Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-24-Speech-2-237"
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"en.20020924.10.2-237"2
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"On the subject of CAP reform, I would like to speak out against the all too frequent tendency of this House to criticise the size of our EU agriculture budgets. It angers me to hear that it is scandalous for the Union to devote 45% of its budget to agriculture. In fact, this 45% only represents 3% of the public budgets of the Union and the Member States. 3% of public budgets allocated to 5% of the population, 3% of public budgets allocated to 60% of EU territory, 3% of public budgets allocated to our food, our food safety, maintaining agricultural revenue and to the orientation of agriculture markets.
3% of public budgets allocated to agriculture is less than the percentage in the United States. According to the OECD, US agricultural policy costs USD 338 per taxpayer in comparison with USD 276 in the European Union.
So, just as our US counterparts, in view of the failure of their previous agricultural act, the Fair Act, have decided to increase aid to agriculture by 70% at a time when some countries have the advantage of large areas of land, using advanced agricultural technologies, benefiting from extremely low labour costs, and implementing dumping policies that destabilise prices world-wide, we should not call into question the Berlin agreements by wanting to impose a reduction in our agriculture budgets within the EU. Nor must we let it be said that our agriculture budgets are an obstacle to progress in developing countries. Our CAP and the associated budgets offset the social and environmental restrictions we impose on our farmers, and aim to provide them with a comparable quality of life to that of the rest of the Union’s population. The developing countries, and in particular the poorest among them, have a high proportion of poor peasant farmers, and what these poor farmers need is not increased liberalism placing them in competition with largescale high-tech farming throughout the world, but, on the contrary, to be able to increase their productivity by selling their food products on regional or national markets. We must not aim for the wrong target. It is not our so-called protectionism that is causing poor third-world farmers to starve, but, on the contrary, dogmatic free trade aimed at placing farmers with vastly differing levels of technology and productivity in competition with each other. This, appropriately, was what the Senegalese and Indian Ministers for Agriculture were saying at Johannesburg.
Lastly, if we really want to reduce the public budgets allocated to agriculture, it is perhaps time to reopen discussions on Community preference, by defining a new, updated Community preference system that would allow the extra cost imposed on our agriculture sector by our high food safety, social, environmental and animal welfare requirements to be absorbed internally into the agriculture prices on the Community market. In order to do this, Mr President, Commissioners, we must firmly turn our back on the aberrant dogma of world prices."@en1
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