madam president you have heard some diverging views around the house this morning on this issue
i congratulate of course mr siekierski
at a time of deepening economic recession and the tens of millions of people who are living in poverty and are hungry of course as a parliament we have to find ways of helping them and providing them with food aid
but as the commissioner pointed out there are nineteen participating member states in this project
that means there are eight member states not participating
the uk is one of them and the reason is that they use their own social policy to provide aid for the poor
they withdrew from this scheme many years ago
the question that many member states and the commission are asking is why are we using the cap to finance social policy
this used to be perfectly ok when we had massive surpluses milk lakes butter mountains and beef mountains and were required to distribute this food to the poor using the cap budget to finance that distribution
but now when there is very little in intervention and we are hearing now that we have to buy in food even from outwith the eu and use the cap budget to store and distribute this food this surely is becoming something that should be better handled by member states <unk> policy
when you consider that there are people living in complete deprivation in some of the new member states like romania and many of these people by the way are subsistence farmers they are the people who the poorest
yet we are potentially taking money from them money from the cap budget that could help them to distribute this food aid the main beneficiaries of which are actually old member states like france italy and spain
so there has not been a level playing field applied to this distribution of aid and in future i think we should be very cautious about how we take this forward
