Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-22-Speech-2-258"
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"en.20080422.49.2-258"2
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"−
Mr President, other speakers here today have debated the subject at length, but it is better to repeat ourselves than to contradict each other.
When you have a dollar a day to live on and it costs 75 cents to feed yourself, and then this increases by 40%, you have nowhere to go. You cannot redistribute your costs, so you reduce your food ration, you stop sending your children to school because it costs money and your main priority is to feed them, and then you get all the attendant social problems that come with this.
What we are seeing is the human problem on an individual scale. The causes have mostly been covered. I think we should refrain from having an ideological interpretation of these causes, because there is not just one interpretation. Obviously biofuels might be one cause but, as Mr Daul said, this represents 2% of production, 1% of surface area, so we should stop overstating this.
Climate change is not necessarily harmful everywhere, even though the consequences are disastrous in some countries. As for the change in eating habits, I believe that the fact that some of the world’s population are eating better is rather good news. As for speculation, yes of course we should find a way to stop western capitalists from making money that should be going to rice growers in Vietnam.
The money issue will be resolved. We will of course find the EUR 315 million to be added to the EUR 2.9 billion of the World Food Programme. However, the real solution, as the Commissioner said in his report, the solution lies with production issues. We must improve agriculture, improve productivity, especially in Africa, which of course requires investment into hybrid research, and we should stop demonising GMOs, which can be part of the solution.
We need to invest in training. It was Mr Dumont who said ‘give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. I think that applies here too. Above all, we need to invest in infrastructure, because improving agriculture means improving irrigation, improving transport, making it possible for produce to sent from point A to be sold at point B, and we need to improve storage and the cold chain, if we want to export this produce.
Everyone needs to act, not just humanitarian resources. All aid measures – the IMF, World Bank, ADB, etc. – must be mobilised in order to put agriculture back at the heart of development strategy. It is also an opportunity for us to rethink food security in humanitarian aid. Let us be humble enough to admit that years of humanitarian aid have not reduced dependency. We need to ask questions about humanitarian aid to ease our consciences. This is not the time for ideological interpretation. Let us examine the external causes, population density, natural disasters, the loss of human life through HIV and AIDS and, more importantly, the links between poor governance and the humanitarian consequences."@en1
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