The colonialist overtones of EU’s green trade crusade

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A quarter of a century later it remains a resonant and notorious image of European arrogance. Michel Camdessus, then the French managing director of the IMF, stands over Suharto with arms imperiously folded as the Indonesian president, head bowed, signs a humiliating and wildly excessive list of conditions in return for an emergency loan during the Asian financial crisis in 1998.

Now Indonesian accusations of oppression by Europeans are being aired again, this time over Brussels’ demands that palm oil producers prove that their exports to the EU do not cause deforestation. Indonesia’s economy minister has accused the EU of “regulatory imperialism”; the Indonesian foreign ministry’s videoed annual address last year contained an image of a jackboot marked with the EU logo stamping on a palm oil plantation.

As Brussels’s attempts to manage its trading partners’ production processes proliferate — from standards on renewable fuels to deforestation to carbon emissions to plastic packaging and employment conditions — so do accusations of condescending heavy-handed coercion from those who have to comply.

The bureaucratic intrusiveness of the deforestation regulation has aroused particular resentment. The EU has made some effort towards lightening the load: last year it set up a task force with Indonesia and Malaysia on implementing the rules. But there does not seem to be much appreciation of the dark historical resonances.

Many of the countries affected by the deforestation regulation are former European colonies still growing colonial-era crops. The oil palm is native to west and central Africa, not south-east Asia. It was brought to the then Dutch East Indies by 19th-century European colonists and grown in plantations worked by indentured and forced labour shipped in from around the region.

One of the large palm-growing companies active in Indonesia, Socfin, has a holding company listed on the Luxembourg stock exchange. It was originally founded in 1909 by a Belgian, Adrien Hallet, who grew rubber and palm oil in the Congo. The Belgian colonial presence in the Congo included viciously extractive colonists who cut children’s hands off as punishment for failing to meet rubber-tapping quotas.

Indonesia won its independence from the Netherlands (which, like the rest of western Europe, razed most of its own forests centuries ago in the process of getting rich) in a bloody war in the 1940s. But the country’s palm-oil growers are still being forced to follow rules dictated in Europe. Large-scale foreign-owned producers such as Socfin will almost certainly find it easier to comply than will Indonesian smallholders.

Framed like that, you can see how the EU’s pious insistence that its trade policy furthers “European values” might grate just a tiny little bit.

It’s not the first time that clodhopping European insensitivity has irritated former colonies.

During fractious negotiations on preferential trade agreements with the African-Caribbean-Pacific grouping of countries in 2007, then-trade commissioner Peter Mandelson unwisely said Nigeria “wants to sit like an elephant in the middle of the road” and obstruct progress.

The Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010 banned the Belgian official Karel De Gucht, then the EU’s development commissioner (and later trade commissioner), from the country over comments he made about the former Belgian colony.

In 2022 Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, was rightly criticised for describing Europe as geopolitically a “garden” and most of the rest of the world as a “jungle”, and suggesting that EU ambassadors were sent forth to tame the wilderness.

Meanwhile, in post-Brexit Britain, the then home secretary Suella Braverman imperilled trade talks with India in 2022 by singling out Indians for overstaying their visas when visiting the UK.

In practice, many middle-income countries show reserves of pragmatic tolerance that Europeans do not necessarily deserve. Indonesia, for example, continues to negotiate a bilateral trade deal with Brussels. Brazil, along with the other three South American countries that make up the Mercosur grouping, is ready to sign a trade agreement with the EU despite its own resentment over the deforestation regulation. Delhi appeared to use the outrage in India over Braverman’s unwise remarks as leverage to press its demands for more work visas in the UK-India trade talks rather than abandon the deal altogether.

We are, after all, where we are. The pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by rich countries cannot be undone: the cities of Europe will not be flattened to allow the land to return to forest. No solution to climate change will be possible without the big middle-income countries reducing carbon emissions, though huge amounts of development aid to help the transition wouldn’t go amiss.

But EU policymakers might just reflect that exploitative imperialism is a traditional European value too, and that what looks like progressive principle in Brussels can come across as hypocritical coercion on the receiving end.

alan.beattie@ft.com