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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I also support these amendments, because it does not seem possible that the European Parliament will do anything to improve the common agricultural policy. It is too firmly engaged on the European gravy train to upset its direction and jeopardise the comforts that it enjoys from it. Noble Lords may have noticed a quotation in the Times on 21 April, from an unnamed British diplomat who is supposed to be close to these matters in Brussels. He said: "““You cannot spend 45 per cent of the EU budget on 5 per cent of the population who produce 3 per cent of the EU’s output””." Economically, as other noble Lords have said, the CAP is madness. The Government have said that it costs the average British family about £1,000 a year in higher food costs. We should not forget that those higher food costs come through the increased price of milk, sugar and bread, and hit the poorest hardest. However, it is beyond our shores that the CAP must be held to account. If we are to believe the Trade Justice Movement, CAFOD and Oxfam, the common agricultural policy has been killing untold numbers of people in the developing world, mostly children, by dumping its unwanted produce on those impoverished people, because they cannot sell their products in their local markets. I have a question for the Minister: have Her Majesty's Government made any estimate of the extent of this suffering? What is the number of people who have been affected in this way in recent years? I accept that US grain subsidies and grain exports compound the problem, but we are responsible for the common agricultural policy, because we are part of the European Union and, therefore, we support that policy. Then of course biofuels come on top of all this. They are perhaps not strictly part of the common agricultural policy, but the EU, in its absurd quest for environmental change and altering our carbon footprint in the useless pursuit of affecting global warming, is clearly proposing to use land that would be better used for growing food. I say ““useless””, because we now know that the planet is cooling down, and will be for at least the next 12 years—maybe the next 50 years. I pray in aid the Hadley curve. Anyway, we are not talking about that now.