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Health, sanitary, standards-related and quality regulations render a lot of the supposed access theoretical. Still, it is true that the EU's larger economies are more open to international trade than the United States. Gaymard flaunted a telling statistic: the EU absorbs well over two fifths of Brazil's farm exports.
The IMF perceived in Europe as the long and heartless arm of the Americans has dismantled the coffee regime and marketing structures causing irreparable damage to its indigent growers, Gaymard said. The CAP, insists Gaymard, does not encourage environmental ills. The policy does not subsidize the husbandry of disease-prone poultry and pigs, nor does it support genetically modified crops.
Gaymard proffered the usual woolly mantras of "farm products are more than marketable goods", "France, and Europe in general, need security of food supply", "food cannot be left to the mercy of market forces". Farmers, unlike industrialists insisted the Minister counterfactually cannot simply relocate and agrarian pursuits are a pillar of the nation's culture and its attachment to the land.
Gaymard is no less parsimonious with the full truth elsewhere in his counterattack. This is partly untrue and partly misleading. Important commodities such as sugar, rice and bananas are virtually excluded by long phase-in periods. Non-tariff and non-quota barriers abound. Macedonian lamb is regularly barred on sanitary grounds, for instance.
Gaymard implied that the destitute would do well to introduce a CAP all their own and thus underwrite a thriving indigenous sector for internal consumption and more stable export revenues. They have not committed themselves to doing so in international forums and do not believe that, as far as they Are concerned, it would be to the developing countries' advantage.
Yet, it cannot be denied that Gaymard advanced in his speech a few thought-provoking and oft-overlooked points. He convincingly argued that farm products covered by EU subsidies are rarely in direct competition with the crops of the poor in Africa and Asia.
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