Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-17-Speech-2-207"
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"en.20060117.20.2-207"2
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"Madam President, as we know, from as early as 1968, Europe has sought to ensure that it is able to meet its own sugar needs; that is to say, that it is in a position to satisfy demand by means of its own production wherever possible. As with many good intentions, this went wrong along the way and undoubtedly began to constitute a problem.
Our sugar-beet farmers simply do not stand a chance of competing with the hot climate and low wages of the tropics – although it has to be said, of course, that our sugar is not produced using either slash-and-burn or child labour, nor is it transported halfway round the world, which undoubtedly protects the environment, too.
Allowing beet farmers to produce ever greater surpluses and sell them on the world market at subsidised prices, so to speak, and thus making them competitors to all of those who could actually produce sugar far more cheaply, created a system that was bound to collapse sooner or later. Yet instead of slow, sensitive regulatory intervention to avert the worst-case scenario, the response was to look the other way for decades.
The last straw seems to have been the agreement with ACP countries on the re-export of their sugar, which was subsidised to the tune of EUR 800 million. This is a most peculiar kind of development aid. Previously, subsidised EU sugar exports were regarded as immoral; now they are illegal.
We shall have to work hard, therefore, to ensure that our farmers, our sugar factories and the workers in these factories emerge unscathed, as far as possible, from this mess of our own making."@en1
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