Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-06-04-Speech-3-181"
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"en.20080604.22.3-181"2
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"Mr President, on the face of it, I should be in favour of this report which seeks to help under-developed nations. After all, Britain’s Commonwealth preference system was of enormous benefit to the less well-off members of the British Commonwealth, but then I do not suppose you want to hear how a wicked post-imperial power actually helped its poorer neighbours.
The problem is that EU programmes always turn out to have the opposite effect to that intended. The CFP, intended to conserve fish stocks, is a disaster as a result of which the EU, by the votes of this House, has awarded licences to EU fishing fleets to raid the waters of one Third World country after another, bringing poverty and starvation where once there was at least subsistence level. Excess sugar production is dumped on the Third World, to which the answer evidently is to reduce European production, not put it to better use. Poor-quality EU tobacco grown with EUR 18 million of our taxpayers’ money every year was dumped where it did most harm. Now we are told this money will go on anti-smoking propaganda, not Third World aid.
EU aid programmes are a classic case of giving with one hand and taking back with the other. The CAP restricts imports, hampering developing nations while at the same time dumping its excess in the Third World. Poor local farmers are thus put out of business, pulling the rug from under the very countries that the GSP is meant to help. Food prices are spiralling so much that former Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, is warning of a food revolution. While all this is going on, the EU is promoting biofuel targets, which will impact on food production in the Third World more than anywhere.
So this House can wax lyrical about how the EU’s GSP programme will come to the aid of less-developed nations, but the truth is that EU policies will only help to ensure that the poor stay poor, the hungry stay hungry, and the less-developed nations stay undeveloped."@en1
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