All Eggs In One Basket - International Food Policy Research Institute: Fill & Download for Free

This is exactly what was done in the west and with disastrous consequences. This has been answered in detail giving examples from across the world where it was done by Prof Devender Sharma in a National daily newspaper. I am reproducing the article here.What India is doing today to Agriculture was done by the West with disastrous consequencesLink -Why should India follow an agricultural model that has failed in the developed world?Can India afford to drive away people from rural areas to the cities ? Where are jobs for them? Is our idea of development to have millions of migrant workers serving middle class for a pittance?https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/why-should-india-follow-an-agricultural-model-that-has-failed-in-the-developed-worldBy Prof Devendra SharmaDriving people away from Agriculture will achieve what? Where are jobs for them in cities? Is it our idea of development to have farmers-turned-migrant-workers serve the middle class for a pittance?Around the mid-1980s, my interest grew in the extent of subsidies rich developed countries were giving to the agriculture sector. If farmers in rich countries were allegedly doing so well, why did these governments, all champions of the free market, have to provide subsidies to their farmers? Generally speaking, no political regime wants to subsidise Agriculture; they would rather put all the eggs in the corporate basket.Then during my travels to the USA and Europe, especially the countryside, I witnessed the devastation market-oriented agriculture had done to rural communities in America, Canada, and in Europe. We are constantly told in India that developed countries are so prosperous and their farmers are in such good shape that we need to copy the same model. In reality I found that whatever remains of the American agriculture today is entirely due to the massive subsidies the government provides.When WTO came into existence, I was commissioned by British journal The Ecologist to do a column on how the WTO regime would benefit Indian farmers. In that column I compared Indian farmers to a European cow, comparing the subsidies that a European cow received vis a vis an Indian farmer’s income. It became a major talking point among the economists and the UN Human Development Report by the UN and the World Development Report by the World Bank both mentioned dairy subsidiaries in comparison to developing world.Agriculture is being sacrificed to serve the economic interests of the corporate sector; it happened in America, it happened in Europe and now it is happening in India. But this model has not worked anywhere, not in America, not in Europe or in Canada and Australia. For us in India the sensible thing would be to create our own model rather than copy from the rich countries depending upon our needs and circumstances. Even the global community is today looking towards India for new ideas.Dominant economic thinking is that we have to reduce the size of the population dependent on agriculture to achieve higher growth. when I visit foreign universities, economists endlessly argue that there is no other way than this. One of our former RBI Governors in fact went on record to say that the biggest reform in India would be when we can move people away from agriculture to urban areas, which need cheap labour.If we take this migration of people to the cities as employment generation – creating an army of dihadi mazdoor - there is something fundamentally wrong with our economic thinking. There are lessons from the lockdown last year, when we saw the plight of migrant workers, as hundred million walked back long distances to their villages. I call these migrant workers ‘agricultural refugees’. They were pushed to the cities because the economic paradigm created by the dominant thinking has made rural areas economically unviable.In America , 1.5 percent or so of the population depends on agriculture, agriculture by this warped definition should have been a lucrative profession. But it is not. Agriculture in American is facing a severe crisis, with farmers saddled with a bankruptcy of $425 billion as of July 2020. The idea that fewer people engaging in agriculture will ensure prosperity has clearly outlived its utility and it is time for economists to stop flogging this dead horse.There is another flawed argument that larger the land holding size, the better the bargaining power. The average land holding size in the US is 440 acres while 86 percent of Indian farmers have land holdings of less than 5 acres. It is therefore argued that we need aggregators and contract farming, which would enhance bargaining power of farmers and there will be price discovery. My question is why did this then not happen in America? Or in France where the average land holding size is 135 acres? Or Canada where it is 3000 acres; or in Australia where it is a staggering 10,800 acres?When Ronald Reagan was encouraging big corporates to replace the allegedly inefficient small farmers, the world did initially go into surplus food production, prices fell and consumers were happy . But a country where over 50 percent of the population are involved in agriculture, we do not have to follow what America did but go by what Gandhiji said, production by the masses, not production for the masses. In fact, that is what PM Modi also envisages, ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas’.As I have said before, economists have to be held accountable for the crisis the agriculture sector the world over is facing. They have misled us to believe that this model of economic growth works. They need to go beyond Economic theory and look at the ground realities. The reverse migration we saw in India should be a lesson for them to go into reverse economic thinking. Rather than pushing people to the urban areas, the challenge is how to make