§ Mr. Austin MitchellTo ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what is his latest estimate of the total cost to United Kingdom consumer/taxpayers of direct and indirect support to farmers and horticulturalists.
§ Mr. AllenTo ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what is the estimated cost per adult in the United Kingdom of the common agricultural policy for each of the last 10 years.
§ Mr. CurryThe CAP system of agricultural support, in common with the support policies of other industrial countries, gives rise to substantial costs to taxpayers and consumers compared with a situation in which foodstuffs were imported at world market prices with no support to domestic producers. Estimates of these costs, and the savings that could be secured if current policies were 77W ended, are possible only by making many assumptions. Important judgments are necessary about the current levels of world prices—no simple matter given the wide variations in quotations and substantial fluctuations from year to year—and the changes in these prices if present policies were abandoned. The latter depend on how producers and consumers throughout the world might respond to the new circumstances and on the impact on factors such as exchange rates.
Estimates made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, using a particular set of assumptions, imply that the transfers from consumers and taxpayers in 1990 resulting from agricultural policies in the European Community as a whole—separate figures for the United Kingdom are not available—were equivalent to £4.4 per head of total population per week. It is not meaningful to express this per adult. This figure is derived from the OECD estimate of the aggregate cost of 105.1 billion ecu for 1990, assuming the EC12 population is 327.1 million and that 1 ecu = £0.7139. Corresponding estimates can be derived from OECD studies for 1986 to 1989 as follows, expressed per head per week: 1986, £4.0; 1987, £4.4; 1988, £4.0; 1989, £3.7. Consistently based estimates for earlier years have not been published.
The figure for 1990 is one estimate of the extent to which the CAP raised the cost of food and agricultural products, and incurs budgetary costs, compared to existing "world" prices. As I have emphasised on a number of occasions, and as the OECD has made clear, the estimate takes no account of the effect that removal of farm support would have on world prices, and other variables, and thus gives no indication of the extent to which taxpayers and consumers might be better off if current policies were removed. Consumers/taxpayers would benefit by considerably less than £4.4 per head per week if all agricultural support were removed.