Cows Can Fly While World’s Poor Starve

BRUSSELS - The European Union (EU) spends so much money subsidising its farmers that the cost of maintaining each cow in the grouping is more than what the world's poor have to live on in a day.

The EU dairy industry receives Euro 11 billion (S$31 billion) a year, or Euro 1.40 per cow each day - more than the Euro 1.30 that each of the three billion poor around the world live on in a day.

The excess, according to British-based charity Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod), was such that all the EU cows could take a luxury round-the-world trip with stopovers in 10 cities including Shanghai, Singapore, and San Francisco, with Euro 400 each in spending money.

Alternatively, the 38-billion-euro (S$67 billion) annual cost of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (Cap) could pay for all the cows to travel in style - an upper-class ticket each from London to New York.

Cafod drew this analogy in a report and a satirical e-animation movie Mooster's Millions, which shows cows on a plane trip around the world.

Both highlight the EU's 'crazy agricultural policies' and their devastating effect on developing countries.

Cafod estimated that EU farm subsidies robbed poor countries of over Euro 35 million in agricultural exports daily.

It said the Cap was 'enormously expensive and enormously damaging' and a 'roadblock on the path to development for dozens of the world's poorest nations', preventing them from using their agricultural potential to improve their people's lives.

The conclusions coincide with findings from other international groups, which criticise the Cap for causing billions of dollars in losses to developing nations' farmers.

Critics say the EU handouts encourage its farmers to overproduce, leading to wastage or dumping of cheap food on world markets.

Furthermore, many developing countries cannot compete with the subsidised European exports and are denied the opportunity to export their farm products into the EU, the world's largest single market, due to high tariffs.

As a result, farmers elsewhere are put out of business.

Development charity Oxfam recently put the EU at the top of its 'double standards' league, saying it was adept at ensuring a place for its products in developing markets, while excluding third-world products, especially agricultural goods and textiles, from its own countries.

Bond, a body which groups over 260 non-governmental organisations in Britain, also said that the EU's efforts to reduce poverty in Asia were undermined by its trade and agricultural policies.

Cafod director Julian Filochowski said: 'In trade negotiations, the EU, US and Japan have tilted the playing field so the developing world is playing uphill at a 60-degree angle, without boots. And half the team is injured.'

The was despite the fact that up to 80 per cent of the people in the world's poorest countries rely on agriculture to eke out a living, but only 4 per cent of the EU population worked in farming.

While farmers in developing countries survive on less than Euro 260 a year, their EU counterparts received an average of Euro 11,500 in subsidies.

The main beneficiaries were a minority of rich farmers. About 70 per cent of Cap subsidies go to the largest 20 per cent of European farms. Small-scale farmers account for nearly 40 per cent of EU farms, but their share of the subsidies is a paltry 8 per cent.

The battle over the agricultural regime is intensifying as the deadline for the EU's expansion nears. The European Commission has proposed some reforms, including limiting subsidies. But it is uncertain even these modest reforms could be passed.