WE’VE NEVER SEEN THE CASE FOR A GLOBAL DEPRESSION PUT QUITE THIS ELEGANTLY

The chocolate biccie paradox (Larry Elliot, The Guardian, April 15th, 2006)

The Germans make the cars, the Italians make the clothes, the French make the wine, the British make the pharmaceuticals - and then they all buy and sell from each other.

That's the way international trade is supposed to work. Each country specialises in what it does best, sells its produce on the world market and uses the money raised to buy things it can't make efficiently for itself.

That's the theory. According to the UK Interdependence Report, it doesn't quite work out that way in practice.

Take chocolate-covered biscuits (of the small pack variety). Each year the UK exports 1,145 tonnes of these delicacies to the Germans. The Germans, meanwhile, export 1,728 tonnes to us. Or how about chocolate-covered waffles and wafers, again in easy to handle, snack packs. The government's own data shows that in 2004 17,240 tonnes left these shores, passing en route the 17,590 tonnes coming in the other direction.

And so it goes on. The British poultry industry sent 5,417 tonnes of fresh, boneless chicken cuts across the Channel to France in 2004, and the French sent 3,952 tonnes back to us. We export more than 10,000 tonnes of milk and cream from the lush pastures of southern England; we import virtually the same from the cows chewing the cud in northern France.

NEF says there is a serious side to the statistic showing that the 465 tonnes of gingerbread coming into the country is matched by the 460 tonnes leaving these shores. It argues that the environmental impact of "lorries passing in the night" is not included in the price of goods in the shops, and that much of the trade that is going on is actually ecologically wasteful.

"Shipping vast quantities of identical goods backwards and forwards around the world matters for three big reasons," said Andrew Simms of NEF. "First, it's a towering monument to economic and environmental inefficiency, as meaningless and wasteful as a job-creation scheme that pays people to shift a pile of rocks from one end of a worksite to another and back again.

"More profoundly, it matters because we face upheaval from potentially irreversible climate change due, in large part, to the burning of fuel, whilst at the same time there is rising conflict over access to dwindling oil supplies. The third reason is that a global economy built on, and blind to, its own fossil fuel dependence simply cannot survive in its current form."

So, we need a really, really big central planning agency like GOSPLAN to sort this all out. For more cutting edge economic genius from the left, see here.