Sir, - So Joe Walsh and Tom Kitt went to the World Trade Organisation talks in Doha with Cabinet approval to try to block the launch of any new trade round that commits the EU to eliminating or phasing out subsidies to farmers. Agricultural products (as opposed to processed food products) form an ever decreasing portion of our exports, yet we are apparently prepared not only to jeopardise our successful new export industries such as software, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, but also to put at risk the whole world trading order that has seen the creation of unprecedented levels of wealth since the end of the second World War.
The world is facing a triple crisis involving the first capacity-driven recession since 1929, the first co-ordinated global downturn also since that year, and the unknown threats resulting from September 11th. The successful launch of a new trade round is absolutely vital, and in particular for this country which exports 80 per cent of what it produces. Indeed, in the words of Tom Kitt, we are one of the world's most spectacular beneficiaries of trade liberalisation.
The Common Agricultural Policy is an abomination where 80 per cent of the benefits go to 20 per cent of the producers, who then dress it up as being of vital importance to European food security. All it has done is keep inefficient producers in business, lead to massive over-production, waste, fraud, ecological and health disasters such as BSE, and create higher taxes and food prices for European consumers.
At the same time, the CAP not only makes it more difficult for developing countries to break into rich countries' markets, but also floods them with artificially cheap food, so hitting local producers twice, often in the only area where they have a comparative advantage. A case in point is sugar beet, whose cultivation was started by the French as an emergency measure to beat the British blockade during the Napoleonic wars, over 200 years ago!
Farmers are the only members of society to receive compensation for the foot-and-mouth crisis, which exposed interesting practices on headage claims, and are the same ones who are quite ready to blackmail the Government and the rest of society over road development.
It is time we adopted the New Zealand model, where the efficient take over the inefficient, and can then beat the world without any subsidies at all. - Yours, etc.,
Desmond Kelliher, Hillcourt Park, Glenageary, Co Dublin.