rural areas economically viable and profitable.Indian farmers are still on the streets. Their agitation is far from over and the whole world is eagerly observing how it shapes up. The movement has moved out from the Delhi border to various parts of the country as farmers have started going to villages, holding maha-panchayats and taking their message to more and more people. This is possibly the greatest mass movement of our times.Just two years back, the chief economist of the US Department of Agriculture admitted that since the 1960s, American farm income has seen a steep decline if you adjust for inflation. Whereas in India we are told that free market agriculture model would make farm income go up. I fail to understand why that did not happen in first world countries after they opened up?Bedabrata mentions in his Times of India that the price American farmers get for wheat today is less than what they used to get during the American civil war. In Canada the wheat price in 1867 when adjusted for inflation was $30 per bushel. 150 years later, in 2017 the price had come down to $5 per bushel. This is what free markets have done to agriculture.In the US, 40% of average farm income actually comes from subsidies. It clearly demolishes the argument that markets lead to price discovery. A study of cotton in America shows that around 2005 there were 20,000 cotton growers. American farmers were getting a subsidy of 4.7 billion dollars in 2005 to produce a crop which was sold at 3.9 billion dollars. It depressed global cotton prices. Farmers in Africa and India were priced out.We were led to believe that our farmers were inefficient and unproductive; but in reality, Indian farmers were priced out because of subsidies that American farmers received from their government. On top of it, America provided an additional subsidy of 180 million dollars to the textile industry to buy the subsidized cotton. Still Brazil continues to heavily subsidize cotton growers.According to the Centre for WTO Studies, New Delhi, America provides a subsidy of 85 lakh rupees to each cotton grower every year while in India the subsidy a cotton grower gets is Rs. 1500.Situation is not much different in Europe. Despite the massive subsidies for the agriculture sector, every minute one farmer is quitting agriculture. EU provides a subsidy support of 100 billion Euros every year. Imagine if this subsidy is withdrawn, what would happen to the farmers in EU? Even in France, the top most agriculture producer in EU, recently farmers hung dozens of suicide dolls from trees in front of Parliament to highlight their plight.So why do we want to borrow this failed model? It’s a question I have been repeatedly asking.Sonny Perdue, Donald Trump’s Agriculture Secretary had said, “In America the big gets bigger, the small go out.” To illustrate in 1970s there were more than 6 lakh dairy farms in America. 93 percent of American dairy farms have closed down. Does that mean milk production has come down? No. On the contrary it has gone up, which drove the prices down and dairy farmers committed suicide. Today there is so much surplus milk with mega dairy farms, each with 7000 to 15000 cows that America is trying to find a market for its surplus milk; and that’s why the US is pushing India for market access in dairy.India is the largest producer of milk in the world and yet we are under pressure to open up our markets to dairy companies for milk..Even for India, the Director General of International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC, comes up with similar advice, “Move up or move out.”Bedabrata mentioned about the nexus between political power and big corporates in America. In fact there is another player - the economists. The mainline economists all over the world speak the language of capitalist power , a language that has failed to enhance farmers’ income anywhere in the world.Agrarian crisis is so severe in America that one of the farmers called me up the other day asking what is happening in India. As I explained the situation he said, “We know that living in debt is living in hell. We are very happy that Indian farmers are standing up and fighting our battle.” Another farmer in France said that agriculture is being sacrificed to keep consumers happy. Not only in France or US, the crisis of farm debts is the same everywhere. It is actually caused by the denial of rightful income to farmers which is the biggest issue globally farmers are facing.Prior to the Indian farm protests in hundreds of tractors had marched into Washington DC in Feb 1979 asking for guaranteed price. . They camped for 4-5 weeks but they could not get what they wanted. Jimmy Carter, then American President could not meet farmers demand. If he had not failed, American agriculture would have been a global model for economic viability of the farmers.What farmers need everywhere today is a guaranteed price for their produce which alone can pull them out of the prevalent crisis. Markets would automatically adjust to it. Don’t forget when the debate about minimum wages had started, corporates had objected saying this would upset their balance sheet but eventually they had to provide minimum wages and adjust their business plans accordingly. If there can be minimum wages for workers, it is time we provide minimum support price (MSP) to the farmers as a matter of right.Let us look at the confectionary industry with a turnover of $212 billion. Chocolate is a major component. Guess what the average income of a cocoa farmer is, it is Rs 100 per day, less than the price of a standard chocolate bar. Coffee industry is no better. There are around 50-60 lakh coffee bean farmers across the globe and 80 percent of them earn less than $1.9 per day, which the World Bank defines as acute poverty line imagine if these farmers had received a minimum support price all these years rather than being left to face the brutalities of the market.

