• Efforts to adapt to climate change through preventive and curative measures geared to the regions and economic sectors most affected.

These elements could be given shape through the following
actions:

• Ensure the immediate and effective enforcement of agreed policies, in order to achieve the Kyoto target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 8% below their 1990 level. Those measures are essentially the ones set forth in the Green Paper on energy security and the White Paper on European transport policy, as well as measures to promote climate-friendly technologies such as eco-technologies.
• Conduct community awareness campaigns to induce people to change their behavior.
• Intensify and target research to improve the understanding of climate change and its global and local fallout, and at the same time develop cost-effective strategies to mitigate climate change (especially in the areas of energy, transportation, agriculture and industry) as well as strategies for adapting to climate change.
• Strengthen scientific cooperation with countries beyond the region, and promote the transfer of climatefriendly technologies, and work with developing countries to prepare climate-friendly development policies and strengthen the adaptive capacities of the most vulnerable countries. The EU would in this way maintain its driving role in international negotiations in this area.

The European program on climate change entered a new phase in 2005, designed to determine the new measures that must be adopted in synergy with the Lisbon strategy, relating in particular to energy efficiency, renewable energy, transportation, and carbon capture and storage (CONAM, 2006).

Benefits and costs of the strategy. It is difficult to assess the costs of action. Those costs would reflect primarily the restructuring of transportation and production systems, as well as of energy use. On the other hand, those costs are bound to rise significantly if no action is taken by the other countries that are major producers of greenhouse gases. According to the commission, a less ambitious policy for combating climate change is not a sound alternative, for it would not achieve the objectives set and would imply additional costs due to climate change.

If dealing with climate change is to become a priority, it must be approached in the framework of the three broad issues of sustainable development, and there must be regular monitoring of its implementation, enforcement and reporting through suitable indicators. To this end, climate change management must focus on the following four lines of action:

• Pursue scientific and technological research to generate basic information in support of decisions and policies to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
• Establish mechanisms for outreach and active participation in the process of implementing the Climate Change Convention.

• Create mechanisms to facilitate the transfer of technology for mitigating the impacts of climate change.
• Strengthen inter-institutional, regional and international cooperation and forge strategic partnerships.

Policies for dealing with climate change demand the setting of national and regional priorities for reducing its impact in a concerted manner. These could be linked to programs and projects with targets for reducing GHG omissions in Latin America and the Caribbean. If this is to happen, the environment must be part of the political agenda of governments in the region (CONAM, 2006).

Governments could also reform their own organizational structures to promote the effective management of environmental issues. Those structures need to be made less bureaucratic and more participatory, they must have more concrete targets and the resources needed to meet commitments under the Climate Change Convention. Efforts are also needed to develop the technical and organizational capacities to address the problems created by GHG (CONAM, 2006).

Policies could also offer incentives to various social players and producers to attack the main causes of GHG omissions, and these would need to be accompanied by an active outreach and public awareness campaign. Clean technologies are also needed to address the problems of climate change, as an alternative to the main sources of GHG emissions. In this connection, research into alternative energy sources needs to be evaluated in light of social, environmental and economic variables.

5.5 Marketing and Market Access Policies

5.5.1 Access to international and regional markets
The access to the agriculture and agroindustrial markets of developed countries that protect domestic production should be based on strategies that recognize the competitive handicap of small farmers and peasants/indigenous producers in the region, as well as the specific impact that such agreements can have on the weakest sectors, and their differential impact on poverty. Implementing such policies will require absolute transparency in international and regional negotiations in LAC, from the initial stages of the negotiating process, and organizations of small-scale producers and peasants/indigenous farmers must acquire the capacities for monitoring those negotiations. To this end, they should have more opportunities for representation.

Another area that requires regulation is the growth of large-scale food distribution through supermarkets. Smallscale producers cannot compete with the oligopsonistic power of these companies to impose purchase prices, and government regulation is needed.

5.5.2 Active commercial policies for the domestic and international markets
These policies should be designed to generate market power through the creation of differentiated assets, for example by using different promotional instruments (designations of origin, internationally recognized protocols, eco-labeling, organic production, integrated production, etc.). The pur