"Blood Coke", Part 2

Alex James, the guitarist bass player from Blur goes on the ground in Colombia:

Nearly everybody would rather be doing something else. Anything else. According to a recent poll, Colombians are the second happiest people on earth. I fell in love with the place in the two weeks that I spent there at the invitation of the president, Alvaro Uribe. The invitation was extended to me because in my recently published autobiography I claimed to have spent £1m on champagne and cocaine. That’s all behind me. I’m a farmer now, and it was as a farmer that I wanted to go there.

And he was shocked at what he found. I wasn't shocked, but I was shocked to hear one of the problems he identified and the solution he advocated: removing EU protectionism that punishes legitimate Colombian farmers who want to bring their wares to Europe:

I brushed with the human side of what comes across as a cold and distant problem in a far-off country – although wherever cocaine is available, it’s not really very far away at all. The purpose of my visit was not to moralise, merely to observe, but it’s transparent that every single line of cocaine is tainted in blood. If legalising it isn’t an option – and synthesising it about as far off as cold nuclear fusion – then we need to start buying more bananas.

Colombia is a uniquely wonderful place. Any less remarkable nation would have been completely torn apart by the terrible virtue of being the place where the best cocaine comes from. But it has a problem in selling its other wonderful produce, particularly in Europe.

There is a saying there: “A French cow is paid better than a Colombian farmer”, referring to European farm subsidies. Colombia produces the world’s best coffee and chocolate, in my opinion, and I can’t help thinking that if Colombian farmers were given a glimmer of a chance, and more of their amazing produce was available in Europe, they wouldn’t need to grow coca and we’d be well on the road to peace in Colombia. Something they deserve.

I think (and I pray) perhaps Europe is waking up to the consequences of its soulless hedonism.

UPDATE: Forgot to add the link that makes the title make sense, and that gives me some hope that this is part of a trend.

UPDATE 2: Alex James now writes regularly for the sort-of conservative British weekly, The Spectator--although he's not writing anything really political. Here's is column on flying with the Colombian Special Forces on a drug-eradication mission, but here's a better one about a different kind of narcotic:

Art is a drug and the pushers are the most cunning marketing minds of the post-modern world.

In Miami, there isn’t a single billionaire who isn’t in the clutches of one or more art dealers. An edgy contemporary art collection is de rigueur and it is impossible to go for dinner in any of the big houses without first being marched around a static carnival of death and genitalia. There, the rich people use art as a weapon to beat each other with and they all make money out of it, too.

I'm always pleased to find some figure from popular culture has a brain and can write. And while I doubt I've much true ideological kinship with Alex James, I'm impressed that he is confident enough in his success to contribute to a right-leaning magazine like the Speccie.