Towards a New Common Agricultural Policy (original) (raw)

and 15.5% are obese (European Commission, 2010). Yet 90 million tonnes of food a year-the equivalent of about 179 kg per capita-goes to waste (Eurostat, 2010). This scenario simply replicates, on a regional scale, a world panorama in which, of a total population of 7 billion people, 925 million are undernourished (FAO, 2010), 1.5 billion adults are overweight (OMS, 2008) and 1.3 billion tons of food, the equivalent of about 1/3 of world production, are wasted every year (FAO, 2011). This situation is unacceptable and represents one of the most serious injustices perpetrated in the contemporary world. The European Union has to come up with a concrete response at Community level to the immorality of the model outlined aboveand help do so at global level too. It is no longer tolerable that, in the name of agroindustrial profit and the socioeconomic model it is part of, conditions of extreme inequality are being perpetuated and that the health of people and the environment seriously harmed. Unemployment and the drop in jobs in the agriculture sector Another worrying phenomenon determined, to some extent, by agricultural policies is the drop in employment in the agriculture sector. The drive towards higher and higher productivity, based solely on increases in productive factors other than human labour, has caused a swingeing decrease in employment. The 27-State European union has lost 3.7 million jobs (a quarter of the active work force) in the agriculture sector in the space of nine years (European Commission, 2010). In the period from 1975 to 2005, countries fundamental to European agriculture, such as Italy, France and Germany, saw the percentage of their workforce engaged in the sector drop annually by 2,3%, 2,8% and 3% respectively (European Commission, 2010). In France, the percentage of people employed in the sector has fallen from 30% to 3% over the last 50 years. In 2007, with Bulgaria and Romania's admission to the EU, the active farming population numbered about 14 million, whereas today, just a few years on, it has fallen to 11 million. One significant statistic is that of the size of firms, which are now tending to be larger with a high concentration of capital and land. Since 1980 they have grown by an average of 66%. Finally, as a direct consequence of the liberalisation of the farming market and the race to lower production costs, production is being concentrated where costs are lowest. At present, 50% of the farming land used and 10% of EU production is concentrated in just three.