I've always been fascinated by how societies will convince themselves they are somehow virtuous by passing, for example, labor laws, or environmental laws, and then inevitably don't like the cost increases associated with those laws, and therefore outsource to other countries that don't have those laws. This effectively punishes those that follow the rules, and rewards those that are the most ruthless. iPhone owners walking around talking about how unenlightened we were when we had slavery don't know what to say when I point out how their phone was made.
When I was in the Navy, we'd pull into Thailand, and we'd have to pay a service their to pump our sewage to another ship where it could be processed, because the US Navy has rules against dumping sewage in foreign ports. But a lot of foreign ports don't care, so they'll happily take a couple hundred thousand USD to pump the sewage off the ship, and then cruise right across the bay where we were moored and dump it within a mile of shore. Easy money.
Apparently something similar is happening with pesticides in the EU: "EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices" documents it, and points out:
> Although these chemicals are not allowed on the EU market, they can still be exported from European Member States to third countries. From there, they can return to Europe as residues in imported food — a “toxic pesticides boomerang” that puts consumers at risk.
The pattern holds: ban the thing that is bad, then have other countries use those things and import the product. Fascinating.
https://www.foodwatch.org/en/eu-banned-pesticides-found-i...