It seems the government is to spend money encouraging the farm and food industries to develop new markets on the Far East. The logic being this is the area with the fastest increase in middle class people, who hanker for sophisticated Western food.
This ignores the gravity model of trade, that it is easier to do business nearer to where you are based. It also seems to be a substitute for trade with the EU, which the government has made more difficult. Spending taxpayers money to find new markets to replace ones its own policies have damaged is not good economics.
The UK should be encouraging such trade on top of continuing to maintain market share in the EU, or even increasing it. But it isn’t because it can’t; having loaded costs and problems onto trade in Europe, it is spending even more taxpayers money trying to find markets to compensate.
https://jonty.substack.com/
"This ignores the gravity model of trade that it is easier to do business nearer to where you are based." It depends what you call gravity? The UK have already gravitated this year towards English speaking nations away from the European languages. We have always been a fairly lazy international trader in terms of numbers of languages we learn and use. If you live in the EU you will learn French, German, Flemish etc. If the 19 states in the Euro do go for fiscal union they will need to go for a common language like German and/or French.
It is not particularly a substitute for trade with the EU rather as well as and not putting all one's eggs in a solitary basket. What is wrong with that? I would argue that spending tax payers money to find new markets is what an international trade department is all about. We had got too dependent on the lethargic EU bureaucratic sloth model. I would argue the EU are out of step (Corporal Jones style) with the rest of the World.
If the EU was going to play fair yes we could have maintained and expanded our EU markets and maybe we will in part but they set out to punish us for having the audacity to leave their perfect dictatorship that pretends that it is democratic.
This year we need our farmers to step up and increase our UK food provision so we are less reliant on imports should the EU decide to close the border. We must help them bring in the harvest too!