Hain: Cap is “bloated self-subsidy”
Time is running out for agricultural subsidies, Welsh secretary Peter Hain has said.
His comments come ahead of this week’s G8 summit in Gleneagles at which the breaking down of world trade barriers has been earmarked as a key area for discussion.
The EU’s common agricultural policy (Cap) is likely to be a major bone of contention between Tony Blair, who believes it should be reformed, and French president Jacques Chirac, who insists the current subsidies have been agreed until 2013.
Chancellor Gordon Brown insists that reform of the Cap is required if the developing world is to compete on the world market and pull itself out of poverty, a view reiterated by Mr Hain this morning.
“The entire agricultural subsidies for the rich world – not just Europe and the USA but throughout the rich world – amount to the entire wealth of sub-Saharan Africa excluding South Africa,” he told BBC Radio Wales.
“That just indicates the grotesque scale of the way the rich world protects itself against the poor world, and if we are to have genuinely open and free trade as we want and as lots of rich leaders across the world are arguing for, then that has got to be tiled evenly rather than being a one-way kind of trade.”
He described the Cap as “a huge bloated self-subsidy by rich European countries blocking access from poor countries for their agricultural produce”, while also lambasting the US for its own “huge subsidy for its own use”.
In an interview with ITV’s Tonight with Trevor McDonald, US president George Bush said it would drop its subsidy system if the Cap was abandoned.
“Let’s join hands as wealthy industrialised nations and say to the world, we are going to get rid of all our agricultural subsidies together,” Mr Bush said.
“And so the position of the US government is, we are willing to do so, and we will do so with our fine friends in the European Union.”
