Yesterday's International Herald Tribune contained a piece examining exactly what's behind the French intransigence which is currently threatening the future of the Doha trade round. Extract below:-


For those living outside France, there is puzzlement over the French government's vehement defense of its farmers, who today make up just 3.5 percent of its population.

French production of milk, beef and wine, among other farm products, brings in billions of euros every year.

But in the context of the modern French economy they add up to very little.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calculates that 2.7 percent of France's economy is devoted to agriculture.

So what is behind France's resistance?

Soudé says France is opposed to any measure that could jeopardize the Common Agricultural Policy, the European system of subsidies and regulations.

"France always had a special link to agriculture and to the terroir," he said.

"We have a relationship with food that is not the same in other European Union countries. We have a culture of good eating, which we treasure."

There is also the obvious fact that France receives almost 10 billion, or $12 billion, in agricultural subsidies from Brussels every year, by far the largest share of the 53 billion program.
[...]
But there is also a curious aspect to the French position that suggests the controversy is more about pride than economics.

The main points of contention in the WTO trade negotiations are the tariffs that the European Union imposes on a long list of agricultural products.

Yet many of these tariffs are unnecessary because parts of European agriculture are competitive enough to stand on their own, according to Stefan Tangermann, head of the agricultural division of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and one of the leading experts on the common agricultural policy.

"In economic terms, the EU doesn't need these tariffs as much as they did in the past," Tangermann said.

"I don't really think for many of the products that Europe produces - wheat, cheeses, fresh milk, yogurt, a good part of beef production - that there is huge room for imports. Europe's farmers are reasonably competitive."

Tangermann also says the deal that the EU is proposing - but that France opposes - would not put many farmers in jeopardy.

"The offer that the EU has put on the table is not an order of magnitude that would fundamentally undermine the viability of farmers in the European Union," he said.


Far be it from me to downplay the pleasures of a glass of good vin rouge accompanied by a hefty chunk of camembert, but to taunt the poor of the world with metaphorical cries of "Let them eat brie!" is beyond grotesque. Pass me the "free trade" fries - it's time to declare war on terroir.

David Cameron has in a matter of weeks emerged from virtual obscurity outside the Westminster village to become the heir apparent to the Conservative throne. It is difficult not to be perplexed when one looks for the substance behind this rise. His lack of political experience and ideological unerpinnings lead to the conclusion that Cameron has been anointed as the Tory chosen one merely on the basis of a media image which is potentially attractive to the floating voter.

David Aaronovitch in yesterday's Times attempted to tackle this analysis by hunting out the substance behind the Cameron image. Aaronovitch seemed to get some solace from this exercise, but to me it seemed to confirm the suspicion that the Tories see in Cameron nothing more or less than the second coming of Tony Blair.

Among the meagre crumbs of comfort put forward by Aaronovitch are the following:-

The Boy David wants to continue the expansion of higher education, not the contraction back to “proper university courses” so beloved of many on the Right and not a few on the Left. To fund that expansion he wants the Conservatives to support, and even extend, variable top-up fees. Public service spending comes before any tax-cutting imperative: “We will never get good schools, universities, hospitals, transport or police on the cheap.” The key is reform. Reform in the shape of co-payment, where Cameron endorses road pricing as a way to deal with congestion, and in “good ideas like Foundation Hospitals and City Academies”, which Labour failed to press ahead with because of their own party’s conservatism.

So, the Cameron strategy of opposition with regard to public service provision would seem to be to criticise the Labour party for not being Blairite enough. What is needed, this would seem to imply, is for Blairism to migrate to its natural home: a David Cameron-led Conservative party in opposition to a Gordon Brown-led Labour party.

Aaronovitch's attempt to substantiate the Cameron world-view continues with his reaction to the War in Iraq.

By August this year, and with the Iraq war less popular than ever, Cameron made a speech to the Foreign Policy Centre. Before the war started, he said: “I had my concerns about the scale of what is being attempted.” He preferred deterrence to pre-emption, multilateralism to unilateral action, and was worried about the chances of success.

Then comes a passage of analysis about the global threat that might have been written by Paul Wolfowitz or Tony Blair, rather than Douglas Hurd or Ken Clarke. “Jihadism,” Cameron said, “feeds into the bewilderment, alienation and lack of progress felt by many in the Muslim world. The corruption of many states in the Middle East. The lack of democracy. The concentration of power in the hands of elites whose lifestyles are noticeably un-Islamic.” In other words, until those regimes are democratised, we will always be at risk from fundamentalism. So, we in Britain, “share a responsibility . . . to promote change, reform and liberalisation”.

Cameron, in his own write, is a reforming neocon. Here’s a passage worth quoting to anyone who says they don’t know who he is. “Just as there were figures in the 1930s who misunderstood the totalitarian wickedness of Nazism and argued that Hitler had a rational set of limited political demands, so there are people today who try to explain jihadist violence with reference to a limited set of political goals. If only, some argue, we withdrew from Iraq, or Israel made massive concessions, then we would assuage jihadist anger. That argument . . . is as limited as the belief in the 1930s that, by allowing Germany to remilitarise the Rhineland or take over the Sudetenland, we would satisfy Nazi ambitions. A willingness to cede ground and duck confrontation is interpreted as fatal weakness.”

