The discussion over the €57 billion spent on the CAP today – amounting to more than 40 percent of the EU’s budget – takes place against the backdrop of a dramatic worsening of the global food crisis, associated with rising and more volatile food prices. For 2010, the number of hungry was estimated at 925 million people, up from 833 million in 2000-2002.2 Although the CAP strongly influences the state of poverty and food insecurity in the world, its external dimension is barely taken into account in the current debate.
A new publication from the Transnational Institute analyses the impacts of the scramble for the cheapest raw materials, the exports of cereals, dairy and poultry products, as well as the effects of the growing demand for animal feed, by far the most important agricultural commodity imported into the European Union.
The report – Globalising Hunger: Food Security and the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is available of the ARC website here
