Susan George is an author, Board Chair of the Transnational Institute, and Honorary President of Attac-France. This article is part of the Transnational Institute’s ongoing research in EU Trade Policy. (Photo: William Hamon/Flickr) (Photo in text: Susan George, Raimond Spekking, Wkipedia commons) Let us ask an apparently simple question: Is outmigration from “South” to “North” on such a scale a “normal” phenomenon? Young people especially want to travel, but few, given the choice, would choose permanently to leave their countries, familiar landscapes, food, childhoods, families, friends, memories, languages....without serious motives. They would especially not risk their lives and gamble their futures in order to cross the borders or reach the shores of Europe, only to be confronted—in case of success— with the life of a marginal “sans papiers”, an undocumented person facing menial, ill-paid jobs, precarious living conditions, crowded substandard housing, no civil rights, possible imprisonment and deportation, racism, xenophobia.... Should we not therefore accept at least the hypothesis that mass migration is not “normal”; that migration candidates would, more often than not, avoid it if they had other options; that the “push factors” causing people to leave their home countries in such numbers require much closer examination than they have so far received? Among such factors should we not also accept the hypothesis that, in the case of Europe, its own policies may have more than a little to do with out-migration? On one hand we are confronted almost daily with the evidence of increasingly desperate people willing to undertake harrowing, dangerous, long-distance journeys. On the other hand, virtually all the literature stresses that migration to Europe iscaused by “poverty” or “socio-economic deterioration of the situation” at home; or “the growing gap” between North and South. These serve as handy, catch-all explanations. More sophisticated analyses may point also to the lack of security in countries torn by civil strife; improved communications and information systems that give an unrealistic picture of life in the rich countries; social solidarity networks established by and with previous immigrants; the fairly recent emergence of an entire industry of commercial, usually criminal, people-trafficking enterprises devoted to recruiting and smuggling migrants across international borders and so on. Analyses that invoke “poverty”, “deterioration” and “gaps” do not seem to consider it their business to ask why these should exist on such a vast scale—such scourges are somehow just there. In the case of such a major policy preoccupation for European governments and European citizens as migration, surely it is worth examining seriously the impact of EU policies on population movements. Surely experience so far shows that the securitypolice approach is at best partial; at worst a failure and that root causes have not necessarily been identified, much less taken into consideration and dealt with. European decision-makers of all political persuasions recognise that migratory flows from South to North constitute a problem area. These decision- makers should welcome more precise knowledge and assessment of the impact of European policies not merely on Southern governments, but also on the lives of communities and the vast majority of Southern populations that constitute the human pool from which migration springs. With such knowledge, they could at least decide whether maintaining this or that policy was worth the “boomerang effect” of provoking increased migratory attempts or whether Europe would be better off abandoning it. Ideally, the overarching goal of European policy towards the sending countries should be that of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm”. A courageous research programme has the duty to assess such harm, if it exists, and if so, to devise means to eliminate it and replace it with positive approaches. Nothing could improve the stature of the European Union with its Southern partners more than this. It is true that Europe, like any other political entity, has many constituencies to satisfy as well as many economic and political interests and cannot be expected to abandon them. Some of these constituencies and interests may, however, be quite limited in importance and of short-term value only. They could and should be replaced by the approach once known as “enlightened self-interest” which deserves a revival. The key areas of European policies to examine concern debt and structural adjustment, trade as well as tariff structures; subsidies, commodity prices; fisheries, the impact of European transnational corporations; Economic Partnership Agreements [EPAs]. Debt Despite modest reductions, outflows from South to North remain a heavy burden on Southern countries and hamper their development. Research must quantify this burden and assess the current value—including monetary and non-monetary value— of reimbursement to individual EU countries and to the EU as a whole. What is the level of funds “sterilised by debt repayments and therefore unavailable for development? What are the real impacts of debt-induced structural adjustment packages, particularly the privatisation of public services and export-orientation, particularly of agriculture? The debt “crisis” is in fact a chronic illness and ideally the EU should, with the help of research, devise a quick, clean, democratic, non-bureaucratic, corruptionfree, “once-for-all” plan that can put an end to a problem that has festered for over a quarter century. We already know that debt cancellation is affordable. Research would need to examine the amounts owed to specific EU countries and the total amount over which Europe could have an influence [including sums still owed to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, where 30% of the voting stock gives Europe plenty of influence ]. Many argue that debt cancellation would simply lead to renewed indebtedness. One can, however, show— although research on these aspects is still thin—that when debt cancellation does occur, the money is on the whole well-used, for schools, clinics, immunisation, access to water… The EU, if it were to require that African governments associate their own people in the choice of priorities for spending the money freed up by cancellation, could insure that savings on debt repayments were wisely used everywhere. Debt cancellation ought nor normally to create huge numbers