[R-P] Cada argentino vale menos que una vaca

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

Cada vaca en la UE recibe u$s 2,50 de subsidio diario.  Eso hace unos 
$ argentinos 7,50; $15 por cada dos días, o sea $ argentinos 225 al 
mes.  A cuánto están los subsidios por desempleo aquí?


[A-List] Every cow in the European Union is subsidised by $2.50 a 
day.
Bill Totten shimogamo at attglobal.net
Mon Aug 16 08:05:13 MDT 2004

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That's more than what 75 per cent of Africans have to live on.

by Jessica Williams

from her Fifty Facts That Should Change the World  <Icon Books, 2004>

It's unlikely that Europe's cows know how lucky they are - cows are,
after all, not known for their intellect. But the generous subsidies
paid to their farmer owners make them among the most fortunate beings
alive. The European Union's cows come under the Common Agricultural
Policy, or CAP, as it's more commonly known. Each one of them 
attracts
$2.50 per day in subsidies.

Put another way, the Catholic aid agency CAFOD calculated that for 
the
money the EU spends protecting its farmers, each of the EU's 21 
million
cows could go on a round-the-world trip once a year. The cows could
touch down in London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Hanoi, Siem 
Reap,
Brisbane, Rarotonga, Los Angeles and San Francisco - with 400 pound
spending money to help them along. <1>

What makes this even more remarkable is that the EU's cows aren't the
most heavily subsidised in the world. According to the World Bank, 
that prize goes to Japanese cows, which receive $7.50 every day. <2>
Presumably, when the Japanese cows join their European friends on 
their
round-the-world trip, they fly business class.

CAP lies at the very heart of the modern European Union. Agriculture 
was
a key element of its precursor, the Common Market, when it launched 
in
1958, and in a post-war environment it was thought crucial to 
guarantee
food supplies at affordable prices - as well as securing a fair 
standard
of living for farmers. But Europe's landscape has changed a lot since
then. The EU says that in the early 1960s, one in five people in the
then six member states worked on the land. By 1998, that had declined 
to
fewer than one in twenty people across the fifteen member states. <3>

The policy is complex, sometimes illogical and incredibly politically
charged. The Economist described it as 'the single most idiotic 
system
of economic mismanagement that the rich Western countries have ever
devised'. <4>  The eminent economist Jeffrey Sachs once remarked, 'I
have never mastered EU agricultural policy, because I figured if I 
did
so it would drive me into such a surrealistic world that I would 
never
climb out of that twilight zone again'. <5>

Due partly to this complexity, CAP has become a very expensive way to
secure cheap food and fair wages. The policy costs around thirty 
pound
billion every year - about half of the EU's total budget. As the EU
prepares to expand its membership to 25 member states, the way that 
CAP
is administered is becoming a key issue. Countries like Poland and
Slovakia are still largely dependent on agriculture, and bringing 
them
into the system of subsidies could break the EU's budget.

The cost to governments is, of course, passed on to consumers. The
system, which was designed initially to secure affordable food, has 
now, perversely, made our weekly shopping bills far larger. According 

to calculations by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), food prices are 44 per cent higher in the EU than
they would be without CAP. Milk costs 70 per cent more, beef 221 per
cent more and sugar 94 per cent more. <6>  Yet average yearly incomes 

in Britain's farming sector are falling, and in 2002 52,000 farmers 
left 
their land - more than double the figures for the previous year. <7>

The long-awaited reforms of CAP, unveiled in June 2003, represented a
massive compromise between the competing interests of the member 
states,
as well as those who will soon join the EU. The link between 
subsidies
and production was removed, so that there would no longer be an
incentive to overproduce - but even this had to be made subject to
exceptions. Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler called it 'the 
start
of a new era'.  But critics noted  that Europe would still spend 
about
the same amount in subsidies; all that had been achieved was to make 
the
system even more complicated.

The issue that concerns aid agencies is that Europe's lavish farm
subsidies are seriously hurting the developing world. Farmers produce
more food than European markets really need, so they sell their
subsidised excesses to the developing world at a cost far below 
that of production. Local producers can't possibly match the prices,
with devastating effects for farmers who don't enjoy the extravagant
subsidies of the rich world.

According to Oxfam, the EU's sugar regime provides 'one of the most
powerful and unambiguous examples of dumping'. <8>  Although the EU 
is
one of the highest-cost sugar producers, its subsidies mean that it 
is
the second-largest sugar exporter in the world. One of the countries
seriously affected by Europe's low-cost exports is Mozambique. There,
sugar is a lucrative export crop, and the sugar sector is the single
biggest employer in the country. Yet the EU exports hundreds of
thousands of tons to African markets - countries that would be 
natural
importers from Mozambique. The World Bank estimates that the EU sugar
regime has caused world prices to fall by seventeen per cent. <9>

At the same time, 'escalating tariffs' - duties that are low on raw 
or
unprocessed materials, and rise sharply with each step of value added 
-
stop countries developing their manufacturing and export sectors. The
World Bank quotes the example of US tariffs on Chilean tomatoes. The
tariff on fresh tomatoes is 2.2 per cent - but if they are processed
into sauce, the tariff leaps to nearly 12 per cent. In this way, 
African
coffee growers are effectively confined to exporting raw beans, and 
Mali
and Burkina Faso in West Africa to the export of raw cotton. The 
World
Bank's chief economist, Nicholas Stern, called these measures 'taxes 
on
development'. <10>

Europe isn't the only offender, of course. America massively 
increased
its subsidies and other aid to farmers in May 2002 - the 
administration
will spend an additional $180 billion over the next decade. President
Bush called it a 'safety net for farmers'.  The subsidies will now
follow a 'counter-cyclical' pattern - meaning that it will cancel out
signals given from the market, encouraging farmers to continue to
produce in times of surplus, leading to yet further overproduction.

