| akumabito |
06-11-2006 17:27 |
Ik haak nog even in op de praatjes over de EU, en met name het landbouwbeleid van de EU. Mensen die het huidige landbouwbeleid steunen zijn naar mijn idee dus echt niet goed bij hun hoofd, OF hebben totaal geen idee waar ze het nou eigenlijk over hebben. (doch een combinatie van beide factoren is natuurlik ook niet ondenkbaar)
Bron
Citaat:
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) remains the most visible and expensive common policy of the EU, but is increasingly out of step with the need for Europe to respond to the challenges
of globalisation. Internationally, it continues to attract criticism, to create tensions in the EU’s relations with trading partners, and to impose significant costs on developing countries. Domestically, it imposes substantial costs on consumers and taxpayers but is inefficient in delivering support to farmers and promoting an attractive rural environment.
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Although the CAP has evolved since its introduction, and recent reforms in particular have made significant progress, the costs of the CAP are still substantial. Half of farm support (about €50 billion per annum) is still geared towards keeping market prices high, the major source of the economic distortion the CAP imposes on the EU and the rest of the world. In particular, the tariffs necessary to support this system are still very high, both in absolute terms and in comparison to those imposed on non-agricultural goods. Whilst the average tariff for non-agricultural goods is 4 per cent, for agricultural goods it is around 20 per cent, with tariffs of 70 per cent or more not uncommon for core CAP commodities.
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Economic and financial costs:
● Economic analysis, even on conservative assumptions, suggests the CAP will leave the EU economy around €100 billion poorer over the period of the next financial perspective (2007-13);
● The financial cost to ordinary citizens is much greater – around €100 billion each year according to OECD estimates, half from taxpayers and half from consumers owing to higher food prices.
This is an average cost to an EU family of four of around €950 a year, with only around €20 of this spent as EU money on targeted environmental programmes;
● The CAP has been estimated to be equivalent to a value added tax on food of around 15 per cent;
● Removing market price support would bring a one-off reduction in inflation of 0.9 per cent;
● Many of its benefits accrue to the landowner because of the tendency for support to capitalise into the value of inputs such as land – only around 10 per cent of market price support, which
forms half of the CAP, actually reaches farmers in their capacity as farmers;
● A quarter of market price support is lost through economic inefficiencies.
● Over a third goes to suppliers of inputs such as machinery, pesticides and fertilisers;
● Up to 90 per cent of the value of coupled area payments goes to the landowner, who may or may not be a farmer. In Member States such as France where the proportion of rented land is high less than 20 per cent of such payments reaches farmers; and The CAP results in a substantial reallocation of resources between Member States.
Social costs:
● The €50 billion annual cost to consumers arises from higher food prices and so falls disproportionately on the poorest in society as they spend a much greater proportion of their income on food;
● The CAP sits uneasily with the needs of the EU’s new Member States – it is poorly targeted at promoting the restructuring and modernisation of agriculture or at improving rural infrastructure,
services and employment; and
● Support for farmers takes no account of the relative income or wealth of farm households compared to other sectors of society. Many farmers are poor, but in many Member States, taken as
a group, farmers are not uniquely or predominantly the poorest in society. Average farm household incomes are higher in many Member States than the all household average.
Impact on developing countries:
● Securing further trade reform would generate substantial benefits for the global economy and poverty reduction. Global income could increase by $290 billion by 2015 if trade-distorting policies in merchandise trade including agriculture were eliminated. Over half of these gains would come from ending agricultural protectionism in rich countries;
● Agriculture is extremely important to developing countries, especially the poorest, where it accounts for 40 per cent of GDP, 35 per cent of exports, and 50-70 per cent of total employment.
Three quarters of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas, and are either wholly or partly dependent on agriculture;
● The EU is not the only rich country to provide support to its farmers: Japan provided $49 billion and the United States $47 billion in 2004. Nearly half of rich country producer support, $133 billion, went to EU farmers, and the EU accounted for over 40 per cent of market price support;
● About half the benefits to developing countries from agricultural reform in all rich countries would come from the EU;
● The EU already takes a higher share of imports from low income countries than do other major trading nations, partly reflecting its temperate geographical position. Nonetheless, on the World
Bank’s measure of overall trade restrictiveness, the EU is more restrictive than the US and Canada but less restrictive than Japan;
● The impact of further reform will vary between countries, depending on factors such as the investment climate and infrastructure;
● Some developing countries would immediately gain from a liberalised agriculture market in the EU and other OECD countries. A large number will benefit in the longer term once they have built
up the capacity they need to trade – economic infrastructure, human capital, institutions and social protection systems to safeguard people through change;
● There are other countries that may lose out in the short term because they will lose their trade preferences or face higher food import bills. But their economies are unlikely to develop if they
remain trapped in distorted and non-competitive production resulting from preferences. Preferences have been of limited value, encouraging countries to over-invest in areas in which they would not normally have a comparative advantage. So these are not reasons for delaying EU and OECD agricultural reform; and
● It will be of fundamental importance that, side by side with efforts to open markets and phase out subsidies, developed countries make the necessary investments in the capacity of poor countries to
trade as well as their ability to cope with the challenges they face in the short term.
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