Doubtful, assuming you mean wind and solar as the renewables. The debacle of wind and solar in Texas has not helped investors see a sunny future.Why SunPower's Shares Plunged 35.6% in FebruaryThe plunge in solar energy stocks didn't spare SunPower last month.(TMFFlushDraw)Mar 3, 2021 at 12:39PMWind and Sun Aplenty But Investors Wary of Australia RenewablesAuthor of the article:Bloomberg NewsJames Thornhill and Matthew BurgessPublishing date:Mar 14, 2020 • March 15, 2020 • 4 minute read • Join the conversationArticle content(Bloomberg) — Australia’s sunny skies and windswept coasts, which have drawn billions of dollars to the nation’s renewables sector, are starting to become a hard sell.Overseas renewables developers and investors are shying away in the face of a creaking power grid and unclear policy, exacerbated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison defending fossil fuels and refusing to tighten emission targets even amid deadly wildfires and drought. London-based construction group John Laing Group Plc this month said it would exit the market, highlighting a trend that last year saw new investment in the sector fall for the first time in half a decade.“Australia is a market with significant challenges and currently international investors are very wary of investment,” said John Martin, chief executive officer of renewables investor New Energy Solar Ltd. “They see a range of unresolvable issues from a lack of consensus on policy and an overly complex market design to individual project woes like grid access, congestion, marginal loss factors and curtailment.”Wind and Sun Aplenty But Investors Wary of Australia RenewablesWhat is certain is more politically added wind and solar does make oil and other fossil fuels more profitable and more in demand. This may seem counterintuitive but think about the foibles of wind and solar starting with intermittency and ending with no energy in bad weather. What must grid operators do? Keep coal or oil power plants running 7/ 24 as stand by. This doubling up is expensive but also very profitable for the fossil fuel owners.This is the new reality is also found with coal and solar together - very wasterful as subsidies cost more than the energy out put.Have you flown on an airplane in the winter when the Captain announces a delay so they can ice the wings because of the cold? Same problem for the blades of wind turbines. They need deicing and antifreeze to operate.Have you been in desert climates like Palm Springs when the wind causes a sand storm? It is blinding and it arrests any power from solar panels.Much of the world must survive during winter snowstorms and yet solar panels will fail when covered in snow.WRITTEN BY JASON ISAAC ONFEB 18, 2021. POSTED IN LATEST NEWSYes, Texas’s Blackouts Are The Result Of Unreliable ‘Green’ EnergyAs Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse?But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only surprise is that the house of cards collapsed in the dead of winter, not the toasty Texas summers that usually shatter peak electricity demand records.The blackouts, which have left as many as 4 million Texans trapped in the cold, show the numerous chilling consequences of putting too many eggs in the renewable basket.Fossil Fuels Aren’t To BlameThere are misleading reports asserting the blackouts were caused by large numbers of natural gas and coal plants failing or freezing.Here’s what really happened: the vast majority of our fossil fuel power plants continued running smoothly, just as they do in far colder climates across the world. Power plant infrastructure is designed for cold weather and rarely freezes, unlike wind turbines that must be specially outfitted to handle extreme cold.It appears that ERCOT, Texas’s grid operator, was caught off guard by how soon demand began to exceed supply.Failure to institute a managed rolling blackout before the grid frequency fell to dangerously low levels meant some plants had to shut off to protect their equipment. This is likely why so many power plants went offline, not because they had failed to maintain operations in the cold weather.Yet these operational errors overshadow the decades of policy blunders that made these blackouts inevitable.Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation.Increased Reliance On Unreliable RenewablesOn the whole, Texas is losing reliable generation and counting solely on wind and solar to keep up with its growing electricity demand. I wrote last summer about how ERCOT was failing to account for the increasing likelihood that an event combining record demand with low wind and solar generation would lead to blackouts.The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter freeze and not during the predictable Texas summer heatwaves.Yet ERCOT still should not have been surprised by this event, as its own long-term forecasts indicated it was possible, even in the winter.Although many wind turbines did freeze and total wind generation was at 2 percent of installed capacity Monday night, overall wind production at the time the blackouts began was roughly in line with ERCOT forecasts from the previous week.We knew solar would not produce anything during the night when demand was peaking. Intermittency