Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-01-12-Speech-1-177"
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"en.20090112.18.1-177"2
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"Mr President, when I initiated this report the issue of global food security was very high on the political agenda and, to some extent, it has slipped from the highlights. But it is certainly an issue that is of concern because there are still upwards of one billion people globally who suffer hunger or malnutrition. Thirty thousand children die of hunger and poverty-related illnesses a day. These are horrific statistics and it makes the issue of how we produce sufficient food and give people access to that food a key issue.
I give a warning. Well over a year ago we were talking about high commodity prices. Today there are surpluses of grain, for example, in store and no market for them. Those farmers will not produce as much in the next season, and that could exacerbate the longer-term problem of global food security.
There is a lot in this report. I hope colleagues can support it and again I thank the many people who took a great interest in it.
I would like to thank the Commission for working with me in drafting this report and also the very many committees in the House, in particular the Committee on Development, which were obviously involved in its production.
In four minutes it is impossible to do justice to what is in the report, but let me just highlight some of the issues which I believe are of importance. Firstly, the fact that I have put the common agricultural policy and global food security in the one heading suggests that the old practice of bashing the common agricultural policy and blaming it for all the ills of the developing world has moved on, and that we are now aware that the common agricultural policy has provided food security for European citizens, and that as a model it can provide lessons for what we need to do in the developing world in terms of food production.
It is very clear that we have allowed agriculture development to slip down the political and development agenda over the last decade or so. There was a time when much of our development aid money went to stimulating agriculture and to projects on food production. That is not the case today, although I think, since the food price hike, we are beginning to refocus on agriculture, both in the EU and globally.
That means allowing those countries which have the resources to grow food to do that, to help them and their small-scale farmers produce food locally to meet their needs. It involves not just the provision of the basis ingredients of food production, such as seeds and fertilisers, but also the know-how, the advisory services, the assistance to farming families in the developing world to allow them to produce to meet their own needs.
It can be done. We have examples of Malawi and other countries that have managed to come from situations of extreme famine to producing food. It takes public policy initiatives to do it. It also requires that the European Union, given its huge involvement in the developing world, urges countries to look at their agriculture and begin stimulating food production in their own countries.
The issue of supply and demand is a very delicate one because there is a growing world population – it will increase by 40% by 2050 – so we are going to have to look at these issues. The problem of competition – as we have witnessed – between food production, feed production and fuel, is obviously a key concern. I suppose, driving all of this, we need to look at the issue of research and development.
I believe that we have not done enough in terms of research and development. We, in Europe, had looked towards producing less food and therefore perhaps had not looked at the need to look at the efficiencies of agricultural production and the need to produce more into the future.
One of the key messages that I really want to get across in the short time I have is to say that farmers worldwide will produce food if they can make an income from doing it, so the pressure on policymakers is to get that right, to provide the policies that will give farmers stable incomes. How do we do that? By providing stable prices and also looking at the costs of food production. Unless farmers get that income stimulus, they will pull back."@en1
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