False Economy - Alan Beattie [97]
Until some partial reform a couple of years ago, the price of sugar in Europe was three times the world average. (It is now merely twice.) And yet the EU exported far more massively subsidized sugar than it imported, dumping it cheaply on global markets. Also still with us are the sugar growers in Mauritius. Once part of a rush of low-priced sugar that undercut the Caribbean sugar islands, they themselves also cannot compete with Brazil and Thailand and now rely on preferential access to the European market, reflecting the fact that Mauritius, too, was a European colony. The red-ink profiles of European empires no longer sprawl across maps of the world, but their faded outlines can still be seen in the patterns of global commodities trade. The EU maintains an elaborate system of preferential access to its market for its former colonies—a way, perhaps, of assuaging its postcolonial guilt. The attitude might be summed up as: "We're very sorry about those three centuries of imperial subjugation. Got any sugar?"
In the end, in contrast to nineteenth-century Britain, it was neither a consumer revolt nor rival domestic lobbies that forced reform in the EU's sugar regime. The intractability of agricultural reform in wealthy countries reflects an odd dynamic. As countries become richer, they spend a lower proportion of income on food, and so the effect of artificially higher prices becomes less irksome to consumers. Had the sugar farmers managed to inflict serious damage on their economies and bring widespread inconvenience—as did the coal miners, who made Britain shiver in the dark by forcing a series of power shortages during the 1970s—they might well have provoked the backlash that the coal unions eventually faced.
When a loaf of bread costs, as it did in England in 1800, a quarter of a day's pay for a construction laborer, there will be riots when it doubles. When it takes, as it does in Britain today, about ten minutes' work at the minimum wage to buy one, fewer people will notice the cost to them of food subsidies. The EU Common Agricultural Policy is currently reckoned to cost an average family about a thousand euros a year—not negligible, but not enough to get them marching down the Champs-Elysees. No political party has been swept to power in Europe in recent times by promising to get tough on agriculture.
Nor are there very strong rival producer lobbies within the EU. Unlike the nineteenth-century textile magnates, no call center or software house is going to argue that expensive sugar is significantly cutting into its employees' standard of living. Meanwhile, food companies receive some official EU compensation for the higher cost of using European sugar. And when the food industry, which uses sugar as an input, tried to discuss the need for cutting its price, the sugar lobby was right on hand to block them. Within the British Food and Drink Federation, an industry association, sugar beet interests managed to stop the organization calling for cheaper sugar. Jonathan Peel, the director of European and international policy at the Federation at the time, and a descendant of the same family as Sir Robert, found it hard to replicate the success of his illustrious forebear. "I remember thinking that not much had changed in a hundred and seventy years," he told me. Ludicrously expensive sugar is a luxury that EU consumers and taxpayers could quite easily have afforded to retain.
What helped to force reform was a new phenomenon: complaints from a lobby overseas—Brazilian sugar growers—who had recourse to the World Trade Organization. They obtained a WTO ruling that the EU tariff and subsidy regime was illegal under