is not a technical problem but a fundamental reality when trying to generate electricity from wind and solar.This is a known and predictable problem, but Texas regulators fooled themselves into thinking that the risk of such low wind and solar production at the time it was needed most was not significant.Special Breaks Helped Cause The BlackoutsThe primary policy blunder that made this crisis possible is the lavish suite of government incentives for wind and solar.They guarantee profits to big, often foreign corporations and lead to market distortions that prevent reliable generators from building the capacity we need to keep the lights on when wind and solar don’t show up.Research by the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Life:Powered project found that more than $80 billion of our tax dollars have been spent on wind and solar subsidies in the last decade, in federal subsidies alone. Texans are also charged an average of $1.5 billion a year in state subsidies for renewable energy.All that cash hasn’t materially changed our energy landscape. Wind and solar still provide just 4 percent of our energy nationwide. The promise that subsidies would kickstart renewable energy technology remains unmet after more than 40 years.Renewable advocates will be quick to point out that fossil fuels also receive subsidies from the federal government. That’s partially true, but solar companies receive 75 times more money and wind 17 times more per unit of electricity generated.Nevertheless, the best solution for Texans, and all Americans, would be to eliminate all energy subsidies and allow the free market to drive our energy choices.As politically popular as wind and solar energy are, no amount of greenwashing can cover up their fundamental unreliability and impracticality for anything other than a supplemental energy source.Yet our government — even in the oil country of Texas, home of Spindletop and the Permian Basin — is designed to incentivize renewable energy projects.Keep This From Happening AgainThis week’s blackouts should be a wake-up call to politicians. Overconfidence in renewables led us uncomfortably close to total grid failure — and when the going gets tough, few things really matter to voters as much as access to electricity.Without it, scrambling for the barest necessities like food, water, and warmth becomes expensive, stressful, and all-consuming.The consequences are potentially deadly. For all the talk of climate change, cold is far deadlier than heat, responsible for 20 times more deaths.Although the cold itself may not kill you — you might not literally freeze to death — it has devastating potential to exacerbate preexisting conditions and make otherwise minor illnesses life-threatening.It’s a reality far too many know firsthand, as a recent study found increasing natural gas utility prices led to an increase in wintertime deaths as they force families to choose between putting food on the table and paying the heating bill.In this health-conscious era of the COVID-19 crisis, this should be enough to pause any policy discussion that might inhibit electricity access.Here’s What To DoThe Texas legislature, and other states hoping to avoid similar messes, should act decisively to protect our electric grid in a few specific ways.First, they should require all electric generation to be “dispatchable,” or readily available — meaning generators guarantee a certain amount of power will be available at all times.No more should we tolerate wind turbines pumping out a measly 2 percent of their capacity and leaving Texas families in the cold.Second, they should end subsidies for both renewable and traditional energy sources. Research by the Texas Public Policy Foundation explains extensively the problems with energy subsidies, including distorting markets without improving technology or shifting our energy landscape in the slightest.Rather than wasting tax dollars trying (and failing) to pick winners and losers, lawmakers should allow the free market to work.Finally, they should work to discourage the discriminatory practice of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, which prioritizes political correctness over fiduciary duty and places workers’ and retirees’ futures at risk.Texas and several other states will file legislation soon to prohibit companies that boycott or divest from fossil fuels from doing business with the government. It’s a good start to ensure this energy discrimination campaign doesn’t infiltrate state pensions and investments.Especially in the bitter cold of winter, a life without electricity is a miserable one. It’s unfortunate that years of poor policy choices — coupled with ERCOT’s mismanagement — made this crisis a reality for so many Texans.Texans learned firsthand the consequences of unreliable renewable energy this week. If their voices are heard, it won’t happen again.Read more at The FederalistPA Pundits - International"the relentless pursuit of common sense" FEATURED ARTICLES are at the TOP. SCROLL DOWN for TODAY'S posts.https://papundits.wordpress.com/"the relentless pursuit of common sense" FEATURED ARTICLES are at the TOP. SCROLL DOWN for TODAY'S posts.Media Blacks Out Truth In TexasPosted on Sun 03/14/2021 by