Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-09-Speech-2-321"
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"en.20040309.12.2-321"2
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".
Mr Howitt, you are, in theory, right to say that higher prices in Europe help to make exporting to Europe a more attractive prospect for poorer states. You must surely also be aware, though, that there are numerous reasons why the current price level is quite simply unsustainable. We really should not be deluding ourselves where our own sugar beet farmers or the developing world’s exporters are concerned. The current price on our internal market is something like three times higher than that on the international market and, whatever happens, we will, in the current WTO round, be obliged to reduce our external protection for sugar. That alone will be enough to bring the price down on the internal market; there is no other way of doing it. That is the problem facing us.
To that we have to add other issues, such as how we can compensate for additional imports from the least developed countries merely by cutting back our own production, for sugar consumption in Europe is not going to increase. Nor must it be forgotten that sugar faces ever-tougher direct competition from other sweetening agents. No longer is there any sugar in Coca-Cola today – it contains isoglucose and nothing else. These sweeteners are also in direct competition with sugar. If, as the USA did a long time ago, we create a free market for them, quantities will increase accordingly. The result of all that is that, in the European Union, production will not decrease in the same way in every Member State; on the contrary, the simple fact of the matter will be that, in some of them, sugar production will quite simply no longer pay and so they will stop growing sugar beet. That is what we have to reckon with. I do not think it makes sense to arouse expectations that we can never satisfy.
There is also the problem of having to consider how we help those developing countries that have traditionally been our sugar suppliers – Mauritius is one example – if they begin to see exporting sugar to Europe as a less attractive prospect than it was in the past."@en1
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