EU's remote islands slam Brussels for ignoring their problems

The EU's 'outermost' islands in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans say the policies decided in Brussels concerning free trade, agriculture or fisheries take too little consideration of their interests and economic problems.

"The EU's free-trade agreements with countries in our region often jeopardise our own small producers, who are dependent on a few crops. We need pragmatic policies to make it through until 2014 [when the new multi-annual EU budget starts]," Paulino Rivero Baute, the pre...