PA Pundits - InternationalMedia Blacks Out Truth In TexasBy Mark Mathis ~ During the Texas blackout corporate media outlets couldn’t publish their fictional stories fast enough. “Wind and solar were not the problem!” declared the New York Times, USA Toda…https://papundits.wordpress.com/2021/03/14/media-blacks-out-truth-in-texas/#commentsBy Mark Mathis ~During the Texas blackout corporate media outlets couldn’t publish their fictional stories fast enough. “Wind and solar were not the problem!” declared the New York Times, USA Today, ABC News, the Associated Press, NPR, and countless others. The media outlets that shamelessly shill for a renewable energy nirvana can always be counted on to misinform.The media proclaimed that wind and solar weren’t the problem because these unreliable sources aren’t expected to produce much power during winter months in the first place. That’s a small truth wrapped in a big fat lie. From February 8 to the 16th electricity output from wind was down 93 percent. On the two most critical days of the freeze, the 15th and 16th, wind power was almost non-existent. However, it is true this pitiful performance was not a major factor in the outages. That bit of truth created a window for deception.According to our corporate media, the blackouts were caused by failures in natural gas, coal, and nuclear generation. Again, a tiny truth wrapped in a whopper of a lie. Yes, there were frozen pipes and a number of other glitches. However, the frozen pipe problem was largely caused by Ercot, the company that runs the grid. As Ercot cut power to protect the grid from damage, it cut off electricity to natural gas production and processing units. With no power to pressurize the pipes, they froze. This was a management failure, not a problem with natural gas-fired power. In spite of Ercot’s mismanagement of the system, natural gas delivered 450 percent more power from the 8th to the 16th. Yes, 450 percent more. And, this happened even as natural gas providers were delivering a record amount of gas to residents for home heating.I could go on and on about grid mismanagement before and during the crisis. For example, Ercot allowed some coal and natural gas generators to go offline for maintenance even as weather forecasters were warning about the historic dimension of the big freeze. But talking about these issues distracts us from the giant problems that have been building up in Texas for more than 15 years.What wind and solar advocates in the mainstream press ignore (or probably don’t even know) is that the electric grid demands a high level of consistency. It operates within a narrow margin at 60 hertz. If power is even .5 percent above or below 60 Hz the grid begins to fail. Wind and solar are wildly erratic. The large swings in power output test grid operators ability to maintain this small operating space. Dealing with the inconsistent nature of wind and solar is a manageable problem when they provide a small percentage of the power supply. But Texas has increased its wind generation from 2.9 percent in 2007 to 25 percent today. Solar went from next to nothing to 2.38 percent. That’s an enormous amount of unreliability for a grid that demands precision.The only way to manage this problem is to maintain a large reserve margin of power that can be called upon at a moment’s notice. When electricity from wind and solar drop quickly as they regularly do, reserve power from natural gas fills the gap. A healthy reserve margin is 15 percent. But with wind claiming such a large percentage of generation in Texas, a larger margin (i.e. 25 percent) would be prudent. The reserve margin in Texas is only about 7.5 percent.Setting mismanagement aside, this is the key problem with the Texas grid. There’s too much erratic wind and solar and not nearly enough reliable baseload power from coal, nuclear, and natural gas. The reserve margin should be at least doubled and probably tripled to accommodate unreliable wind and solar that are already part of the system. Understanding this reality takes some research and deeper thinking, but our corporate media are either not interested or are incapable of learning about the technical aspects of how the electrical grid functions.True journalism is hard to find these days. What could be more important to the function of our modern world than electricity? And yet, corporate media are more interested in telling small truths wrapped in giant lies. The consequences be damned.Mark Mathis is author and documentary filmmaker as well as president of the Clear Energy Alliance, a company devoted to curing energy blindness.Media Blacks Out Truth In Texas

