EU to improve targeting of Third World food aid

from Reuters Africa

By Jeremy Smith

BRUSSELS - Europe's development and farm chiefs called on Thursday for better-targeted aid to help Third World countries achieve long-term sustainable farming, as a way to feed millions of people while global food prices soar.

While the EU comes under pressure in world trade talks to slash its internal agriculture subsidies, it also faces repeated calls -- as a major humanitarian aid donor and farm producer -- to help developing countries weather the world food crisis.

The EU's executive Commission has suggested a series of short-term measures to boost EU farm production that could be used as food aid and contribute to calming sky-high commodity markets. But long-term solutions are needed too, experts say.

"It is so important that we have short-term solutions on food aid and long-term solutions to make it possible for developing countries to feed their own," EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said.

"It is much better to send them a fishing rod instead of sending fish," she said. "And micro-management in Third World countries is not the way forward. More trade will be part of the solution," she told a conference debating the world food crisis.

Anti-poverty agency Actionaid says developing countries lose 100 billion euros a year in trade, twice as much as they get in aid. To halt this, it says, Europe should remove some of the protectionist elements of its farm policy.

Later this year, EU ministers will negotiate a mini-reform of the bloc's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that should phase out safety-net public purchase of commodity stocks at fixed prices, and subsidies still linked to production volumes.

CAP spending amounts to around 44 billion euros a year, some 40 percent of the EU's entire annual budget.

"NO-BRAINER"

The conference was organised by EU president France, which only this week accused EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson of offering too many concessions on agriculture in a bid to secure a deal at the Doha round of world trade talks. Mandelson said he was being undermined at a time when the EU should stand united.

His Commission colleague in charge of development, Louis Michel, said recipient countries would do better to channel donations to their farm sectors, adding that many governments still had to be persuaded to prioritise EU aid for agriculture.

Michel said he also agreed with an idea previously floated by French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier, hosting the conference, to set up "regional country markets" -- particularly in Africa -- to pool farm resources by jointly managing rivers for irrigation, creating collective grain storage, and so on.

"We should strive to come up with a targeted aid package for a specific region," he told a news conference later.

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