Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-25-Speech-2-025"
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"en.20070925.4.2-025"2
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".
Mr President, the EU’s sugar policy is in a strange situation. Sugar quotas have been reduced by 2.2 million tonnes but at the same time the Commission has been selling millions of tonnes of new quotas. The net reduction is therefore just a million tonnes, whilst the target was six times that figure.
At the same time, the big producer countries have only increased their production. For example, Germany has increased its production from what was around 240 000 tonnes a year and France from what was 350 000 tonnes a year. It is primarily just the small countries that have reduced their production. Of the biggest countries only Italy has reduced its production significantly. The result of this has been that the small countries and those countries which are poorer off in terms of their natural conditions have had to reduce their sugar production.
At the same time again, more than EUR 3 billion – three thousand million euros – has accumulated in the restructuring fund, of which perhaps around EUR 2 000 remains unspent at present. This money has mainly come from consumers, because consumer prices have fallen more slowly than producer prices, and this difference has accrued in the Fund. On the other hand, it has also come from farmers, whose producer prices have gone down. This money has been and is being paid mainly to the industry, in the form of a massive amount of compensation to the tune of EUR 730 per tonne, while at the same time just around 10%, at best 20%, of this cash goes on changing the industrial structure and tearing down factories.
The entire sugar policy is a warning example of what can happen when we start implementing agricultural policy on industry’s terms. The industry is being paid huge amounts in compensation and we are getting very little in return. It is to be hoped that in the future agricultural policy will be practised as agricultural and not industrial policy.
We should focus special attention on the importance of solidarity. It should also be taken into consideration because all countries, including those which have reduced their sugar production, still have to pay prices for sugar which are higher than global market prices, although they are simply not allowed to produce it because the industry has decided against it.
In the same way, in the future we will need to ensure that we do not start applying any similar kind of system to other areas of agricultural production."@en1
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