Norway and Switzerland are completely different things and have a totally different relationship and history to the UK, so the comparison is actually a little bit flawed (and missing Iceland which is in the same boat).Norway is a relatively small state with just over 5 million people (very slightly smaller than Scotland). It has a relatively short history as a separate state having developed gradually over the last several centuries, taking a while to develop and really only started to come into its own in the last half of the 19th century as food supplies and sanitation improved and socio-political-economic developments started to kick in in the aftermath from 1814 of having its own constitution, Parliament and some institutions like universities, the Mortgage Bank, the Norwegian Krone which alongside the development of Oslo and infrastructural improvements that there could be a major increase in a separate Norwegian cultural identity. Norway only obtained its independence from Sweden in 1905 importing a Danish prince Carl, later Haakon VII and British princess Maud as monarchs to help ease the process. Norway stayed out of the First World War, fostered international relations across the board based on neutrality, boosted the nation’s brand with Arctic and Antarctic exploration at the peak of the so-called ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic research beating the British to the South Pole. They had a tumultuous period between the two World Wars with a good deal of political instability but were still quite rural in many places and focused around the sea as a source of income - they had internal fish to fry. The Second World War and occupation forced them into a more active role internationally, they were at the forefront of pursuing a regional strategic approach as embodied by Nordic Council, joining the UN and joining NATO in 1949.Their primary focus was strategic defence against the USSR with whom they shared an extreme Northerly border and developing their ability to prevent another invasion by any power and a repeat of the Quisling administration from 1940–1945. Although trade with Europe was useful and valuable, they did not feel a need to go beyond the European Free Trade Association and rejected EEC membership in 1972, a Norwegian could explain why more effectively, but something tells me that the nature of Norwegian politics, centred on coalitions and compromise ensured there was less fudging or outright untruths regarding the likely impact on the power of Parliament, the law courts or any other factors that were conveniently brushed under the carpet by Edward Heath when we British joined at the same time. Additionally, the Norwegians voted in their Referendum before joining, we did so after when it was already a done deal. It is always so much harder to win an argument after the fact.Furthermore, something rather extraordinary happened in the mid-1960s, oil and natural gas was found in the North Sea. The Ekofisk field was discovered in 1969 - one of the bigger fields. The Norwegians created Statoil ASA, a state-owned oil and gas management company in 1972 intended to manage resources in the interests of the Norwegian people and answerable for many of its activities, presently to the Minister for Petroleum and Energy and the world-famous Government Petroleum Fund a sovereign wealth fund with clear legal limits on how much money can be accessed and spent each fiscal year by Ministers and how much, the vast majority, which must be re-invested into the Fund to set-aside against when Norway will not have such a bounty any longer. They were thus able to use the monies they were able to access to underpin a major period of development and strategic investment as well as to create an extremely integrated, effective welfare and social care system and ensure that state pension systems were and are properly funded. The British did not create such a fund and privatised Britoil between 1982 and 1985, at practically the first opportunity and our public and private sector pensions schemes usually have shortfalls.The Norwegians were able to pick and choose the parts of the European framework they wished to participate in and therefore chose to join the European Economic Area from 1992 with some provision for free movement of labour and a contribution to the EU’s budget but chooses to engage quite differently from a position of relative strength. Their economy is not as unbalanced towards the banking sector and therefore vulnerable to the loss of the right to trade in the EU if the rules changed as the UK is and non-membership of the EU’s Common Fisheries and Agriculture Policies, the former of which has been so destructive to British fishing, has allowed those two sectors more flexibility than their British counterparts.Furthermore, the Norwegians are a relatively new country, they have spent a long time developing their own system and creating their own unique state which in some regards, including land ownership and the public disclosure of income tax returns, is very different from the how most countries do these things, but particularly the British. Additionally, unlike the British, they did not have the albatross around the neck that was post-imperial decline to deal with and the divisions that come with that or a rapidly changing demographic makeup. They were hitting their stride and finding confidence in their place in the world just about the time when we in the UK were rapidly loosing ours. There was no large scale separatist movement and the oil money provided, managed carefully and with the public interest at heart and not just as an easily milsch cow as it was here, an economic boom sufficient that the EEC was not going make as much difference as it did - the Norwegians were not an ex-superpower looking for a new role in the world. The EEC needed them