Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-10-Speech-1-103"
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"en.20030210.9.1-103"2
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"Mr President, I believe it would have been better to have held this debate before, and not after, the General Affairs Council had agreed to the Community’s offer for negotiation of the agricultural aspects of the WTO. It is clear that this is necessary for institutional balance and the whole decision-making process.
This is not a new practice, however, since there are precedents in the reform of the CAP of 1992 and in Agenda 2000. I say this because certain aspects, such as the reduction in internal support, involve the need to adopt very controversial aspects in the proposed regulations on intermediate reform.
We are talking about aspects such as total decoupling which, as well as being rejected by many MEPs – including myself – is also opposed by professions and many Member States. With regard to the content, I would continue to say the same thing: we are accepting a policy which will lack substantial and sufficient funds and which could therefore have negative effects on Community agriculture and in particular on the least-favoured regions.
With regard to the more specific proposals, I believe that there are some quite positive aspects in relation to the least-developed countries. However, the assumption is made that greater liberalisation of trade will lead to greater economic development. And this is not always the case. In this regard, I would like to point out that the two most liberalised markets – coffee and cocoa – are the agricultural markets with the highest level of poverty surrounding them and in which the producing countries call for less liberalisation and more regulation.
Neither can the negotiations be based on world market prices which, although it is true they are linked to the volumes marketed, bear very little relation to production and consumer prices. In any event, I believe it is important to make progress in order to remove export refunds for agricultural products with damaging effects on local agricultural production in the least-developed countries. We must recognise the right of the less developed countries to protect themselves from these subsidised exports in order to safeguard their fundamental right to food security, to food sovereignty and to the survival of their small-scale and family-run farms.
I believe the proposal to create a food security box is interesting, since it would be very useful also for the European Union for strategic and food security reasons. But in this regard the Commission is forgetting our dependency on vegetable proteins from outside and, specifically, from countries, in this case, which are not underdeveloped or developing, but which are very developed. And our dependency stands at 75%. This seems to me to be an extraordinary oversight.
Finally, given its distorting use by the United States and other countries, I am very pleased with the proposals to eliminate the
clause, to subject export credits and food aid to strict discipline and to protect geographical indications."@en1
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