Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-03-Speech-3-156"
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"en.20020703.4.3-156"2
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"Mr President, projections based on the ‘current rate’ of decline in the number of people suffering from malnutrition suggest that it will take a century to overcome hunger in the world. Is this hard fact not enough to justify a radical rethink of the policies that are currently being pursued? The subsidies that the governments of industrialised countries pay to their own farmers are forty-eight times higher than the amount paid to support agriculture in poor countries. Direct competition between agricultural products from countries with very unequal productive systems, as well as the practices of exporting countries in the developed world, coupled with the risk of dependence facing the countries of the South if they specialise in the export of one or two primary products – these are the long-term threats to the future food security of the people who inhabit three quarters of our planet.
The effects of these practices, which are totally consistent with the enshrined provisions of the WTO Agreements, are verifiable and have been verified. These practices kill. The Johannesburg summit could be an opportunity to make other choices, to focus on other avenues as yet unexplored, such as guaranteeing the right of developing countries to protect their rural economies with a view to defending their food security against multinational corporations and to supporting local food-processing businesses. Why not make hard and fast provisions for the creation of a specific fund designed to guarantee the effective achievement of all these objectives? The Director-General of the FAO has estimated that an additional amount of 24 billion dollars would be needed to achieve the aforementioned aims. The disaffection of the Heads of State at the FAO summit, however, provided confirmation that the developed countries’ would not be committing any more resources, which cannot fail to give cause for concern. The only effective remedy would be a response to the needs of the poor countries; at the Forum of the Peoples that has just been held in Sibi, Mali, for example, these countries called for the immediate and unconditional cancellation of Africa’s foreign debt and for fair payment for agricultural products and other raw materials. This is the price that has to be paid to rid the world of hunger."@en1
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