Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-23-Speech-3-307"
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"en.20021023.7.3-307"2
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"Mr President, the problem of food security and famine faced by 20% of the world's population is, without doubt, a blot on the copybook of modern civilisation and proves that capitalism is unable to resolve even basic problems. The salient features of this report are a hypocritical interest in the people and farmers of developing countries, wishful thinking and contradictions and its ultimate purpose is to offer those responsible for the problem an alibi so that they can continue with the very policy which is exacerbating the problem.
The objective of the proposed draft is to resolve the food security problem and it sets an interim date of 2015 for halving the number of people forced to live on a dollar a day. This objective is cancelled out by CAP reforms, which cut Community agricultural output in order to bring it into line with the international market, as defined by the WTO rather than mankind's food requirements. Why? Because, according to the prevailing view in the European Union, food is not a commodity that meets various needs, it is a commodity that guarantees huge profits for the food industry and multinationals.
With its endless reforms of the CAP, the European Union is becoming more and more product-deficient, ruining farmers and, at the same time, forcing developing countries, with extortionate agreements and price mechanisms, to sell their agricultural produce at knock-down prices, tightening the noose around the neck of their people and protecting the multinationals' profits.
The solution is not to abolish subsidies in developed countries, ruining their farmers and bringing them into line with farmers in developing countries, but to maintain a parity in international trading relations between developed and developing countries in practice, so as to improve their standard of living, reduce their foreign debt and increase their overall domestic output. The wishful thinking and contradictions in the report reach the height of hypocrisy in the proposal to fund genetically modified crops for developing countries, to be supplied by various multinationals and never mind the consequences.
We know from experience that famine is a political and social problem, not a technical problem. We have the productive potential and wherewithal to feed the entire world and still take care of the environment and public health, but not under the current social system, by which I mean the prevailing capitalist system.
This report keeps to the standard formula and offers no positive suggestions to mitigate the global food problem. On the contrary, the measures it proposes will exacerbate the problem, which will be compounded by serious risks to the environment and public health and the dependency of developing countries on multinationals in the developed world."@en1
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