Canadian envoy takes CAP to task: ‘it does enormous damage to poor states’

Date: 05/12/02

By David Cronin

THE Common Agricultural Policy is 'doing enormous damage' to the world's poorest countries, Canada's new EU envoy has said.

Jeremy Kinsman's claim coincides with a call by Oxfam for EU governments to honour promises made at last year's World Trade Organization summit in Doha by agreeing farm reform measures by the end of 2002. In a letter to farm ministers, the anti-poverty group argues that subsidies paid to Europe's farmers lead to the dumping of surplus produce on poor countries, slashing the earnings of their producers.

'We dislike American and EU farm subsidies equally profoundly,' said Kinsman. 'I don't think anyone in Europe denies that the CAP is enormously trade distorting. And I don't think anyone denies that doing something serious for developing countries is going to involve reducing those distortions. I realise that rural life has to involve more than bed and breakfasts and hedgerows and symbolic sheep on the horizon. But distortions have to be addressed.'

Canada is broadly supportive of efforts by Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler to overhaul the CAP but believes this must be followed by the eventual scrapping of subsidies.

This point will be raised at the forthcoming EU-Canada summit in Ottawa (19 December).

The summit will also focus on the fight against terrorism, said Kinsman, a Montreal native.

Europol, the Union's police agency, is working towards reaching a deal on exchanging data - possibly including details of airline passengers - with law enforcement authorities in Canada.

While securing an EU-US accord on legal and judicial cooperation has proved tricky due to differences in data- protection laws, Kinsman said Ottawa's views on data privacy are closer to the Union's. 'We don't have national ID cards in Canada, for example,' he added. 'Our laws will be easier to fit with Europe's than with America's.'

The Common Agricultural Policy is 'doing enormous damage' to the world's poorest countries, Jeremy Kinsman, Canada's new EU envoy has said.