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| Why Russia Is Destroying Sanctioned EU Food |
| 2015-08-21 |
| h/t Gates of Vienna [GlobalResearch] President Putin's late-July decree to destroy all sanctioned EU foodstuffs caught at the Russian border has incited a flurry of backlash, even among some typically Russian-friendly foreign journalists. Russia Insider's Danielle Ryan, for example, documents not only instances of domestic criticism over the initiative, but also personally laments that it's "wrong" and "not right". It's completely understandable why the publicized destruction of food is appalling to many people worldwide, but the fact is that they're largely missing the deeper reasons why this is happening, and that's partly due to the Russian authorities not properly communicating them. It's not simply about saving the administrative resources and time that have to be directed to resending the products back to their original destination, nor in depriving a sanctions violator of the opportunity to profitably resell their said contraband back in the EU or elsewhere. There's also more at play than just supporting Russian domestic producers and ending the country's foreign food reliance. What's really happening is that Russia is publicly defending itself from a clever form of psychological-economic warfare being waged against it by the EU, and it's doing so at this specific time in order to limit the ability of this offensive to interfere with the upcoming general elections in September. ...The most common criticism surrounding Russia's controversial measure is that the government should donate the smuggled food to those in need, perhaps even to the refugees in Donbass, instead of just destroying it. This well-intentioned and altruistic perspective forgets that that there are concrete health concerns behind the government giving its citizens or other recipients food products of unverified quality, but that's not all. The main issue is that doing so would only be a short-term solution to whatever problem it was meant to address (be it poverty in Russia or helping war refugees in Donbass), albeit one with major external strings attached that are unacceptable for any self-respecting and patriotic authorities to fully agree to. To begin with, if Russia gave the food to anyone else, it would merely be acting as a conduit for de-facto 'humanitarian aid' from the EU to its population, and as with all examples of this type of international assistance, the donor's image would be enhanced at the government's expense and could easily be exploited by Brussels for soft power gains. It would also undermine Russia's message that its domestic issues (even poverty) don't need foreign interference to solve. Moving along, another primary reason behind Moscow's refusal to give the confiscated food away is that it establishes a dependency relationship between the recipients and the EU donor that could be broken at any time. Should the EU and its related companies decide to stop breaking the law and trying to smuggle their products into Russia, the civil beneficiaries would suddenly be left without the resources that they had previously come to expect, possibly even leading to unrest and discontent with the government intermediaries that had previously facilitated the 'donations'. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 Same reason the Champ won't sign the Keystone. Governmental asset control. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2015-08-21 08:24 |