Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-11-18-Speech-2-054"
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"en.20081118.4.2-054"2
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"Mr President, we have already heard a great deal during this morning’s long debate. Fortunately, I managed to give the Commissioner a portion of school fruit before we started, so hopefully with that snack, we will be able to carry on discussing this important topic for a while longer.
I should like to turn my attention away from school fruit, though, to the subject of milk. Quite apart from the discussion about all kinds of technical instruments, it is, to my mind, impossible to explain to the European citizen that we have paid EUR 340 million in superlevy, while we all remain nearly 1% under the European quota. This lack of logic will in any event need to be addressed in the Council.
Moreover, as I have stated before, the Commission proposal of an annual quota increase by 1% is very ‘skimmed’, in my view, and this could easily be increased to ‘semi-skimmed’ in the Council of Ministers later. After all, with 1%, we are leaving opportunities unused within the EU and the world market. The argument I have heard before in this debate, namely that our quota system would automatically give us a good price, is far too short-sighted. This is also clearly evident from the price development since 1984. Needless to say, mega stores like they have in the United States are unthinkable in our region. We will need to put safety nets in place for very lean years and for unforeseen circumstances, such as animal diseases.
Also, and I think this is just as important, I would urge the Commission to look at how the returns are divided across the food production chain. While supermarkets currently work with economic margins of some 20% and the distribution trade with margins of nearly 10%, many primary producers – the farmers – without whom none of the food would be there – are working with negative returns at the moment.
Back to the main topic, though. As I said, we are talking about our daily bread here. Food security should therefore be paramount in this debate, but mainly also in the debate on agricultural policy after 2013, because I think the last thing we need is to have to establish in due course that we have become just as dependent on far away countries for our daily bread as we are for energy."@en1
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