Same thing happening Stateside. In the USA, Trump’s MAGA movement is increasingly vilifying immigrants from Mexico and Central America and beyond despite decades of overwhelming evidence of the benefits to the country from their participation in the American dream. This is a melting-pot nation founded on immigration and, as in the UK, it is hurtful to see the first or second generation descendants of immigrants pulling up the ladder behind them in such a cruel and hypocritical manner.
But it’s not just people but foreign animals that also get flak. In Europe, reeling from violent farmers’ protests in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and above all France (which is now in siege mode), foreign agricultural imports are being blamed for declining farm prices and a crisis in the countryside. The long-awaited Free Trade Agreement between the EU and the Mercosur bloc (twenty two years in the making and counting) seems to be an early victim of this welling discontent, with President Macron reportedly instructing the Commission to pull the Agreement, at least until the manure-littered streets of Paris quieten down and the European Parliament elections are over.
Imports, as so often the case, shoulder the blame, unjustly in the view of this author. Both the Commission’s and independent studies of the Mercosur Agreement showed that the volumes of beef and lamb from Argentina and Brazil will scarcely make a dent in European production or prices. And IF they were to there is in any case a robust safeguard measure in the Agreement that will kick in and reimpose a hefty tariff should imports affect prices.
But it is all too easy to blame foreigners – humans or cows – for domestic travails. Which is what the European farmers protesting have been doing. The unpalatable and undeniably sad reality is that some European production of beef and lamb lacks competitiveness despite (some would argue because of) decades of significant CAP subsidies. Lack of scale, high labour and input costs, under investment, stringent environmental and animal welfare conditions, prohibition of growth promoting hormones due to public antipathy, poor quality soil and grazing conditions, distance from markets, reduction in consumer demand for red meat, slaughterhouses and processors squeezing prices… these are the underlying difficulties faced by beef producers, not imports which represent no more than around 3% of the EU’s 8 million tons of production and consumption.
But it is easier to blame the outsider instead of introspection. The great Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy in his wondrous poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” told the story of a corrupt town whose townsfolk were sent out each night to the city walls hoping to see the arrival of the Barbarians. And every night they returned home disappointed as the Barbarians never showed up:
Why this restlessness now, this confusion?
People’s faces have turned so serious.
Why’s the square emptying?
Why’s everyone going home so upset?
Because its night and the barbarians haven’t come.
Some border men just in say
there are no barbarians any more.
So now? Without the barbarians what will become of us?
These barbarians were a sort of solution.
(tr. Desmond O’Grady)
Cavafy understood perfectly the human need to externalise one’s problems, to find a scapegoat. It’s the oldest trick in the political playbook. The third oldest profession. Beware.