Tim Hartford

A lire sur le site de Tech Central Station, l'interview de Tim Hartford, éditorialiste au Financial Times et auteur de l'ouvrage "The Undercover Economist: Exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor, and why you can never buy a decent used car".

On y trouvera entre autres d'intéressantes considérations sur le lien entre subsides agricoles et pollution:

So you have got acres of fertile land in Guatemala that you could grow sugar there. But because of protectionism, the sugar is grown in Florida and the Everglades are destroyed. And meanwhile the Guatemalans are either growing coffee for basically nothing, or like the Columbians, they think, well, maybe we should grow cocaine instead.
Now this is not a good idea.
(...) The countries that have the highest trade barriers, Japan and Korea use so much fertilizer. Then it is the EU. They use a lot. American less, but you know they still have quite a lot of protectionism and they still use quite a lot of fertilizer.
And then countries like Brazil that don’t have a lot of agricultural protectionism don’t use much fertilizer either. And when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The protectionism is necessary because the land is not good. And the fertilizer is necessary because the land is not good. So free trade in agricultural products is -- well it’s good for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is it is good for the environment.

Sur l'influence néfaste du protectionnisme, Tim Hartford évoque l'exemple historique de la ville de Bruges,

(...) which was the richest city in Northwestern Europe, in the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries. And it was rich because of trade. People shipped goods from all over Europe. They were traded in Bruges. Bruges was the sight of the first stock exchange.
Tall ships sailed up and down the river’s (wind). And then one day the river Zwin started to silt up. And Bruges was cut off from the world economy and just didn’t change for 500 years. So this to the metaphor of what happens if the anti-globalizers get their wish. What happens if the protectionists get their wish? The river silts up. And basically all the trade moves to Antwerp.