Trade Not Aid.

Christopher Booker provides us with yet another example of the blinding incompetence, the blithering idiocy, of the way the European Union acts.

No industry was harder hit by the tsunami, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation revealed last week, than fishing. Thousands of boats and fishing communities were destroyed, the cost in Thailand alone being estimated at $16 million. Yet it is now a week since, almost wholly unreported in Europe, the Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, told the world that his country did not want financial aid. Above all Thailand wanted the European Union to lift the punitive tariffs on shrimp exports which in recent years have inflicted more damage on its economy than the tsunami itself.

Since 1997, Mr Shinawatra told Jack Straw on his recent visit, the EU's suspension of its preferential tariff system for Asian fish imports has caused exports to the EU to collapse. This has cost the Thai economy £3 billion, double the £1.5 billion in aid that has been promised to the entire region. The purpose of the new tariffs was to give preferential status to the former French colonies of Senegal, Madagascar and French Guinea, the waters of which are fished by subsidised EU fleets, mainly from France, Spain and Portugal, in ways which bring little benefit to the local economies.

Stung by accusations that the EU's protectionism is doing immense damage to the Third World, our new Brussels trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, last week announced: "I want to find ways to assist people and businesses hit by the tsunami." He would "consider" moves towards trade concessions worth "tens of millions of euros". This compares with the Thais' own estimate that the shrimp tariff alone is now costing them £400 million a year.

The EU is thus happy to promise money, which Mr Shinawatra says his country does not want. But when he says he would prefer the right to earn that money through exports, all he gets is another press release from Mr Mandelson. As the British people could tell him, this is par for the course.

When we used to do this it was called Empire Preference and was roundly, and rightly, condemned as economic rubbish. Later, when we joined the EU we were told to abjure the remains of our system, now renamed Commonwealth Preference.  No, it isn’t just the manner in which the French are bending the EU to continue their version of such preferences, it’s the mindboggling lunacy of anyone trying to manage trade in this manner at all.

Simply abolish all tariffs, quotas and other non-tariff barriers on all imports into the EU altogether. Good for us and good for everyone else.
It won’t happen of course, as there are too many bureaucrats who make their livings from "managing" trade. Plus the little known fact that import duties are the EU’s only independent source of funding.