Robert Zoellick isn’t the only man who thinks the best way out of the current food crisis is yet more of the same policies that got us into it. Stephen Pollard over at The Spectator believes this too.
As my good friend Chris Brooke has charted over the years, Mr Pollard believes a number of absurd things. Throughout them all, a common denominator can be found: an inclination for prejudice over evidence.
So let’s have a look at a country that has done exactly as Mr Pollard would have wanted, stripping away all its protections and exposing it to the glories of the free market in all its key food commodities.
The country looks like this:
Haiti is the posterchild for Mr Pollard’s ideas on free trade. The consequence of their adoption is that Haitians are taking to the streets.
A reader sends this harrowing report of protests in Haiti. It would seem that the country’s policy-makers need something a little more substantive than free-trade dogma. As Dan Davies eloquently puts it “the great thing about the market mechanism, of course, is that when it kills a million people, it doesn’t leave fingerprints.”