APPENDIX 20
Joint memorandum submitted by CAFOD, ActionAid,
Oxfam and Christian Aid (H23)
The CAP is enormously expensive and enormously
damaging. A typical family of four currently pays £16 a week
in taxes and higher food prices to prop up a regime with a disastrous
track record of overproduction, environmental degradation, and
food safety scares. If the CAP only affected Europeans, international
aid agencies like ourselves would leave the debate to others,
but the CAP also undermines the livelihoods of millions of farmers
in developing countries by dumping cheap produce in their markets
and denying them export opportunities to the largest single market
in the world.
We are therefore deeply disappointed and concerned
that the CAP's external impact gets almost no attention in the
Mid-Term Review. Moreover, given the widespread anger among developing
countries at the WTO over the issue of northern subsidies and
double standards, and the impending Cotonou negotiations between
the EU and ACP countries to set up Economic Partnership Agreements,
we do not think it is politically wise or even possible to ignore
the CAP's external impact to such an extent.
We have made a number of observations and recommendations
how to deal with the CAP's development implications in the attached
submission [not printed] which we have sent to the parallel House
of Lords inquiry. Given the gravity of the issue, we would also
like to draw it to the attention of the EFRA inquiry,
30 September 2002
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