Jack Thurston
Jack Thurston joined the German Marshall Fund in 2005 as a non-resident transatlantic fellow, based out of London, to examine the politics of agricultural policy reform in the United States and the European Union. He will also work on building a network of freedom of information campaigns on farm subsidy payments across Europe, following the success of his campaign for payment disclosure in the United Kingdom. Mr. Thurston comes to GMF from the Foreign Policy Centre in London, where he wrote a report on the EU’s Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) in 2002. From 1999 to 2001, he served as special advisor to British Agriculture Minister Nick Brown. In this capacity, he completed policy analyses and developed political strategies on CAP reform, WTO negotiations, and sustainable development. Mr. Thurston began working in UK politics in 1994 as a Parliamentary staffer responsible for health policy, and he later joined the Labour Party Whip’s Office in 1996. Mr. Thurston writes widely on European agriculture and trade policy, EU politics, and transatlantic relations. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, and the New Statesman, and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's flagship farming program “Farming Today.”Read articles and notes at Jack's blog.
News Articles
Splitting Europe’s budget billFebruary 03, 2010Who are the misers and who are the gold-diggers among the EU's 27 member states? Some are Gold Diggers, happy to reap the benefits of integration and let others pick up the tab. Others are Misers – fans of budget discipline and a smaller CAP, but keen to claim compensation for their net balance deficits. Others still are Fence-Sitters: quick to pay lip service to the idea of budgetary discipline, they are still keen to maintain CAP spending levels. That is the conclusion of a new paper analysing the EU member states' responses to the “fundamental” review of the EU budget, which the European Commission launched in 2007.
Farming Should Protect Europe’s Environmental Resources, not Use Them UpJanuary 29, 2010In 2009, farm incomes fell across the whole of the EU, not least in France. This is despite the EU spending 55 billion euro on the common agricultural policy (CAP), one of whose aims is to ensure farmers a fair standard of living. The data shows that across Europe, 85 percent of aid goes to the top 17 percent of recipients.Politics beats economics, againJuly 30, 2008Whoever's to blame for the collapse of the Doha round, one thing's for sure ? we'll all have to live with the consequences.Mother mercantilismJanuary 01, 2006To leaven the mood at the opening session of the WTO ministerial conference in Hong Kong in mid-December, Pascal Lamy, the WTO’s newly installed director general, pulled a magic wand from his breast pocket. Progress has been so slow and the main protagonists dug in to such seemingly irreconcilable positions that Lamy, who has the unenviable task of brokering a final deal, could be forgiven for resorting to sorcery.
But if he had been looking for a prop to sum up the overall mood of the delegates and observers arriving in Hong Kong, Lamy might well have brandished a stethoscope. After the acrimonious walkout by developing countries at the last summit in Cancún in 2003, the main objective for the WTO this time around was survival. The diminishing of expectations to such a low level was profoundly depressing, particularly in a year when the British government threw the weight of its twin presidencies of the G8 and the EU behind the trade justice movement.
The good news is that the WTO did survive Hong Kong, and its 149 members agreed a text which includes a small measure of progress towards a final deal. The new text is less than spectacular, but everyone agreed to keep talking, and to hold a Hong Kong 2 in Geneva in the spring. The bad news is that there is an enormous amount still to do, and not much time in which to do it.
The EU delegation came to Hong Kong expecting the worst. In the late summer "bra wars," Peter Mandelson had flunked his first major test as EU trade commissioner, and over the months that followed, the US consistently outmanoeuvred the EU in the build-up to Hong Kong. If America's multibillion-dollar cotton subsidies, so crippling to poor west African farmers, had made the US the villain at Cancún, it did not seem impossible that fortress Europe would carry the can for a potentially fatal breakdown at Hong Kong. This is because progress in agriculture, the sector of the world economy most heavily distorted by trade barriers and most important to developing countries, has become the prerequisite for progress in other areas like manufactured goods and services. Brazil, the world’s most competitive agricultural exporter and leader of the powerful G20 grouping of developing countries, recently turned its fire away from US cotton, corn and soybean subsidies and towards Europe’s farm tariffs.
Mandelson’s negotiating position has not been helped by a French government whose leaders – from President Chirac down – seem to relish the chance to strut on the world stage and belittle EU institutions by threatening to veto any trade deal which might require shaving a little of the fat from Europe’s bloated farm subsidy programmes. US negotiators face exactly the same kind of opposition from an increasingly protectionist congress, but the difference is that for the most part congress has had the good grace to refrain from using the handcuffs in such a public manner.
Facing isolation, Mandelson’s strategy in the early exchanges at Hong Kong was to go on the offensive. To the point of obsession, he criticised US "food aid" (see "Aid-dumping," Prospect July 2005), arguing that it serves the narrow interests of American farmers and aid charities more than the needs of the world's hungry. In a more subtle and effective move, he challenged the US, Japan and middle-income countries, including Brazil, to match the EU’s unilateral move to completely open its markets to the 50 least developed countries for all products other than armaments. Economists tell us that the benefits of trade liberalisation always outweigh the costs. While this may be the case as far as economics is concerned, with politics the reverse is closer to the truth.
Publications
Aid, not TradeJune 01, 2005When world leaders meet in Gleneagles in July to discuss healing Africa, much will be made of the need for Africa to be better equipped to help itself. As up to 80 percent of Africans depend on farming for their livelihoods, reducing agricultural trade barriers ought to help. But will it?
