Irish aiming to sell CAP to poor countries

By David Cronin

Date: 06/05/04

IRELAND'S EU presidency will next week advocate a new strategy aimed at convincing poor countries that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is not inimical to their interests.

Discussions at the meeting of farm ministers in Killarney

(9-11 May) are due to pivot around a document claiming that CAP reform means the EU is doing more to help developing countries than is commonly accepted by other players in the World Trade Organization (WTO).

"Yet in the negotiations on the Doha development round, the EU has found itself continually subjected to more and more demands," adds the presidency's paper. "This suggests a failure to bring home to our WTO partners the significance of reforms of our domestic support arrangements and the value, or potential value, of the trade concessions we have made."

The paper states that, due to alterations to the CAP made during the 1990s, the level of export subsidies paid declined from 25% of the value of farm exports in 1992 to 5.2% in 2001.

At the same time, the EU is the world's largest importer of agricultural goods from developing nations, taking more than the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand combined.

Dublin recommends that a CAP communications strategy should be two-pronged. It should look at how developing countries can be assisted by explaining the opportunities offered by such initiatives as Everything But Arms (EBA), which is designed to give quota-free access to the EU's market for a raft of produce. Secondly, the strategy should examine how campaign groups, critical of CAP, can better understand its purported benefits.

But relief agency Oxfam branded the Irish presidency's efforts a PR stunt. It also accused Dublin of not telling the entire story by, for example, failing to pinpoint the deleterious effects of the EU's sugar regime, which escaped a shake-up in the CAP reform package adopted by EU governments last year.

Because sugar from least developed countries (LDCs) is subject to highly restricted market openings under the EBA scheme, the group has calculated that the total quota allowance for sugar from the 49 recognized LDCs is equivalent to only three days of sugar consumption in the EU's 15 "old" member states.

"Sugar is an area which might slip off the reform agenda again this year," said Oxfam's Jo Leadbeater, referring to a review of sugar support currently being undertaken by the European Commission.

"If we look at this sector, then the EU's spin starts to come undone. What we don't need is another PR stunt, what we need is real reforms from the EU."

A spokesman for Irish Agriculture Minister Joe Walsh said he wished to kick-start a debate about whether member states can join the Commission in "selling" the CAP abroad.

Article previews a meeting of European Union Agriculture Ministers in Killarney (Ireland), on 9-11 May 2004 at which the Irish EU Presidency put forward a paper claiming that reform of the Common Agriculture Policy means the EU is doing more to help poor countries than is commonly accepted by other members in the World Trade Organisation (WTO).