Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-26-Speech-4-022"

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"Madam President, you have heard some diverging views around the House this morning on this issue. I congratulate, of course, Mr Siekierski. At a time of deepening economic recession and the tens of millions of people who are living in poverty and are hungry, of course, as a Parliament, we have to find ways of helping them and providing them with food aid. But, as the Commissioner pointed out, there are 19 participating Member States in this project. That means there are eight Member States not participating. The UK is one of them, and the reason is that they use their own social policy to provide aid for the poor. They withdrew from this scheme many years ago. The question that many Member States and the Commission are asking is: why are we using the CAP to finance social policy? This used to be perfectly OK when we had massive surpluses – milk lakes, butter mountains and beef mountains – and were required to distribute this food to the poor, using the CAP budget to finance that distribution. But now, when there is very little in intervention – and we are hearing now that we have to buy in food even from outwith the EU and use the CAP budget to store and distribute this food – this surely is becoming something that should be better handled by Member States’ social policy. When you consider that there are people living in complete deprivation in some of the new Member States, like Romania, and many of these people, by the way, are subsistence farmers, they are the people who the poorest. Yet we are potentially taking money from them – money from the CAP budget that could help them – to distribute this food aid, the main beneficiaries of which are actually old Member States, like France, Italy and Spain. So there has not been a level playing field applied to this distribution of aid, and in future I think we should be very cautious about how we take this forward."@en1
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