EU likes starving Africans

It’s a feature of any unelected bureaucracy that it can never admit to having made a mistake, however overwhelming the evidence of that bureaucracy’s stupidity. For half a century, the EU Common Fisheries Policy has led to a million tons of edible fish a year being thrown back dead into the sea. That 50 million tons could have fed a lot of people. But an even worse outrage is the EU’s politically correct demand that countries increase the amount of biofuel in cars and lorries. Soon about a third of farming production will be used, not for food, but to make petrol. This is causing food scarcity and prices to rocket – the price of corn has doubled in a year. The UN has called the EU biofuels policy “a crime against humanity”.

In the rich West, we can cope with rising food prices as food only makes up a small part of our spending. In Africa, where food can take as much as half a family’s income, massive price rises are catastrophic. The EU biofuels policy needs to be scrapped. But that would mean the well-paid, well-fed�bureaucrats admitting they had made a mistake. They’d rather a few million deaths from starvation in Africa than�concede that�their policy was a disaster.