When Irish farmers break the law, the leaders of the Irish Farmers Association start speaking Martian. Or something. Maybe Jupiterian. Whatever it is, it's not English as she is spoke, writes Kevin Myers.
The following paragraph is in English. Hundreds of farmers blockaded Drogheda port over the weekend to prevent a consignment of English wheat from being off-loaded from the merchantman Arklow Sky. The blockade was ended when the importer agreed to put the wheat into storage immediately, rather than selling it on the Irish market.
The following paragraph is in Martian. Mostly. The IFA national grain committee chairman Paddy Harrington said the wheat would be released onto the market when it would not distort the market price. Furthermore, an IFA spokesman said that the wheat was not low-cost, as first thought, but an expensive load which would have a depressive effect on the market.
Gibberish
Take a pair of scissors and cut that paragraph into pieces, then shove the words around as you like. Released market furthermore load effect not Harrington wheat that low- the spokesman expensive distort first would market have market when wheat . . . et cetera. Doesn't make sense, does it? Well it makes more sense than the gibberish being uttered by the IFA. But of course, monopolists always speak through their bottoms when asked to justify their conspiracies against the public; and normally they get away with it, because to question their gibberish suggests a failure to understand the principles of economics.
It's as it another IFA, the Irish Fireman's Association, were to declare: "The reason why we put paraffin in our hose-tanks is because rapid combustion of all burnable materials ends the fire more quickly." Or the Irish Fisherman's Association declaring that having fish for sale distorts the market for fish.
Here is the decoding machine for agricultural IFA-Martian. "Distort the market price" simply means "will lower the price". Similarly, a "depressive effect on the market" means an increase in price, and therefore a reduction in demand. The consignment at Drogheda was, apparently, going to do both at the same time. Lethal stuff, this imported wheat.
Ignoring for the moment the simultaneous movement of the market in two opposite directions, basically the IFA is saying that price movement either up or down in the market-place is a bad thing. But price movement defines a market. A market which does not permit prices to rise and fall is not a market at all but the very opposite, a cartel. Calling a cartel a market is like pointing at a boulder in a cave and insisting it's a skylark.
So all the IFA implications that high prices "depress" the market and low ones "distort" it sound like Martian, but in fact they're the gobbledegook of subsidised monopolists everywhere. And the reason for the outcry now about imported wheat is that Irish wheat is being harvested, and the IFA wants to ensure optimum "market" conditions for it at the point of sale; so they rig this bogus "market", with a bit of dockside bullying thrown in for good measure.
Rigged markets
Frankly, it really wouldn't matter one way or another if the real "loser" in the rigged market which is no market at all were some other subsidised monopolist in Lincolnshire. But of course, rigged markets work against everyone, apart from those who rig it - against those buying the produce (us) and against those not allowed to sell in it.
The really big losers in the EU cartel are the third world agricultural producers who can't break into the EU cartel - just one more reason to pray for enlargement of the EU so that the CAP (the Criminal Anti-competition Policy) becomes economically unsustainable.
Morally, it is already. The EU, thanks to its subsidies and quotas, has a sugar mountain the size of the Pyrenees. Poland produces 2 million tons of sugar beet a year, which with enlargement will add an Alp to the Sliamh Siúcra of Europe.
Meanwhile, unsubsidised sugar producers in economically backward countries such as Thailand, Brazil, and Mozambique, with their teaming masses of poor, can't sell their cane sugar in Europe, even though it's better, cheaper sugar.
Mozambique, emerging from decades of war, is expected to lose €1 million euro in exports because of an EU protectionism which almost certainly drives an entire convoy of beet-laden juggernauts through World Trade Organisation rules. The EU compensates for this with aid and debt relief - thereby creating a cycle of dependency by which one group of governments suckle a third-world government in order to keep inefficient farmers in Europe on the land while another set of farmers - efficient ones - are wiped out in Africa.
Now: does this make you feel ashamed? If not, then you've probably taken refuge in IFA monobabble - Released market first depress load effect! Furthermore, not Harrington wheat that low- the spokesman! Thought still, expensive distort when as wheat! And that boulder there is going to leap into the sky and break into song, any moment.
Cupidity and stupidity
Europe is not alone in combining cupidity with stupidity. The US broke all its own rules in declaring tariffs and subsidies to protect its wretchedly incompetent cotton industry. This wouldn't matter so much if the only sufferers were the cotton consumers and taxpayers of the US, but alas, the ripples of protectionism spread far indeed. Burkina Faso's cotton industry is now being wiped out by US policy.
So what we saw in Drogheda wasn't just our colourful farmers indulging their ancestral taste for agrarian disorder while alongside them the IFA babbled in tongues: it was part of a rich man's conspiracy against the poor of the earth.