To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what the estimated (a) average agricultural tariff and (b) average intervention price was under the Common Agricultural Policy in each of the last five years, broken down by commodity; and if he will make a statement. (230841)

Since the EU's tariff schedule includes both ad valorem (percentage of price) components and specific (€ per tonne) components, tariffs are compared using estimates of the ad valorem equivalent (AVE). Calculation of the AVE requires an estimate of the import price. Typically unit import values (the value of imports divided by the volume) are used as the estimate of the price in the conversion process.

There is a further complication in deriving average tariff estimates. Each commodity has several (and sometimes many) tariff lines, often with very different tariff rates. These lines can be averaged in different ways, for example a simple average could be used, or lines weighted according to import volumes. Many imports also take place within the context of tariff rate quotas where the applied rate of duty is lower than the bound rate. Further, each commodity has several (and sometimes many) tariff lines, often with very different tariff rates. These lines can be averaged in different ways, for example a simple average could be used, or lines weighted according to import volumes.

Each method has particular disadvantages. For example, weighting by import volume assigns low weight to tariff lines where the tariff is high enough to eliminate imports. This tends to reduce the estimated tariff rate. Historically DEFRA's approach has been to present the tariff for a 'representative' tariff line which accounts for the bulk of imports, or, when there is no clearly dominant individual line, to present a simple average of several important tariff lines.

The EU's bound Most Favoured Nation (MFN) agricultural tariffs have remained unchanged over the period 2003 to 2007, and table 1 presents AVE's for the major commodities as calculated by DEFRA. These estimates give a broad indication of the level of protection, but the tariff applied to a particular consignment on a tariff line may differ, as explained above.

For comparison we also present EU tariffs estimated using an alternative methodology, where average tariffs have been calculated using weights based on imports in a reference group of countries. This approach is better than using only EU imports as weights (which introduces significant downward bias as mentioned above), but may still understate the true level of protection. These estimates are presented in Table 2, and are available only at an aggregate level.

Intervention prices for the main commodities are presented in table 3.