do is force its political and social ideology on other countries. It doesn’t start wars under false pretences and invade countries in order to “Confucionize” them and force or coerce them into adopting ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The west’s brutal obsession with spreading “democracy and human rights” by the sword and force feeding liberal feminism and ‘woke’ gender ideology to all and sundry, even in very traditional societies, is despised amongst people in these places who aren’t part of the global elite jet set. China would be very foolish if it copied this.
The west is in decline. It relies on inhumane sanctions, threats and military firepower to maintain its dominance, its economies and societies are hollowed out and failing and its blunders and buffoonery are out on the open for all to see. At home the natives are restless and increasingly in revolt and abroad its subjects are no longer cowed into giving it the fawning sycophantic “respect” it so admires.
China getting more involved on the international front terrifies the journalists, politicians and think tank types whose job it is to uphold the western status quo. They are sacred witless that in a fair and open competition China’s way of working with other countries will prove to be superior and that the imperialist “rules-based international order” would be exposed as the fraud it is and lose all claims to legitimacy.
While China and Russia talk about working with equal partners in a multipolar world, all the tired old west can do is try to starve countries into submission or coerce them into signing away their sovereignty…and if that fails, wage illegal war on them either directly or via gangs of proxy thugs. It’s all threats and “warnings” and an inability to accept that the post-Second World War order is fading and that the same outdated tricks and lies won’t save it.
Of course no country and no policy is perfect and China’s development model is no exception. I am sure there are people who can point out blunders and mistakes the Chinese have made in Africa and elsewhere. But it’s also clear that the propagandistic stories about China being a ruthless and shameless exploiter of Africa that leaves only ruins and misery in its wake describes western policy on the continent far more than it does China’s.
For all its talk about competition and the “marketplace of ideas” the west cannot fathom a world in which its own ideas are shown to be bankrupt and out-of-date. It doesn’t do genuine cooperation or update its creaky ideologies because that would be “weak” and undermine the entire myth of western supremacy that it still desperately clings to even as its ship is taking on water and beginning to sink.
Thanks baalbek
One of the most balanced and truthful posts in a while. This country needs revolt against it leaders. We are the bad guys,the global bullies.
Re Baalbek’s above comment (22:10).
I can’t remember (apologies) who posted the following link on a Craig Murray blog not so long ago. The 2016 Counterpunch article by Chris Welzenbach has stayed in my mind, and is clearly relevant here —
‘THE DREADFUL CHRONOLOGY OF GADDAFI’S MURDER
(Chris Welzenbach, Oct 5, 2016)
“Prior to the fall of Gaddafi, oil-rich Libya had cash reserves of $150 billion, and there were 143 tons of gold in Gaddafi’s vaults. As Pougala wrote in his Pambazuka News piece: ‘[A large portion of this money] had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation—the African Investment Bank in Syrte, Libya, the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years.’”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/05/the-dreadful-chronology-of-gaddafis-murder/
Surely the UK post Brexit can maintain the tariffs on sugar products and take the £70m or so in import duty rather than giving it to the Americans?
Incidentally, EU import tariffs are used by Brussels, not returned to the countries making the imports. It is an opportunity for the UK Government to keep that income if it chooses to. It is also as I understand it a little mentioned loss of income to the EU.
Very interesting perspective and a vivid story. Cheers Mr Murray.
Given that we have an obesity problem largely driven by processed foods incorporating huge amounts of sugar in them, the last thing we need is cheap sugar. Sugar should be highly taxed making food producers think hard about using it.
I didn’t know the origin of the sugar cube:
In the 1940s UK sugar producers invented one of the most enduring pro-corporate logos in Mr Cube. Mr Cube, only recently retired, was invented as part of a campaign to defend the sugar industry, primarily Tate & Lyle, from being taken into public ownership.
Peter Runge, the company’s campaign strategist, recalled how ‘we were strongly advised to have a cartoon character who, if he caught the public’s imagination, could say the most outrageous things and get away with it, and who could act as a buffer between the public and Tate and Lyle’. Brandishing his sword of free enterprise and protected by his T&L shield, Mr Cube would ‘say sensible, cogent or outrageous things’ with appropriate grimaces and gesticulations, allowing Tate to ‘concentrate on attacking the Socialist policy in a somewhat more dignifi ed manner.’
From the end of July 1949 Mr Cube ‘found his way on to millions of sugar packets on the nation’s breakfast tables. Mr Cube’s catchy slogans were analogous to Cold War sound bites, agitating some Government ministers… into near apoplexy. “Take the S out of State”, urged Mr Cube; “state control will make a hole in your pocket and my packet”. The simplest and most effective message was “Tate not State!”’
I should have said, that’s an excerpt from the book.
The Ghanaians should step carefully, they sound like they could become a prime candidate for a western ‘regime change’ operation should they continue to want to do things their way and for the best interests of its people!
Visiting Thursford Green in Norfolk as a child , I asked if the crop in the fields was cabbages. Them’s not cabbages, Willum, them’s sugar beet.
The CAP was put into place by a certain Charles de Gaulle in order to benefit French farmers which it has done ever since.
De Gaulle blocked UK entry to the fledgling EC at the time to ensure his CAP initiative was passed without any veto’s or delays that the UK would have demanded had they been in the EC at the decision making time of the CAP.
There is a very good book about Britain’s relation with Europe written by the late Christopher Booker “The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union” Kindle Edition.