Yet, it cannot be denied that Gaymard advanced in his speech a few
thought-provoking and oft-overlooked points.
He convincingly argued that farm products covered by EU subsidies are
rarely in direct competition with the crops of the poor in Africa and
Asia. The cotton, rice and groundnut oil subventions generously doled
out to growers in the United States - the EU's most vocal critic - harm
the third world smallholders and sharecroppers it purports to defend.
The IMF - perceived in Europe as the long and heartless arm of the
Americans - has dismantled the coffee regime and marketing structures
causing irreparable damage to its indigent growers, Gaymard said.
The CAP, insists Gaymard, does not encourage environmental ills. The
policy does not subsidize the husbandry of disease-prone poultry and
pigs, nor does it support genetically modified crops. The CAP is also
way cheaper than portrayed by its detractors. Food constitutes only 16
percent of the family budget - one third of its share when the CAP was
instituted, four decades ago. The CAP amounts to a mere 1 percent of
the combined public spending of all EU members. The comparable figure
in America is 1.5 percent.
This last argument is, of course, spurious. It ignores the distorting
effects of the CAP: exorbitant food prices in the EU, double payments
by EU denizens, once as taxpayers and then as consumers, mountains of
butter and rivers of milk produced solely for the sake of finagling
subsidies out of an inert and bloated bureaucracy and deteriorating
relationships with irate trade partners.
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