EU Referendum has an interesting pair of articles on EU sugar subsidies and EU "charity".

Now why, I can hear you asking yourself dear reader, would I want to read an article about sugar subsidies?

Allow me to 'splain...

In certain situations, farmers find that they traditional business (growing beet sugar, for example) becomes threated by business from other countries. There are two basic kinds of answers to this problem.

One is to tell the farmers you're sorry about the situation and they'll have to find something else to do with their land and time. Another one is to take money from everyone (taxpayers, anyway) and pay them a bit more than their cost is worth.

In other words, if product X costs $1 per unit on the open market, and a farmer needs $3 per unit to make a profit, you force the taxpayers to pay the farmer an extra $2 per unit he produces.

Meanwhile, if there is more of X than anyone needs locally, the government will then turn around, as France has done with sugar, and "dump" the excess on the open market at cut-rate prices. Say, $0.95 in our example.

As a proponent of free trade (or more accurately, my own version of 'fair trade"), I view trade as one of God's ways of helping poor people lift themselves out of poverty and better their situation. Very often it is these poorer nations which are the perfect place to produce cotton, or sugar, or many other products. When France "dumps" excess product onto the market -- illegally, in this case -- they are preventing many of these poor people from making a living and plunging many into poverty.

Hence the hypocrisy of government aid, given to the central authorities, which seldom makes its way to those who need it most. In the end, such practices take money out of the poorest people in other countries, put it in the pockets of French bureaucrats, who then given a fraction of it back to the rules of said poor nations.

Hene the title, "A Rapacious Predator".

And yes, the US has subsidies on cotton also, which I also oppose, but as far as I know, the US hasn't been found guiltly of overproduction and dumping.