Bag's Rants

UK in second place for something.

Of course it is not for anything good. It seems we are second place after the US for "ecological debt". This is where a country runs out of it's own natural resources and has to import them. It seem today, April 16th, is the day for the UK. That means for the rest of the year we are importing and not living off the land. This, of course, is bad.

This sounds a lot worse than it is. When you read the text they give examples, from 2004, of this debt. I copy these from the article.
1) The UK exported 1,500 tonnes of fresh potatoes to Germany, and imported 1,500 tonnes of the same product from the same country
2) Imported 465 tonnes of gingerbread, but exported 460 tonnes of the same produce
3) Sent 10,200 tonnes of milk and cream to France, yet imported 9,900 tonnes of the dairy goods from France

Now I don't know about you but when I want examples I want to see some humdingers. The worst of the worst. The real cases that highlight the situation. Saddam is not on trial for fiddling his taxes for example.

When I look at these. I think they are all caused by the EU and it's policies. We don't grow food because we don't want to add to some EU mountain and in fact get paid to not grow things. The debt would not be significant if it wasn't for our policies. From their examples, Item 1, does not exist. Of course we are converting King Edwards to King Wilhelms or whatever in this case. Item 2 imports would start on December the 28th if we kept our own¹ and, item 3, if we didn't burn all our cows within 2 parsecs of where one tripping on something we would be self sufficient there as well but even the example has us starting imports on December the 20th. So all in all a totally meaningless report. Just proving how you can say anything with statistics.

Read more here about how this meaningless measure is intended to be a yardstick for world health. More money for the boys and, only slightly, more useful than an analysis on why toast falls butter side down.

One thing that it doesn't say is that all this wasteful moving about of everyday foodstuffs means that the cost of gingerbread goes up because of a government policy. 1 tonne of gingerbread moving from the UK to France and 1 tonne of gingerbread moving from Germany to the UK means no difference to the gingerbread but now we have to pay fuel costs, other transport costs and import duties. So the only ones who benefit from all this are the government. Why am I not surprised to see this?

1) Based the the total imports if we didn't export. Total use divided by 365 to give how many per day. Then how many days imports. Thus gingerbread. Imported 465. Export 460. Total imported = 5. Total use per day = 465/365 = 1.2. Thus 5 tonnes at 1.2 pd = 4 days. That makes it December 28th we would have to start importing. It's only ballpark figures though.

posted by Bag @ 12:24 pm