Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-03-Speech-3-148"
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"en.20020703.4.3-148"2
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"Mr President, it was agreed in 1996 that the number of people suffering from malnutrition would be halved to 400 million by the year 2015. However, the fact is that the number of hungry people has remained the same over the past five years. It is very unfortunate that so few of our European leaders attended the ‘World Food Summit: five years later’ in Rome three weeks ago. It once again illustrates that only a few seem to want to narrow the gap between rich and poor in this world by way of priority, let alone meet basic needs, such as food and basic health care.
The fact that Mr Prodi and Commissioner Nielsen
present in Rome proves that Europe can take the lead, and would also be prepared to do so if it were up to the Commission. However, a few changes will have to be made in that case.
According to the head of the World Food Programme, Mr James Morris, 300 million malnourished children in the world can be fed at school for EUR 0.24 per child per day. At the moment, we spend in Europe EUR 2 daily per cow on subsidies. The chasm between rich and poor is not narrowed by means of extra funding or food aid to developing countries, but precisely by means of additional policy. We must take the subsidised cow by the horns. Without adequate reforms to the common agricultural policy now, the objectives of the World Food Summit will never be reached, and certainly not by 2015.
Moreover, Commissioner Nielsen was right to state that, as an organisation, the FAO remains very inefficient. Commissioner Nielsen is right to demand only concrete, national, regional support and no general FAO fund contribution, and he was right to criticise the bad management, such as in Zimbabwe. By adequate agricultural policy, I specifically mean the shift of production subsidies towards rural development, but mainly also free and fair trade. We should call an end to the dumping of European products in developing countries. We should in Europe abandon the export subsidies for our own farmers and we must lower the trade barriers for developing countries to a minimum.
I await with bated breath the EU’s new agricultural policy, on which the Commission will be taking a decision next week. As Commissioner Nielsen rightly said, that is where, in addition to national policy in the developing countries themselves, a large proportion of the solution to world hunger lies."@en1
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