Reform the Common Agricultural Policy to support high-quality local produce, organic produce, energy crops, farm marketing and countryside management, and open EU market to developing world exports
A recent survey of Labour MPs revealed that reform of the European Common Agricultural Policy was a top priority for the next Labour term. This is something we at Oxfam can heartily agree with.
The CAP costs Europe £30bn a year. UK taxpayers shoulder around £4bn of this and the majority goes to the wealthiest farmers and landowners. A recent Oxfam report showed that the top two per cent of UK landholdings receive 25 per cent of the subsidies. An exclusive club of 224 landowners get an average of £2 each every five minutes. That’s a total of £47m annually – more than Ethiopia receives in aid from the UK. The Duke of Westminster alone gets nearly £1,000 a day.
But the inequality doesn’t stop within Europe’s borders. The CAP hurts billions of farmers overseas and deprives them of the chance to make a living from trade. Its subsidies encourage overproduction and facilitate dumping of surpluses on world markets, pushing down world prices and undercutting local farmers. At the same time, tariffs block developing country producers from our market and rob them of the opportunity to gain from high prices here.
Seven out of ten people in the world’s poorest countries are employed in agriculture. Fairer agricultural trade could offer them a route out of poverty. Unfair agricultural trade is keeping them poor.
People in Britain want fairer farming. They want to know that their food is safe, and has been produced without harming the environment or causing unnecessary cruelty to animals. They also want to know that by eating it they are not condemning another to hunger and continued poverty. Under the current CAP they can be sure of none of this.
Reform is on the agenda but, so far, not nearly enough has been done. Next but one in line for the presidency of the EU, and this year’s host of the G8, the UK has an unprecedented opportunity to push for further reform of the CAP. Naming a date for ending harmful export subsidies would be one simple yet vital achievement Britain could aim for. Meaningful reform of the EU sugar regime, which gave developing countries a chance to gain, is another area we could usefully concentrate on. With the next World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December 2005 there is no time to lose in agreeing agricultural reforms that mean trade really can work for the poor.
Support a coordinated asylum policy across the EU to ensure asylum seekers get decent, common treatment around the EU and no country bears a disproportionate cost
Earlier this year, the UN general assembly resolved that 7 April every year should be a memorial day for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when 800,000 people were murdered within a few weeks. Ten years later another tragedy has been unfolding in Darfur. When will we ever learn? Conflict generates asylum seekers. It is the responsibility of us all but clearly transcends the ability of any individual state to resolve.
The attitude of xenophobic individual European countries has been to pull up the drawbridge and try to prevent anyone getting to Europe to claim asylum. They have sought to agree on, and incorporate into European policy, their domestic measures of deterrence and denial of rights to asylum seekers. Yet there is emerging a common European asylum policy (as well as an immigration one alongside it) that carries greater hope for a co-ordinated and strategic approach to these issues than can be achieved by the individual states (in the UK five major pieces of legislation as well as many other subsidiary changes in less than 11 years).
Individual states have failed to negotiate adequate readmission agreements (hence the inability of the UK to return Chinese and other nationals to their own countries). Since September 2000, the Commission has been authorised to negotiate Community readmission agreements with 11 third countries or territories. The European Union now has agreed directives on the reception of asylum seekers and the definition of a refugee and subsidiary protection (hitherto different member states had applied different criteria). The challenge of the next five years is whether the European Union, through aid, trade, encouraging democracy and building capacity in parts of the world that generate forced migration, can reduce it.
It must resist short-term, ill-conceived ideas such as internment camps in regions of origin and, instead, build capacity for dealing with migration flows as advocated by UNHCR. Such camps, enthusiastically endorsed by the UK, Germany and Italy are opposed by most others, such as France and Spain, and already Tunisia and Algeria have said that they are not amenable to hosting such camps.
In new Commission President Barroso’s speech to the European parliament on 26 October he stated: ‘I stand against the setting up of “camps” outside the Union. The Commission that I am to preside overwill attach the highest importance to establishing common policies on asylum and immigration. Fair and balanced policies to promote the economic and social integration of third country nationals in full respect for their cultural identities and the essential values of European society.’ To that, we should all say ‘Amen.’
Announce a post-election referendum on Britain joining the euro, with government recommending a ‘yes’ vote
As a pro-European campaign, Britain in Europe is delighted to see that Progress readers place such importance on European issues. Whether it be the imminent referendum on the constitutional treaty or the future referendum on the euro, Britain in Europe looks forward to working closely with Progress readers and Labour party members in pressing the case for Britain’s future.
Britain is a trading nation. Our prosperity as a country depends on our ability to sell what we make in our overseas markets. More than half our trade is with Europe, but our ability to trade with Europe has been undermined because we are outside the euro. In the long term, Britain’s prosperity will be jeopardised if we remain isolated from the euro.
We do well over half of our trade with Europe. Eight of our top ten trading partners are in Europe and up to 3.5m British jobs depend on that trade. Thousands of American and Japanese companies have come to Britain precisely because we offer a gateway to export to the wider European market.
We want to see better public services for the people of Britain. In continental Europe, high-quality public services and membership of the euro go hand-in-hand. Eurozone countries have delivered hospitals, schools and transport systems which are the envy of the world.
Britain’s public services have suffered from decades of under-investment. In the past, plans for spending more on public services have been derailed by economic boom and bust. Britain has now moved away from the old economic instability. Joining the euro would lock in this stability, by putting an end to currency fluctuations with the countries with which we do more than half of our trade. It would boost our prosperity by increasing trade and safeguarding inward investment.
Furthermore, it is vital that we remember what every worker, parent or consumer has gained out of our membership of the EU. Women now have rights to equal pay and no longer have to work two years for an employer before they receive maternity rights; part-time and short-term workers have been granted full workers’ rights; TUPE guarantees rights when companies are taken over; parental leave is available to all; and more than three million Britons now enjoy the right to four weeks annual paid holiday for the first time ever.