EUROPE: Agriculture Proposals ‘Failing Development’

•  brussels
• Thursday, October 20, 2011
• Inter Press Service

CAP is a European Union system which mainly consists of agriculture subsidies and programmes. It currently represents 48 percent of the EU's budget, equalling about 55 billion euros.

The European Commission published its new CAP proposals last Thursday. 'We have to make sure money is spent in a fair and more effective way,' Roger Waite, spokesperson for the European Commission, tells IPS. 'In the new proposals, we put the emphasis on sustainability, greening agriculture, and making sure agriculture helps the whole of society.'

But one day before the publication, the European development NGO confederation CONCORD released a press statement saying the new CAP proposals had dropped every reference to Europe's development obligations. According to article 208 of the Lisbon Treaty, Europe is legally bound to take all effects of its policies on developing nations into account.

This is the so-called Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) principle. While the latest EU Parlament Resolution in July 2011 and the original Commission communication from November 2010 featured a commitment to PCD, the new proposals do not mention it. 'We are not against farmers, nor are we against farming in Europe,' Laust Leth Gregersen, policy officer at CONCORD Denmark tells IPS. 'Our only concern is that sustaining agriculture in Europe must not hamper food security outside of Europe, especially in developing countries.

'All around the globe, you can find developing nations where artificially cheaper exports from the European Union squeeze local farmers out of the production chain and out of their local markets. This leads to food insecurity. The only sustainable solution to world hunger is to increase productivity in developing countries where people live.'

According to the United Nations, last year 925 million people went hungry, equalling one in seven people worldwide. At the same time a third of the food produced for human consumption is thrown away. CONCORD says that by dropping its development obligations, the European Commission is not taking its responsibility in tackling world hunger. As the Commission is not committing to phase out export subsidies, the EU can continue to export below full production costs.

'It is true phasing out export subsidies has not been mentioned in our proposals,' the European Commission's Roger Waite tells IPS, 'but this is an offer Europe has repeatedly made during negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), on condition that everybody else would get rid of their trade distorting export subsidies.

'We are not going to disarm unilaterally, but at the same time we have to stress that our use of export refunds has come down massively in recent years. This year the budget for export refunds is less than 0.5 percent of the total CAP budget. The Commission remains committed to phasing out export refunds in the long run, but only within the context of the WTO.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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