Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-22-Speech-2-252"
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"en.20080422.49.2-252"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in the years and decades that now lie behind us, we had a disastrously low price for agricultural products and it was essential, and urgent, for it to increase worldwide. This is a very good development because the price level was below the production costs for organic/rural agriculture, and that has destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of farmers, not only in the third world but also here in the European Union.
If, as Mr Schulz says, this is being fuelled by speculation, then that has something to do with the fact that now, after the European Union did away with export subsidies and allowed premiums to run down, we have something more like an intervention mechanism, where food and feedstuff are linked to the price of oil, because we are starting to make petrol from food and feedstuff. This promotes speculation because, all around the world, the possibility and necessity of transporting feedstuff is increasing.
The European Union is the world’s largest importer of food and feedstuff, which means that we have no surpluses and that the mechanism by which we convert the imports – which amount to 50 million tonnes of grain units, bought almost below the poverty threshold from third world countries – into food, which is then dumped and exported at a cost of billions and undersold on regional markets in third world countries, has ultimately destroyed rural agriculture and regional subsistence farming.
Therefore, we must see this as an opportunity. This does not mean that I believe that agrifuels are the panacea, because the energy balance is negative and because that gives rise to speculation, but we must try to convert material which is actually available, as waste, into energy. To put it more bluntly, we must make gold from shit rather than thinking that we are competing with food for humans. It is not possible for everyone in the world to have full gas tanks and full plates based only on the plants that grow. It might be possible in Europe, because we are rich enough to purchase these products and these crop harvests for ourselves, but the rest of the world would go hungry.
In closing I would like to add one further thought: We have 850 million people who are starving, and these 850 million people were already starving when the price level was disastrously low. What has now happened is that the purchasing power of the middle classes in third world countries has decreased so that these people are finding it difficult to buy other consumer goods. This thwarts the strategy of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Now people are calling for more money, but the 850 million starving people were already in need of that money."@en1
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