If this makes David Cameron a neocon, then does it not also make IDS, Michael Howard, and for that matter Tony Blair, neocons as well? Cameron, like many Tories and not a few Labour MPs, happened to support the Iraq War. The last time I checked, supporting one conflict did not define Neoconservatism. I have a feeling that David Davis would fit the neocon bill just as well if not better than Cameron.

Aaronovitch's attempts to put some skin on the bones of Cameron's political ideology are fruitless and beside the point. The Conservative Party would appear to have reached the same point as Labour in the early '90s, where pride and belief in the efficacy of past policies have been replaced with a predominant view that if you can't beat them, you need to find a way to join them. One can expect under Cameron a similar focus group-influenced search for the right package of image and policies to recapture the middle ground from Labour. Ideology will be replaced with expediency as the Conservatives attempt to learn the lessons from the Labour media machine.

The question remains whether Cameron and co. will be able to match the incisiveness and drive achieved by New Labour. Tony Blair had considerably more experience on the front bench than Cameron when he came to lead his party, and although the Tories currently appear more unified and motivated than they have since the '80s Thatcher era, Cameron will need to maintain the loyalty of the right-wing of the party, just as New Labour managed with the Left-wingers, in exchange for a serious tilt at Government.

Good to be back!

Skeptical Enquirer this month includes a Q&A session from the archives with Carl Sagan. I am not greatly familiar with Sagan's writings, but find it interesting that such an enthusiastic proponent of the idea of the abundance of intelligent life throughout the universe should have been so readily accepted by an organisation such as CSICOP. OK, he may have been an ardent critic of pseudoscience, but his publication of a novel about alien contact must have raised a number of eyebrows among his fellow skeptics. I have never thought of CSICOP as a particularly broad church, but maybe I should think again.

The question of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe inevitably raises its head in the Q&A session, when a member of the audience raises the following question:-

It seems that [for us]as skeptics, there’s an argument that seems very disappointing and maybe a bit persuasive in the Fermi paradox, the idea that if civilizations were to arise at any significant level, that even given a very extremely slow rate of expansion in the galaxy, that there’s been more than enough time for them to have populated the galaxy several times over. What’s your view on the Fermi paradox?

Sagan's answer is as follows:

The Fermi paradox essentially says, as you said, that if there’s extraterrestrial high technology intelligence anywhere they should have been here because if they travel at the speed of light, the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. The galaxy is 10 billion years old, they should be here. And if you say you can’t travel at the speed of light, take a tenth of the speed of light, a hundredth of the speed of light, still much less than the age of the galaxy. William Newman and I published a paper on this very point, in which we point out: Imagine there is a civilization that has capable interstellar spacecraft and now they start exploring. What are we talking about? That they’re sending out 400 billion spacecraft, all at once, simultaneously, to every star in the galaxy? Not at all. Interstellar space flight is going to be hard, you’re going to go slow, you’re going to go to the nearest star systems first, you’re going to explore those stars. It is not a straight line but a diffusion question. And when you do the diffusion physics with the appropriate diffusivity, that is, the time to random walk, there are many cases in which the time for an advanced civilization to fully explore the galaxy in the sense of visiting every star system is considerably longer than the age of the galaxy. It’s just a bad model, we claim, the straight line, dedicated exploration of every star in the galaxy.

The Fermi Paradox is indeed a significant stumbling block for those positing the existence of life elsewhere in the galaxy. The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a cause celebre for Sagan, has spent decades scouring the sky for the a tell-tale radio wave which may indicate the existence of remote intelligence, but without success.

Sagan's answer may have some merit, but skips over a number of other (in my mind) more convincing solutions to this puzzle. It is interesting, for example, to think that when SETI began its search, the assumption was made that any intelligent civilisation would be bound to transmit radio waves as part of their communication systems. However, even on earth communications are already rapidly moving towards digital optical networks and away from radio waves. How long will it be before earth itself is undetectable from space? A counter-argument may well be that travel through space would required the use of radio technology, but the idea that remote civilisations will be roaming space is perhaps a romanticised one. It surprises me how scientific supporters of these arguments so readily assume that the limits imposed by the speed of light will be irrelevant to such cultures. If one were to stand on Einstein's side of the fence, there may not be much in the aliens' back yard to be worth exploring after a while.

Perhaps the most depressing, and perhaps most compelling, arguments however relates to the shelf-life of any life-form which has tamed science to such a point where it can use technologies the like of which have been developed on Earth. With the capacity for space travel comes almost inevitably the power of potential self-destruction. Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, gloomily gives mankind only around a 50/50 chance of making it through the next 100 years. In a celebrated article in Wired magazine, Sun Microsystems guru Bill Joy argued that the 21st century heralded new unprecedented risks to civilisation. In addition to our old nuclear, chemical and biological bugbears come the novel threats of self-replicating genetic, nanotechnological and robotic apocalypses.

So perhaps civilisations we seek are predominantly snuffed out before we can detect them. In any case, the light years between us would mean that by the time we see each other a response would likely reflect on dusty remains. Still, it would perhaps be of some small consolation before we go up in smoke to discover that we are not all alone after all...