The madness of the Greens

I encourage everyone to go read the blog post by Sue Kedgley on the World Food Conference in Rome. It is a stunning example of madness and extremism.

They argued that the main cause of the crisis was that food production in much of the developing world has been decimated by three decades of globalization and free trade liberalization policies. Previously self sufficient countries had been unable to compete with heavily subsidized, cheap European and American food and so small self sufficient agricultural sectors collapsed in country after country, leaving developing countries dependent on imports and food aid.

Now read this carefully. In the first sentence she blames the food crisis on free trade liberalization policies (never mind even the very lefty UN is blaming it on biofuels and saying free trade is the solution), and then in the second sentence she complains about heavily subsidized cheap food undermining local agricultural sectors.

Earth to Sue – come in Sue. That is protectionism – the very thing you are in favour of. People who support free trade like me want subsidies and tariffs to be abolished. That way those countries which can most efficiently produce food, get to do so. I suspect Africa would boom in terms of food production if indeed one can get Europe and the US to remove their subsidies and tariffs.

It is scary that a long serving MP can not know the difference between free trade and protectionism. I think this shows that the anti globalisation fanatics have just started to use it as a slogan. Anything they are against they label as free trade and globalisation.