Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-03-Speech-3-151"
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"en.20020703.4.3-151"2
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"Unfortunately, the World Food Summit organised by the Food and Agriculture Organization has demonstrated that the fears I expressed to this very House a month and a half ago were entirely warranted.
The absence of thirteen European Heads of State from the Summit and the Italian Prime Minister’s request that the end of the meeting be brought forward because of a football match graphically illustrate how little interest famine in the world generates in our countries. One international conference takes place after another – Monterrey, Rome, Johannesburg; Europe would have the world believe that development is its chief concern. At the same time, however, it abolishes the European Union Development Council, and the Directorate-General for Development may also be axed soon. And we abstain from any binding involvement or commitment whatsoever on behalf of the poorest populations.
This was the other huge disappointment at the Summit, where we confined ourselves to subscribing to commitments that had previously been undertaken without any means of obtaining the tangible resources required for their fulfilment. This, incidentally, had happened in Monterrey too, but it was even worse in Rome. Mr Berlusconi even had the effrontery to cast doubt on the duty of the industrialised countries to assist the developing countries in their desperate plight, invoking the precept that ‘God helps those who help themselves’. Likewise, the WTO helps the United States and the European Union to maintain and even increase their export subsidies on farm produce, subsidies which fly in the face of the sacrosanct principle of free trade proclaimed by those same two parties and which are used to a great extent to the detriment of the poor countries that are the main exporters of raw materials.
How can anyone attach any credit to a US Administration that has just increased its subsidies to cotton farmers or to the governments of the EU Member States that refused to commit themselves in Doha to a timetable for the reduction of their subsidies on agricultural exports? We are disappointed by the resolution that the European Parliament has proposed, because it fails to condemn the gulf between the words of our governments and their deeds. The Roman Emperors used to have a formula for appeasing their poorest citizens: bread and circuses. I believe there were certainly circuses this time in Rome, but the bread was forgotten."@en1
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