Mr. Chairman, just quickly on the three questions, reducing EU subsidizations is obviously one of the questions at the heart of the current negotiations, or what we hope will be continuing negotiations. The European Community, as my two colleagues have said, has a high level of protection. I think it's over 30% of support--30% of the income of European farmers comes from state subsidies. In the United States the figure is lower, but still too high. It's about 18%, I think. This is one of the fundamental questions to get the Doha Round off and going again. We hope that in the next few weeks there will be some movement on both sides, because without movement on both sides, there would be no agreement, and that would be a very great shame to all of us, to every single consumer, producer, and taxpayer around the world.
On the question of protected zones internally, the question of supply and management, I have to struggle to be polite here. I do agree with what my Swiss colleague has said about this. It is a Canadian paradox. That's certainly true. We have gone through, in Australia, this question of protected sectors, and I guess there's no sector that would not like to be protected. In Australia we decided we would balance the desires of particular groups in the community to be protected against the greater need of the community. When I say “the community”, I mean taxpayers who subsidize, consumers whose choices are limited, and the producers themselves, who we found were just sucked into an endless round of needing greater support year after year after year, and there's no end to it. We took the initiative in the sectors concerned.
Of course, I think in any country dairy is the hardest sector to reform, and it was particularly true in Australia. We did bite that bullet and we did go through a very sustained period of reform, and the result is that our dairy sector, from being a protected and inefficient and inward-looking one, is now a dynamic, growing exporting sector that is much stronger and much better than it was when it was protected.
Your third point was on mondialisation, globalization, and there I think I must disagree with you too. I think that globalization has been a terrific thing around the world. Hundreds of millions of people are better off now because of globalization. Look at the hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians who have benefited from the effect of globalization. Had they been stuck in domestic markets, where would they be now? It is the benefits of globalization that have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. In Australia, we think that perhaps we are now 20% better off in terms of levels of income as a result of international competition and globalization than we would have been without it. This is, after all, the intellectual dynamism behind the World Trade Organization and the push for international competitiveness that we all benefit from.
So I'm afraid I don't think that the poor have got poorer. The rich have got richer, yes, that's certainly true, but the poor have got richer too. Just look at the statistics of growth in India, China, and in well-managed countries around the world, and you see these results. Some countries have fallen behind and there are some people who have not kept pace, but the great benefit of globalization, I think, is absolutely without argument.