Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-22-Speech-2-275"
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"en.20080422.49.2-275"2
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"−
Mr President, in view of the current food crisis, the European Commission has just announced that it will be significantly increasing its emergency food aid. This is excellent news, but it is mainly by focusing on these structural causes that the Commission will show that it has grasped the extent of the crisis and that it recognises that both it and the EU are fully accountable for what happens today.
For us European Socialists, the current crisis has nothing to do with fate; it is merely the result of very clear political decisions taken by northern countries in general in a whole range of areas. We need to realise that, while people are rioting and there are hunger demonstrations - and who can blame them - the Commission, which has several voices, is still continuing to subsidise exports of its agricultural produce at the expense of millions of small producers in the south who are incapable of competing.
Bear in mind that some within the European Union are reducing the amount of public development aid, while continuing to promise and claim the exact opposite. We also need to remember that the Commission is still trying to impose so-called economic partnership agreements on ACP countries, the poorest countries in the world; agreements that they do not want, because it is clear to them that these agreements contain the seeds of other future crises.
There is a long list of decisions that the Union and the European Commission are continuing to take which blatantly contradict the objectives announced regarding development cooperation. What more can be said about a system, our system, in which rice or wheat have become safe investments? Is it really fair to see European banks offer their customers investment products that speculate on the rise in commodity and food prices?
Do we just lie down and accept the fact that we are forcing millions of people to starve, just so that we can drive around in environmentally-friendly cars and admire our green spaces? No, we do not. This is why we are calling for greater cohesion between the various policies of the European Union and why we are fiercely lobbying the Commission and Mr Barroso so that we stop this rush towards biofuels by working towards the introduction of a moratorium, like the one proposed by Mr Ziegler before the United Nations, both on their use and production, as long as they compete with food.
I should like to finish by informing my fellow Member Mr Cornillet that the fish proverb is Mao Tse-tung, and not René Dumont."@en1
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