| "Carney said this more isolationist approach, where there's a "world of fortresses," will make countries poorer, fragile and less sustainable. But it's coming nonetheless and Canada must work with like-minded allies where possible to push back against domination by larger, wealthier and well-armed countries." New trade relationships are being forged surprisingly quickly in the midst of all this. Anyone have a list of what's been recently announced? I can think of Mercator, EU-India, Canada-??... |
| Mercosur took 20 years to finalize and if it wasn't for recent unhingedness of American politics, I would expect it to get vetoed by special farmer interests in the last minute. But the threat became too big for that. But yeah, there will be some urgency now. In times of need, people find out that all the "necessary" bureaucracy isn't really that necessary. War or threat of war is the only thing stronger than red tape. (For an analogy, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany put most of its regulations aside to build some infrastructure for import of liquified gas in mere 6 weeks or so. The same infrastructure, under peace conditions, would take some 10 years to litigate against every NIMBY and eco-organization out there.) |
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| ▲ | docdeek 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Special farmer interests are about 25% of the entire EU budget (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20211118STO...). There are still farmer protests here in France every day against this deal. There will be a lot of pressure on French MEPs to vote against it when it goes to the EP for the final vote. | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >I would expect it to get vetoed by special farmer interests IDK man, I feel like supporting the local farming industry is a pretty important strategic move, even if it's a loss leader. We already offshored manufacturing, energy supply and IT to our "allies" in the past and it's biting us in the ass right now. Do we really want to repeat the same mistake again with food? | | |
| ▲ | inglor_cz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Everything is a trade-off. Farmers have a lot of influence in the EU. Personally, I think they are already too dominant, for historic reasons. And yes, I get that food is important. Maybe the answer would be to unburden them from European regulations, which are pretty onerous. The few people active in agriculture I know complain about insane paper wars with authorities all the time. One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count. Why are we doing this to ourselves, to 'secure our food'? | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >for historic reasons Yes. The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important going back since we were primordial organisms to medieval times when if peasants didn't have food they'd riot and behead the king. >European regulations, which are pretty onerous. Onerous regulations that seek to prevent ... checks notes ... the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment. But sure, let's bypass all that and import food from countries that use slave labor and toxic pesticides while the EU virtue signals on Twatter how their mission is protecting humans from racism and exploitation and saving the environment, but apparently apart from those in countries where we import our food from, there they can do whatever exploitation they want as long as they give us cheap stuff. It's not hypocritical at all. Definitely not gonna bite us in the ass in 10+ years time when the leader of one of those countries with a shaky track record on democracy and human rights, decides to weaponize our food dependence on them to gain some advantages or just mow down some more the Amazon for profit while killing the indigenous, and all the EU is gonna do is write a sternly worded X post about "carefully monitoring the situation" at best, or at worst turn a blind eye and pretend a genocide isn't happening, just like they did with Azerbaijan's bombing of Nagorno-Karabakh because they were now dependent on Azerbaijani gas after giving up on Russian gas in 2022. Stupid EU regulations or not, giving up sovereignty on energy and food supply to third parties is bad idea all of the time, because it's guaranteed to be weaponized against you at some point. >One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count. Sounds like a local council, conty or national issue to me, not an EU issue. | | |
| ▲ | izacus 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't know what you're arguing about here because the farmers in EU are aggressively fighting against regulation to curtail chemicals, environmental controls and minimum healthy food quality mandates. | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, and WHY are they doing that? Could it be because they can't fairly compete against imported products from countries where farmers DON'T have those regulations? |
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| ▲ | inglor_cz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important " So is, say, the need to defend yourself, but would you be happy about the military holding the same amount of de-facto power in the EU as the farmers do? Or would you consider it excessive? "the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment." So, there is no unnecessary regulation in your view? All of them are very virtuous and protect us all against horrible things? And as a consequence, the more, the better? If so, how come that their level can vary from country A to country B and yet country B doesn't suffer an epidemic of grisly deaths? Nope, not all regulations are necessary and not every one of them is virtuous and good. Some are just a byproduct of the office needing to show some activity and keeping their budget. "Sounds like a local council issue to me, not an EU issue." Because you are uninformed. She wasn't fined by the local council, which DGAF about an improvised shed with no fixed foundation. She was fined by authorities overseeing agricultural regulations, because that shed meant that she exceeded the allowed extent of her facilities for goats by half a square meter. (Five square feet for USians.) | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >So, there is no unnecessary regulation in your view? Why are you making it sound like the issue is binary? >Some are just a byproduct of the office needing to show some activity and keeping their budget. Agree. >She was fined by authorities overseeing agricultural regulations Were those authorities doing the inspection from the EU or the local nation? | | |
| ▲ | inglor_cz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Why are you making it sound like the issue is binary?" Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself. A bit of a motte-and-bailey. Some of them are undoubtedly good, some less so, and we shouldn't lobotomize ourselves by immediately dragging slavery out when starting discussions about the current regulatory level. "Were those authorities doing the inspection from the EU or the local nation?" EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law. It is very different from the US where state authorities aren't tasked by enforcing federal regulations, because the Feds have their own enforcement infrastructure. Compared to the US, EU-own enforcement infrastructure is tiny and mostly outsourced to local governments. | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself. I didn't mean it to be absolutist. But then riddle me this, if the EU regulations are the problem holding us back, why not get rid of some of them to boosts domestic production, and instead kneecap our agriculture industry with regulations and make ourselves dependent on imports from potential adversaries who don't follow our regulations? Because I don't see the logic behind this being an advantage for us. It makes the EU incompetent at best, or malicious at workst. >EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law. Yeah but enforcement is still local. A lot of countries choose to be very lax with enforcing some EU laws if the laws are stupid and nobody's getting hurt. So ultimately it's still the fault of the local nation for being overly pedantic with enforcement. Blaming EU laws for local issues, is the ultimate cope the UK also tried, and once they left the EU, their problems persisted, because guess what, their issues were all domestically inflicted by local politics and not coming from the EU as they claimed. |
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| ▲ | SllX 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 20 years and counting. The Mercosur deal still needs to pass the EU Parliament, and it’s not scheduled to come up for at least a few months. The EU’s Parliament is also nearly split down the middle on the deal which means there’s still about a 50/50 it fails, maybe 51/49 or 52/48 in its favor at the moment, but it is very close and still has about as much chance of passing as not passing at this juncture. |
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