Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-02-16-Speech-3-408-000"
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"en.20110216.15.3-408-000"2
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".
Madam President, it is welcome that we are actually discussing agriculture and food issues in the middle of the session on a Wednesday afternoon rather than at midnight. I very much welcome that. One of the reasons is that the massive volatility that we are witnessing today in food prices has at long last acted as a wake-up call to politicians across Europe.
Over the last 30 years, we have all become complacent as food prices declined year after year after year in real terms. Food has never been cheaper than it has been in the last few years. We have come to expect our supermarket shelves to be overloaded and groaning with food 24 hours a day. Too much food was thought to be the problem. That dominated the debate up until 2007, rather than the problem being too little.
The recent price spikes are a turning point, a sign that the days of plenty may be drawing to a close. Our current agricultural production model has been based on cheap energy, an abundance of land and plentiful supplies of water. That model cannot meet the challenges we face in the future. A rising population to 9 billion, growing demand from developing countries and the impact of climate change. As Professor John Beddington, the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer, recently predicted, unless we take action we face a perfect storm of scarce energy supplies, scarcity of water and food shortages.
We need to act now and build a new agricultural model. Europe needs to take the lead and the reform of the common agricultural policy gives us the opportunity to map out a sustainable food production system that can meet that huge demand in world food supplies that is going to be needed in the future."@en1
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