“For the first time in history, European society is subsidizing the establishment of an unfavorable unequal exchange”

Tribune. The Brussels Commission and the European governments massively subsidize the production of field crops, cereals and oilseed crops, mainly intended for feeding farm animals. An increasing share of the products of this breeding is exported to countries like China. In short, the European taxpayer partially subsidizes the Chinese worker. It would not matter much, and could even be equated with solidarity – the charitable work of feeding the world – if, on the other hand, Europe did not increasingly buy high added value manufactured products from China. .

This trade situation where one of the parties exports food or forestry products with low added value and imports manufactured products with high added value, economists and historians of colonialism know well: it is called “unequal trade”. . Adam smith [1723-1790] already observed that the Netherlands, the richest country of the time, “Do not produce enough to feed their inhabitants; their wealth consists in the industry and the skill of their manufacturing craftsmen, in a multitude of machines and instruments of all kinds, adapted to facilitate and shorten the work, in their ships and in all the paraphernalia which increases the means transport and trade ”.

In fact, the industrialization and development of trade in North-West Europe in the 18th century^e century were accompanied, in central and eastern Europe, by a second serfdom for the benefit of the large Prussian, Polish and Russian landowners exporting wheat to the West and importing luxury products. A fine example of the divergence of interests between the cereal complex – the large landowners – and the rest of the population, reduced to serfdom …

Exported pollution

In a more general way, the European colonial empires are, par excellence, a mode of organization of the forced unequal exchange, the metropolis attributing to itself the monopoly of the manufacturing production with high value and destining its colonies to the production of low value biomass. This does not mean, however, that the ecological or social situation of the metropolis was satisfactory. In 19th century Britain^e century, at the height of the pax britannica, the smog – urban air pollution – and slums – the districts of the poor proletarians – were the counterpart of the famines in India. It is the same today for China. With unequal economic exchange comes unequal ecological exchange.

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