of jobs in the LDCs as well as allowing for much higher spending on health, education and other necessities. It would contribute to job creation in Europe as well, as former debtor countries began to be able to spend on capital goods, rather than on economically sterile interest payments. Commod ity price s and trade One of the most perverse impacts of debt is the export syndrome. All the indebted countries must earn hard currency to pay the interest owed and must therefore export. Particularly in Africa, indebted countries tend to export the same narrow range of primary products with the result that they produce more than markets can absorb and thus push down prices for everyone. Commodity prices have been declining since the 1970s. Lower prices paradoxically encourage overproduction because countries strive to keep their income stable by exporting even more. Although China’s purchases have recently improved the prices of primary products somewhat, particularly for metals, the declines for cash crops have been consistent. In 2005, a Ugandan coffee farmer received 14 cents a kilo for beans; the coffee in a UK supermarket eventually cost the consumer $26.40/kilo. European tariffs are low to non-existent for raw materials but high when goods are processed in the producer countries into more elaborate goods. Poor countries cannot compete in processing their own commodities so long as they face these high barriers. The European “Everything but Arms” policy has been a positive step which could inspire further beneficial changes. European trade policies and exports to Africa Subsidies in the North can contribute to ruining small farmers. EU agricultural production is subsidised in the amount of about a billion euros a day. What proportion of those subsidies relates to products exported to African markets at prices below true costs of production? We need to know much more about the impact of European trade on small farmers and nascent industries in Africa, particularly the dumping of subsidised products. A few studies, particularly on dairy products, tomatoes and poultry, indicate that exports from Europe at unbeatably low prices have decimated local producers and processing industries [e.g. tomato paste production in Ghana]. Although there is significant literature concerning NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement—and its impact on Mexican farmers, there seems to be little on EU impacts on African farmers. European Union officials will probably be aware of persistent criticism of the EU’s present trade policies, whether in the WTO or in the various bilateral/multilateral agreements and EPAs [Economic Partnership Agreements], all of which contain detailed investment, raw-material access and government procurement provisions. The overwhelming bias towards the interests of European transnational corporations and the latter’s influence over EU trade policy seems in little doubt. EPAs have been challenged by a few African countries [Senegal, South Africa] but most are acquiescing and the Caribbean group of the ACP countries has already signed a full agreement. The least the Commission could do would be to sponsor monitoring of the actual behaviour and impact of European transnational corporations, particularly raw-material extractors, in the migrant-sending countries. Several Latin American NGOs and researchers are at the moment studying the impact of European transnational coorporations in Central and Latin America. Fisheries The fish catch along the western coast of Africa has plummeted and small fisherman can no longer make a living. Many say that the depletion of stocks is due to overfishing by European industrial trawlers. Small fishermen are known to be selling their boats to the people-smuggling rings that use them to try to take migrants to the Canaries. The situation may be similar for countries bordering the Mediterranean. Considerations During and after the decolonisation process, formerly colonised and/ or dependent countries produced many brilliant and charismatic leaders (present at Bandung and beyond….). These countries formed political groups like the Non-aligned Movement or the G-77. From the 1970s in particular, they called for a New International Economic Order; various UN documents like the 1981 “Brandt Report” seconded many of their demands. It looked for a time as if there might finally be a fairer distribution of wealth in the world and greater opportunity for emerging nations. The North was obliged at least to pay lip-service to the demands emerging from a newly confident South. In 1974 at the FAO Rome World Food Conference, Henry Kissinger (fresh from engineering the coup in Chile) intoned that “Within a decade, no child will go to bed hungry, no family will fear for its next day’s bread…” Other conferences followed and the South thought, with some justification, that it was making progress. Gradually, however, the North, led by the United States, brought the situation back under control. Other dictatorships besides that of Pinochet were introduced and supported by the North and former colonisers often underpinned undemocratic and repressive regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Jamaica in 1981, the newly elected president Ronald Reagan put a stop to the process of a New International Economic Order and greater autonomy once and for all. The European Union as a comparatively new political entity has the opportunity to break with this inglorious past and show that it can not only cooperate but act as an advocate for permanent, equal partnerships with the South. Every ruined farmer, every unemployed youth, every fisherman without a livelihood is a candidate for migration. Europe can stop cutting off avenues to prosperity and development with its policies and make migration less necessary. Naturally it would have to disappoint some more or less powerful European lobbies in the short term, but the benefits for Europeans as well as for the people of the South would be enormous. A fortress-Europe policy will not work and, under present circumstances at least, an “open borders” policy is politically unacceptable. The only other options are to reinforce the unsuccessful police-security- expulsion response with its train of inhumane measures and dismal record or to study present European practices and decide to eliminate abuses. Otherwise, no one – particularly no European official – should profess surprise in future as they witness the steady flow of incoming migrants.