Nations With Surpluses Should Cut Farm Subsidies, Briton Says

Industrialized nations producing agricultural surpluses should make a “substantial reduction” in subsidies paid to farmers, the chairman of the World Food Conference recommended Friday at the end of a two-day meeting.

“There is no more appalling spectacle than the contrast between the surpluses of industrialized countries and the deprivation and malnutrition of millions in the Third World,” said Lord Plumb of Britain, the conference chairman and the president of the European Parliament.

Several speakers at the conference, including U.S. Agriculture Secretary Richard E. Lyng, had argued that high farm subsidies created vast surpluses of food that often were dumped into underdeveloped nations, thereby undercutting local farmers and stifling indigenous food production.

Subsidies Defended

But some representatives of farmers’ organizations, along with officials of the European Economic Community, defended certain kinds of subsidies in order to keep small farms operating and preserve rural life in technologically advanced countries.

Plumb, himself a farmer, said that any reduction in subsidies should “take into account the social fabric of the countryside and the importance of the family farm.”

He added that “shift in emphasis away from increased production will provide new opportunities to satisfy the requirements of conservation, recreation and enhancement of the countryside.”

More than 250 delegates from 60 nations attended the conference, the first since a meeting in Rome in 1974, at a time of critical food shortages. That session focused on ways to rapidly increase production and distribution of food to underdeveloped nations.

But production rose so quickly that huge surpluses now exist in the advanced nations, whose budgets have become swollen by subsidies to food producers.

Plumb estimated that half a billion people currently live in poverty and said that figure assaulted “any ethical standards.”

Noting that rock star Bob Geldof had raised money and arranged for the distribution of food among famine-stricken people, he added: “Food aid has a clear role to play in emergency relief and needs to be available where required. However, great care needs to be exercised to avoid food aid becoming detrimental to self-reliant development.”

On a practical level, Plumb said, the current round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), held in Uruguay, “provides a unique opportunity” to meet the conference’s objectives.

He recommended that the more than 90 governments that abide by GATT regulations agree to reduce farm subsidies and, at the same time, cut import tariffs to enable underdeveloped countries to increase exports.