Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-23-Speech-3-309"
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"en.20021023.7.3-309"2
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"Mr President, of the world’s six billion inhabitants, more than 800 million today suffer from malnutrition and of this figure, three-quarters live in rural areas; poor peasant farmers who are poorly equipped and have no market on which to sell their goods and who therefore restrict their production to their own consumption needs. It is crucial to understand that the majority of those going hungry are not city-dwellers who can buy food but rural producers of food crops. It is, therefore, the fall in the price of farm produce that is leaving the third world hungry. Only access to the markets at reasonable prices can provide these poor peasant farmers with a sufficient income to modernise their production, buy tools and gain access to chemicals, to irrigation, and to better seeds.
The countries that have been most successful in staving off famine, particularly India and China, are those that, as a result of policies supporting agricultural prices, subsidies for chemicals and for transport and irrigation infrastructures, have enabled their farmers to access their own internal market and thereby increase their buying power, their productivity and their production. On the other hand, the countries in which famine has spread are those in which the fall in agricultural prices has thrown peasant farmers into poverty, destabilising marketing networks, and has forced many of those living in rural areas, oppressed by poverty, towards ill-equipped suburbs or into emigrating.
It is therefore crucial that we halt the fall in agricultural prices. Access to a profitable local market is the primary right of any agricultural producer, the primary condition for growth in agricultural production and a prerequisite for eliminating hunger from the world. We must give up on the crazy Utopian idea of making the planet one immense borderless market. It makes no sense at all to attempt to pit a peasant farmer in Chad against a farmer in Minnesota or an Andean shepherd against a large New Zealand landowner . Countries which act as propagandists for this single world market, not least those that are members of the Cairns group, are not countries suffering from famine, but countries which, as a result of particularly low production costs, huge areas of farmland, low wages and top-rate agricultural investment are capable of ruining the farming of those countries that do not share these advantages.
As for the policies maintained by the European Union, there are three conclusions to be drawn. First, the agricultural development projects that we fund in the developing countries must all contain a section for assistance for the marketing of food produce. Second, we must help developing countries, or groups of countries with similar production costs, to protect their domestic markets against dumping prices set by the world market, by means of instruments without which their producers would face ruin. Third, we must bring all our influence to bear on international trade negotiations to ensure that the right to agricultural exception, i.e., a nation’s right to protect the farmers that provide its food, is recognised.
This was the aim, Mr President, of the amendments tabled by the Committee on Agriculture. These have been adopted by the Committee on Development and I ask you to give them your support."@en1
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