more than Norway needed the EEC - totally different situation than within the UK.The Swiss are a different thing entirely again. Switzerland is a directional republic, its constitution is barring San Marino, basically unique. Its Federal Council (the Executive) signed onto the European Economic Area but the agreement didn’t pass in 1993. They use a different model again, a serious of bilateral agreements covering a range of specific areas of economic, social or political activity and pick and choose their level of engagement more readily.As discussed in another answer, Switzerland’s system demands a high level of public engagement, unlike with the UK whose Ministers took us in and then assumed that we would happily vote to stay in. Convincing millions of very different people who speak four different languages and whose highly devolved administrations will gain or loose very differently from EEA/EEC/EU membership has proven impossible. They are additionally, as have they been historically, very economically competitive and productive and have a history of welcoming academic excellence and free-thinkers from around the world. Furthermore, their entire history, including during both World Wars and their interwar experience marked more with internal discussions about what sort of country they wanted to be and building up their independent economy, particularly their banking sector, suggests a level of independence which probably wouldn’t work well as a member of the EU, though ironically their experience as a highly federal, directorial system built upon four different lingual groups, answering to the will of the public through regular Referenda is a model of what a democratic EU might well have to become and again, like the Norwegians, the Swiss did not have an Empire and did not have the same hang-ups as the UK when the sun finally set on the Raj.Additionally, the Swiss have developed an extremely hi-tech economy through a long-run of compromise and collegiate debate and due to the country’s small size, combined with a high-degree of specialised labour, skills and industries along with a sophisticated but not overwhelming banking sector, they are well-placed to cope with change. They have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, they have low unemployment levels and they can balance their budgets - the UK can do none of these things as efficiently and certainly is nowhere near balancing the books. Their tradition of neutralism that led them to only join the UN in 1992, may actually allow them to be more responsive and independent, not less, though by popular vote in 2005 they acceded to Schengen and the Dublin rules on asylum, probably to encourage consistency between themselves and their neighbours. Their relationship is far more rooted about job creation, trade and skills development, not about political integration, they will do what is necessary to underpin that relationship without actually joining because they don’t need to.Again, Switzerland does trade extensively with the EU, but the US is their second largest trading partner after only Germany and with the rise of Asia, Latin America and Africa, particularly buying the kind of the luxury brands the Swiss create and hi-tech goods including pharmaceuticals who compete with EU companies for sales so effectively, it is possible to argue that it doesn’t make sense for the Swiss to join an organisation in the EU which risks tying it down too much to inefficient, aging economies and markets in central, southern and eastern Europe which are overly rural and may not buy what they are selling as much as say China is likely to in the next few years.Essentially, like Norway, the EU probably needs Switzerland a little bit more than Switzerland needs it.As to the other part of the question. It is bad because we did join, we put our eggs into the EU basket whilst disengaging ourselves somewhat from our more traditional trade partners in the Commonwealth, partly as a way to offset the loss of prestige and military and financial strength elsewhere. It is always, always going to be painful to break-up a marriage, no matter how rancorous it is and it will have lasting implications, particularly if we find ourselves locked out of the Economic Area out of a refusal to accept the free movement of people and the political and potential constitutional turmoil this decision has caused regardless of what deal we might obtain or what effects it might have for our wider economy or our society as a whole.Norway and Switzerland are so totally different as states, smaller, stable without substantial separatist movements and little history of terrorism (prior of course to that git Brevik) and constructed so completely differently from the UK that in some ways there are absolutely no models for how a post-Brexit UK would interact with Europe at all. These states’ histories, attitudes to international relations, fiscal governance, public finances and debt, industrial development and other issues make it difficult to draw all that useful parallels. Indeed, the best parallel available is to compare Norway with how an independent Scotland if it had to operate outside the EU for a while might behave, but that is a quite different question….