Letters to the editor

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Bear hug double standards

You ran a story on the meeting between Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, (“Bear-hugging bros”, July 13th). Just before the meeting, Russia launched missile strikes across Ukraine, including on a children’s hospital, killing 44 people. Every sincere person would condemn this brutality and unprovoked attack by Russia on a sovereign nation. You then said Mr Modi still went ahead with the meeting and gave Mr Putin a bear hug. Yet how many times have Western leaders given bear hugs to Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, while Israeli forces bombed civilians, including children, in Gaza and did not spare hospitals.

What we in India fail to comprehend is the double standards of the West, where Mr Putin is seen as a violent renegade, and rightly so, but where Mr Netanyahu’s constant violations of human rights in Palestine are not only excused but also supported and condoned. Until Western countries condemn Mr Netanyahu in the way they have done with Mr Putin, their claims of being concerned about the Ukraine war on humanitarian grounds will fail to cut ice with those of us in non-aligned countries. Ethics demand that what’s bad for the goose must also be bad for the gander. Bear-hugging Mr Netanyahu while condemning Mr Putin reeks of hypocrisy.

Saket Gokhale MP
Rajya Sabha
Parliament of India
Delhi

Café tales

For all of the neighbourhood innovation that flows from opening a Starbucks (“The frappuccino effect”, July 6th), it is worth noting that its frappuccino is itself a product of local innovation that its founder once doubted. Starbucks gained the rights to the frappuccino when it bought Coffee Connection, a rival chain in Boston, in 1994. Coffee Connection’s founder came up with the drink after a trip to the west coast, where local baristas blended frozen, frothy coffees fit for a hot summer’s day. He rechristened this drink back on the east coast as the “frappuccino,” combining the familiar frappe milkshake with the foreign cappuccino.

Although it was a local hit, Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks and a coffee purist, wasn’t a fan. He wanted to get rid of it upon acquiring Coffee Connection, but the drink had already become too popular. Today, cold drinks now make up around 75% of the company’s beverage sales.

Kevin Petersen
Miami

African farmers and the EU

The Economist was spot-on in warning that the European Union’s new deforestation regulations will shut out African smallholder farmers from European markets, not because they are cutting down forests, but because they cannot prove compliance (“Unintended consequences”, July 6th). We train rural traders in Africa to collect EU-compliant farm geolocation data, but with tens of thousands of small traders and millions of small farms, the task is immense. Smallholder farmers are already poor and have to pay costs for repeatedly collecting these data each year.

There is a better solution. The EU should clarify its position on the territorial approach, which is when entire regions are declared free from deforestation, and actively encourage it. This would encourage collaboration between the private and public sectors to stop deforestation, rather than simply redirecting commodities from deforested land to other markets.

European coffee companies have called on the EU to delay implementation to allow more time to get ready. That may be necessary, given the general feeling of unpreparedness. At a minimum, delaying the imposition of fines would give the EU, commodity traders and governments time to test efficient systems that stop deforestation and don’t harm farmer incomes.

Paul Stewart
Global coffee director
TechnoServe
Arlington, Virginia

First-past-the-post rules

The ability of the first-past-the post electoral system to deliver decisive victories to centrist parties is a feature, not a bug, of Britain’s electoral system (“Disproportional representation”, July 13th). Systems of representative democracy exist to alchemise the diverse will of the people into a coherent and stable governing authority. Since the people’s will is varied and the will of the government must be singular, a process of compromise and coalition building is required.

Under proportional representation voters do not need to compromise. They have a very good chance of finding a party whose platform closely matches their views, views that are often pretty cranky. The task of compromise is delegated to the politicians they elect, politicians whose survival depends paradoxically on their fidelity to the narrow sector they represent. Such systems inevitably struggle to deliver a stable or coherent government.

In FPTP, political success depends on appealing to a plurality of the electorate. Parties cannot pursue narrow agendas without dooming themselves to failure. It is the voters who are forced to compromise, for they are not offered parties that perfectly match their views.

A winner-takes-all system is most valuable for diverse societies. Instead of appealing to narrow interest groups, our politicians are compelled by their own self-interest to build platforms with at least some appeal to Brexiteers and Remainers, Muslims and atheists, workers and bosses, country and town. By rewarding moderation and punishing parochialism, our system stabilises our politics and our society.

Joshua Wine
Gibraltar

Another important factor is turnout. Only 20% of registered voters voted for Labour compared with 40% for other parties and most worryingly, 40% who didn’t vote at all. Turnout was 60%, down from 67% in 2019 and the second-lowest figure since 1918. This makes the case for voting reform more urgent.

Julian Cooper
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

If Britain adopts proportional representation it must avoid the mistake of ultra-democratic PR in Ireland. This system allows voters to pick all the names of long lists of candidates in descending order of preference. In the coming decade, this confetti voting will fragment support for Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the two mainstream parties, and create squabbling multi-party coalitions. FPTP allows the best candidate to win elections. The massive, complicated vote recounting that is typical of PR should be avoided.

Patrick Slattery
Dublin

Association fallacy

Kelly Clancy suggested that the role of psychology in decision-making, especially in economics, should be dismissed as “one of the least reputable fields of science” (“Everything to play for”, June 22nd). That might come as a surprise to the members of the Nobel committees who awarded the prize in economics to John Nash in 1994 for his “pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-co-operative games” (eg, game theory), and to Daniel Kahneman in 2002 for “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty”.

Neither men suggested that behavioural economics provided a complete representation of how everyone made economic decisions, but instead provided a framework for understanding how those decisions were made. I think the Nobel committees knew a little something about the subject matter, perhaps more so than Ms Clancy.

Robert Checchio
Dunellen, New Jersey

“Working” conferences

Bartleby (July 6th) provided essential strategies for surviving and enduring conferences and pointed out that, for many people, the primary benefit of conferences is networking. However, for many people, “networking” is only one letter away from “not working”.

Rob Shelton
Palo Alto, California