The Copenhagen Summit and the Common Agricultural Policy

I do not disagree with anything that the right hon. Member for Tyneside, North (Mr. Byers) said. Many hon. Members want to take part in the debate, so I will try not to repeat any points that he made.

For a short while, I was fortunate to have been a Minister in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. On occasions too numerous to mention, Ministers made speeches about the need to reform the CAP. Of course, some Members represent fringe agricultural areas and their constituents need to be protected, but there is almost total unanimity in this House on the need for that reform. We were always being told that we should not worry: enlargement would make everything all right, because the current CAP system would not be able to cope when Poland, Hungary and the other countries joined the European Union. Many of us went along with that and hoped that the process would change on enlargement.

In his reply, will the Minister tell us what the impact of the shabby deal between France and Germany has been? To most of us, it appeared to be a disgusting attempt to stitch up reforms to the CAP. In the halcyon days when it was permissible for the Conservative party to have a close relationship with the Christian Democrats in Germany, I made a fraternal visit to the Christian Social Union in Bavaria. Franz Josef Strauss, who led the CSU, told us that Germany had been bribing its farmers for their votes for generations and did not intend to stop.

I understand that Germany and France want to continue to bribe their farmers for their votes, but that policy is costing people dear, and not only in this country. On the "Any Questions programme last weekend, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry said that the CAP cost a family in the United Kingdom about ÿ16 a week. If the CAP was a cost only to us, we could make our own judgment about it. However, it costs the poorest of the poor very dear. In no way can we meet the millennium development targets of taking people out of poverty if that wholly unfair system is allowed to continue. The economies of many countries are based on agricultural production and the need to ensure that more of their agricultural produce can enter European and other developed markets.

I was fortunate enough to be Chairman of the Select Committee that visited Ghana and Nigeria earlier this year. They face not only the difficulty of exporting cocoa at a fair trade price into Europe, but the effect of dumping. Supermarkets in Ghana are full of tomato paste dumped from Italy, but Ghanaian farmers cannot sell their tomatoes on street corners. Three Secretaries of State—for the Department for International Development, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Trade and Industry—wrote an excellent letter that appeared in The Independent on Sunday. That newspaper is a good one, but there is a limit to how much one can cope with on a Sunday, so I hope that the Minister will arrange for the letter to be copied to every hon. Member in the House. I suspect that no Member would disagree with it.

We cannot keep having this conversation among ourselves, however. It is nice and friendly, gives us all a warm glow, and we go away saying that we all want to reform the CAP, but we must move on, as must non-governmental organisations such as the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development. CAFOD must persuade the Catholic Church and Catholic NGOs in other European countries that they should lobby their Governments. Christian Aid should do likewise with the Protestant churches in Germany, France and elsewhere.

We must work out how to engage with parliamentarians in other member states, from whom we have become almost totally divorced. Members of the European Parliament have this discussion in debates in the European Parliament, but MPs do not. The International Development Committee managed to find its equivalent in every EU member state, and under each presidency the chairmen of those groups at least have a meeting. That is a slow and basic start, but it is a step forward. Parliament needs to develop mechanisms for expressing our views to colleagues elsewhere in Europe, otherwise this discussion that we have among ourselves will continue this year, next year and beyond.

We need to ensure that parliamentary colleagues in France, Germany and other member states recognise that we are appalled at the stitch-up that their countries are trying to perpetrate, not only against the consumers of Europe, but more importantly against the poor of the world. If we do not start to take that action, all the talk at Johannesburg and at other meetings about reducing the number of people who live in poverty will be for nothing. I must say to NGOs in this country that it is no good continually berating us. They are pushing at an open door and instead must help us to persuade Parliaments in other parts of the EU that the time for the reform of the CAP is long past, but it must happen now. As the right hon. Gentleman said, consumers will have lower prices, member states will pay fewer subsidies, but most importantly, developing countries will have a level playing field, and we can take more people out of poverty.