§ Mr. KeyTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs if she will list the instruments of agricultural market price support; and how each is(a)defined and (b)calculated. [151647]
§ Alun MichaelThe Common Agricultural Policy includes several instruments whose objective is to support market prices for agricultural products. These are: (i) intervention storage, where public intervention 525W agencies guarantee to buy products at a set price; (ii) export refunds, which bridge the gap between EU internal market and world market prices, (iii) import tariffs which are a fixed or variable levy on each unit of imported product, and (iv) aid for private storage.
The OECD produces annual estimates of the transfers to agricultural producers which result from market price support in the EU. The estimates are calculated as the difference between the EU domestic price and the equivalent world price multiplied by the level of EU production. The OECD estimates EU market price support for the major commodities in 2002 at around Euro 61 billion.