O’Keeffe hits out at EU sugar reform
Mr Lamy said maintaining an Irish price for sugar at more than two-and-a-half times the world rate was not sustainable. Mr O’Keeffe said low-cost producers are not going to be the answer for high cost agri-production problems in Europe.
“We are high-cost producers and low-cost production coming in here is going to have an effect,” he said, suggesting quotas, labelling and import restrictions to level off with high-cost production. Mr O’Keeffe said Ireland had lost its sugar beet industry to reforms, the first EU country to have done so, in a country that had grown sugar for 100 years.
And the compensation was not adequate, he said.
Mr Lamy said he did not think it was for him to start debating with Mr O’Keeffe about the merits of producing sugar beet in Ireland as opposed to cane sugar in a developing country. However, an Irish price for sugar of €650 a tonne and an international market price of €250 a tonne was just not sustainable.
Meanwhile, British Chancellor Gordon Brown claimed the key to boosting world economic growth is an end to agricultural protectionism.
His claims have been dismissed as out of date and inappropriate by the National Farmers’ Union in Britain. It pointed out CAP was radically reformed in 2003 and the vast majority of its programmes are now classified as non-trade distorting by the WTO.
