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Subsidies and tariffs
At the moment subsidies for agriculture in First World countries runs at a staggering $350 billion dollars a year. This allows European countries and the US to produce food cheaply and dump it on Third World markets. A few examples will suffice. It costs Europe 50 per cent more to produce sugar from beet than Third World farmers from sugar cane. Despite this, Europe is selling sugar all over the world because it blocks cheap sugar from tropical countries with high tariffs from entering the European market and it subsidises its beet farmers to the tune of $1.5 billion per year.
The United States, the self-styled champion of free trade, uses import quotas and price support to thwart poorer sugar-producing countries exporting sugar into the US market. The loss to poor cane sugar producing companies is estimated to run to $1.4 billion. Only the Caribbean plantations - built on slavery, the sugar industry's first contribution to a global market - are allowed to export without restriction.
Oxfam estimates that backward countries lose $700 billion (£460bn) a year because of tariffs and barriers in Europe, North America and Japan. Producers from outside the EU, some of them from very poor countries, face a tariff of 140% on exports destined for Europe. At the same time, Oxfam says, the World Bank and the IMF have been pressurising developing countries to cut their own sugar import tariffs.
The sugar regime costs EU consumers and taxpayers 1.6bn euros ($1.57bn) annually, and according to Oxfam's analysis, the EU is one of the world's highest-cost sugar producers, but also the world's biggest white sugar exporter, with 40% of the 2001 total.
Oxfam says the EU's sugar policy makes profits for Europeans while keeping developing countries poor, and is calling for an immediate 25% cut in EU sugar quota production.