UN says EU food subsidies keep world's poor poor

Europe is keeping Africa in poverty by perpetuating a system of closed markets and subsidised agriculture, a senior UN official said.

Eveline Herfkens, United Nations executive coordinator for the humanitarian Millennium Development Goals campaign, said the rich world's efforts to protect its food producers were keeping poor countries poor.

"We are depriving farmers in developing countries of the ability to exist at a human level," she told Reuters.

European farm subsidies for each cow were higher, at about two dollars a day, than the amount most Africans live on, she said: "I think that is a fairly shocking number.

"What it does is not only to deprive African farmers of the possibility to sell on our markets, because our markets are closed, but even worse, we destroy their home markets. So we spoil the price for tomatoes and for milk powder and for cotton."

She said European Union food quality standards often shut the door to outside competition and, although there was nothing wrong with EU farmers producing speciality foods, it was consumers and farmers in poor countries who had to pay for them.

European exports such as Italian canned tomatoes or Dutch milk powder undermined sales of local produce in the developing world, she said.

But the EU was not the sole culprit. "If you go to Mali and Burkina Faso, cotton subsidies from the United States have really killed farmers there," she said.

Herfkens, a former Dutch development minister, says people in rich countries want to help the world's poor, but do not realise how much damage government farm spending does.

The EU agreed in October to curb farm spending, but the deal perpetuated big subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy, which swallows nearly half of the EU's annual e95 billion budget.

"I didn't feel like opening a bottle of champagne after that," Herfkens said. "I have never agreed with the simplistic public relations coming out of Brussels that Europe is such a great force for good in developing countries.

"Ultimately, market access is the only way." Herfkens wants parliaments and the public to name and shame governments into achieving the eight Millennium goals, which include halving extreme poverty, ensuring all children go to primary school and reversing the spread of Aids and malaria.

World leaders pledged at a summit in New York in September 2000 to try to achieve them by 2015. Herfkens said she wants people to take responsibility for goading their own leaders.

"People have to ask their own governments: 'You signed for this in the year 2000, what did you do for this?'" she said.