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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

> The "free market" thinking behind globalization was broken by China first

That’s cute but not true. Countries like France force their colonies (former) in Africa to supply raw materials (like chocolate or vanilla) for cheap, and make billions every year by processing it and selling finished goods for sometimes 100x. Any attempts by African nations to process the raw materials to finished goods are actively squashed by the French govt by a mix of policies. France is not alone in this. “Free Market” has never existed.

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> Countries like France force their colonies (former) in Africa to supply raw materials (like chocolate or vanilla) for cheap, and make billions every year by processing it and selling finished goods

Cute theory, unsupported by facts. Chocolate for instance is a simple supply chain problem: shipping cocoa to Europe is cheaper than shipping milk to Africa and then shipping chocolate back to Europe.

Where possible - nuts for example, transformation increasingly takes place locally. The bottleneck isn't some obscure international conspiracy but investor's willingness to take the country risk and establish trust relationships.

For anyone who doubts the above, have a look into which countries in the world produce the most coffee, and make by far and away the most profit from it.

It's just a little suspect those countries have never grown a single bean, and they're able to buy raw coffee beans from undeveloped countries for a steal.

Why do countries like Ethiopia and Guatemala sell them for so cheap? because the IMF would call in their loans if they didn't, sending their economies back to the stone age overnight.

The free market on a global scale has always been entirely fictitious.

Yawn, it's so easy to disprove, it's not even fun.

Crops produced in Africa like crops produced anywhere else are now traded on the international market. France actually imports very little from its former colonies. A casual glance at the world factbook will show you it's not a major trade partner of any of them.

The idea it makes billions from it is simply preposterous. Just check the composition of France's GDP if you don't believe me. It will probably take less time than it took you to write your original comment.

I mean ‘first’ in that the integration of China into global markets was an immediate cause of policy change in the U.S.

Mercantilism on the other hand has a long history as you point out.

well said!

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