Our insistence has long been that the best way to reduce poverty is to buy things made by poor people in poor countries. Many have told us we’re wrong, this is just economic colonialism, the expansion of global capitalism into a new imperialist phase, exploitation and, well, any other word salad that can be thrown together for a Guardian column.

Now we’re told that the absence of our purchases is causing problems:

According to UN estimates, half a billion people, or 8% of the world’s population, could be pushed into destitution by the year’s end, largely due to the pandemic. The fight against poverty would be set back 30 years.

The crisis could produce famines of “biblical proportions”, with the number of people facing hunger almost doubling to more than 250 million, the World Food Programme (WFP) said. Shortfalls in donor funding and food aid meant 30 million people could die within a matter of months, it added.

Vanishing demand, collapsed distribution chains, and disrupted export markets are pushing people to the brink, affecting groups as diverse as Ethiopian and Kenyan flower producers, Sri Lankan tea-growers, and Bangladeshi garment workers whose contracts have reportedly been cancelled by UK supermarkets.

We should do that rare thing, take a Guardian column seriously. The absence of those purchases is causing poverty. It must therefore be true that the purchases, when they were happening, reduced poverty.

We were right all those years, the way to reduce poverty is to buy things made by poor people in poor countries. This also gives us our policy template for the future. Abolish all restrictions - tariffs, quotas, simply declare unilateral free trade - on purchasing from said poor. In that manner we will maximise our own ability to purchase things made by poor people in poor countries and thus reduce poverty.

We do want to reduce poverty, don’t we? Therefore we must have free trade.