The EU was trenchantly critical of the bill, claiming that the US had
'lost any claim to be a credible force for farm policy reform in the 
WTO agriculture negotiations'. <11>  The relationship between the 
two,
already sorely tested by the US decision to impose tariffs on 
imported
steel, threatened to deteriorate into a trade war.

By August 2003, though, Europe and America appeared to have settled
their differences, as the two prepared their arsenals for the Cancun
meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in September 2003.
Agriculture was expected to be a major topic of discussion, and a 
number
of powerful and populous nations  (among them China, Brazil and 
India)
agreed to join forces to push for change. They called themselves the 
G21
- a disparate group of nations with one common aim - and the EU and 
the
US both knew that they would be under pressure. At the Doha round in
2001, the two had made promises to eliminate export subsidies - and 
it
was clear that neither had kept their word. Three weeks before the
Cancun meeting, the EU reached a bilateral agreement with the US. It
stopped short of demanding the elimination of export subsidies, and
although it changed the nature of payments to farmers, there was no
commitment to reduce them. There were going to be problems ahead in
Cancun.

And so it proved. On the first day of talks, a leaked document from 
the
European Commission revealed plans to remove all mention of 
eliminating
export subsidies from the meeting's final declaration. By the fourth 
day,
the talks had collapsed, with the main sticking point being - you
guessed it - agricultural subsidies. The lasting image of Cancun 
summed
up the desperation felt by the developing world. Lee Kyang-Hae, a 
former
head of South Korea's federation of farmers, stabbed himself to death
during protests. A statement from South Korean farmers confirmed that 

Mr Lee killed himself 'after seeing how the WTO was killing peasants
around the world'.

Campaigners at Cancun seized on many examples of the damage caused by
European and American agricultural policies, and once again, our
globetrotting bovine friends were in the spotlight. It's clear the EU 

is galled by the comparison between the cows' subsidies and the 
income
of the world's poor. Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler bit back
angrily at these arguments, calling them 'intellectually dishonest 
[and]
factually irrelevant'. He went on:

"Yes, in the developed world we are spending money on many things. 
Not
because we are all stupid, but because our standard of living is 
higher. 
What next? Criticising governments for spending public money on 
hospital
beds, costly noise protection walls or fancy trees in parks instead 
of
sending it to Africa? Societies around the world must have the right 
to
choose which public goods and services are important to them." <12>

It is exactly because we do have the ability to choose that we must 
make
those choices wisely. There's now little chance that a deal will be
reached by 2005, the target set for the conclusion of the Doha round 
of
talks. But some commentators feel that perhaps the dramatic events in
Cancun will make both sides more willing to compromise. Cancun showed
that developing countries can hold real power at the WTO, and this is
heartening for many governments. But unless they can turn that power
into action, the grave injustices of the developed world's 
agriculture
policies will continue.

Notes

<1> Quoted in 'Cows Can Fly Upper Class on Common Agricultural Fare',
Guardian, 25 September 2002.

 <2> World Bank President James Wolfensohn, quoted in Christian 
Science
Monitor, 13
June 2003.

<3> europa.eu. int/pol/agr/overview_en.html.

<4> Quoted in 'EU pays the price for farm subsidies', International
Herald Tribune, 26 June 2002.
  
<5> Ibid.
  
<6> Ibid.
  
<7> Zac Goldsmith, 'When common sense is a crime', New Statesman, 30
June 2003.
  
<8> 'Stop the Dumping! How EU Agricultural Subsidies are Damaging
Livelihoods in the Developing World', Oxfam briefing paper 31 , 
October
2002.
  
<9> Ibid.
 
<10> Quoted in 'Cutting Agricultural Subsidies', 20 November 2002,
web.worldbank.org/wbsite/external/news/.
 
<11> 'Questions and Answers - US Farm Bill', May 2002,
europa.eu.int/comm/agriculture/external/wto/press/usfarmbill.pdf.
 
<12> Quoted in 'EU Farm Chief Slams Poor Nations' Demands', Guardian, 

5 September 2003.

Please also see:-

"Feel the parsnips' pain" 
by Patrick West, New Statesman (August 02 2004)
http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisp
layURN=200408020017

"Why animal research is bad science" 
by Peter Tatchell, New Statesman (August 09 2004)
http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisp
layURN=200408090013

Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/


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Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro en fibertel.com.ar

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