Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-22-Speech-2-249"
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"en.20080422.49.2-249"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Michel spoke for the Commission but in the place of the Council. He has considerable experience of both institutions, fortunately, which is to our benefit.
Mr President, the past year has seen startling hikes in the cost of basic foods, such that 100 million people are being pushed into poverty and hundreds of thousands put at risk of starvation. So grave is the threat that it will cancel out all progress towards the goal of halving world poverty by 2015.
Europe’s rise in living standards has been rapid, so rapid that even my generation remembers, on our continent, gardens where little grew except the appetites of young children. We must not stand idly by in our privileged position as disaster unfolds. We must give more money to the World Food Programme now, so that it can feed the destitute, and my group welcomes the Commissioner’s commitments in this regard.
Many lay the blame on biofuels. Indeed, the United Nations special rapporteur has called agrofuels a ‘crime against humanity’. Yet the reasons for the recent food price rises are many and varied, and so must be the international community’s response.
World population growth, poor growing conditions linked to climate change, loss of agricultural land to industrial use, immoral commodities speculation and changing eating habits have all contributed to the current crisis. Meat consumption in China, for example, has risen from 20 kg per capita in 1980 to 50 kg per capita in 2007, and if every kilogram of beef requires 2 000 square feet of land and 13 000 litres of water, while the same nutritional content can be found from soya at 1% of the land and water use, we begin to see the complexity of the problem.
Far and away the worst offender is market distortion, which traps poor farmers in a cycle of poverty and gives them little incentive to increase food production. The high standards of sustainability for sourcing and manufacture, written into the European Union’s biofuels proposals, effectively insure Europe against non-sustainable use. So, rather than using biofuels as a scapegoat, we must move to end agricultural protectionism and export restrictions; we must move to enhance agricultural development in the poorest countries and to ensure the success of the Doha Development Round to encourage free, fair and sustainable farm trade at global level.
It is the common agricultural policy, not European biofuels, that are the root cause of this problem, and it is CAP reform, not dropping biofuels targets, that will solve it.
We must also use our collective weight to ensure that climate change and sustainability criteria are integrated with trade policy. The truth is we can afford to feed the world and, as Dominique Strauss-Kahn has said, ‘global cooperation can deliver the macroeconomic framework and the incentives needed to address the problem’.
My group believes that with the right political will and the right international cooperation, globalisation can be the solution, not the problem. It is up to the European Union to lead the way."@en1
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