The latest environmental demand - don’t trade with poor people

We do - no really, we do - wonder what goes through minds like these:

UK urged not to exploit poor countries in rush for critical minerals

Civil society groups call on government to address risk of neocolonial exploitation in its supply chain strategy

So, umm, how’s that going to work then?

The new strategy, they say, must clearly differentiate between minerals needed for the energy transition, and commit to limiting extraction and the principles of the circular economy.

We must produce as few well paid jobs in poor countries as possible. We should buy as little as possible from poor people in poor countries. We should contribute as little as possible to the government budgets of poor countries - everyone does get mineral royalties after all - and in general we should make the poor better off by reducing our trade with poor people to the absolute minimum possible. Instead we should employ already rich people in already rich countries to recycle more expensively.

Because buying stuff from willing sellers is neocolonialism.

Wholly and totally in opposition to Madsen Pirie’s - he of this parish - insistence that we buy things made by poor people in poor countries as the best way to enrich them.

We find it very difficult to grasp the mindsets that insist upon continued poverty in those poor places. But there it is, that’s the demand from “civil society”. The only assumption that seems to make sense to us is that too many fear that if poverty were actually solved - as globalisation and the spread of capitalist free marketry threatens to do - then where would be the justification for the overthrow of the system? Some of the Teenage Trots insist that the overthrow is the thing rather than any solution to poverty. Which does strike us as being a bit cart before horse to be honest.

Anyone with other ideas of what’s driving this is welcome to try to convince us. But do note - we do actually understand critical minerals, their markets and the mining of. Having worked in the sector which puts us rather further up the information ladder than much of “civil society”.

Tim Worstall