Brazil's Lula urges rich nations to end farm subsidies

ACCRA: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Sunday renewed his appeal to rich nations to end farm subsidies and open their markets to the developing world.

Lula was speaking in the Ghanaian capital Accra ahead of the opening of the twelfth session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

"The rich countries should end agricultural subsidies to their farmers and they should open market access to agricultural products from the developping world," Lula said.

He also called on developed countries to transfer their agricultural expertise to the developing world to enable poorer countries to produce the crops they need in sufficient quantity.

"It is not fair that more than one billion people consume less than the necessary calories and protein for our survival," the Brazilian president said.

Lula, accompanied by his Ghanaian host President John Kufuor was inaugurating the Accra premises of EMBRAPA, Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA - Empresa Brasilena de Pesquisas).

The joint venture with the Ghanaian government will study how to improve the production of regional staple crops such as cassava, rice, beans and soya beans.

He said EMBRAPA represented "the spearhead of our conviction to extend to developing countries and more specifically to African countries the benefits that EMBRAPA has brought and will continue to bring to Brazil".

Lula lambasted developed countries for blaming Brazil for having allowed agricultural land to encroach on the Amazon rainforest and for saying that Brazil's crops of sugarcane, destined for producing bio-fuels, have been using up land that could have been used for food production.

"They should look towards those countries that did not have opportunities in the twentieth century, it is precisely the very poor countries that still have a lot of arable land," Lula said.