EU ten-year growth strategy addresses importance of agriculture to the union

AGRICULTURE and its value to the European and national economy, in terms of employment and exports, have been included in the new EU 10-year strategy for growth and jobs.

EU leaders agreed the outlines of the strategy at a summit yesterday in Brussels. They limited themselves to a few target areas: employment, research and development, greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency, education and poverty.

Learning the lessons from the largely failed Lisbon Strategy, they agreed that each country will set its own national targets.

They hope to make these as realistic as possible by taking account of their relative starting positions and national circumstances.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen said that a sustainable, productive and competitive agricultural sector will make an important contribution to the new growth strategy. “We cannot remain silent about an industry that is our biggest manufacturer, exports worth €30 billion — more than the aeronautics industry — occupies 80% of the land mass, including forestry, and employs 16% of the total in work,” he said.

Agriculture and its spin-off industries must also innovate. And Ireland and the EU must exploit the advantages they have to achieve growth.

“We cannot forget about agriculture and food; it is still one of the few things we still manufacture here,” he added.

On employment, the overall EU budget target will be 75%. For R&D, the target will remain 3%, although though there is no reference to the split of this between public and private contributions; they repeated the climate change targets of a 20% cut in greenhouse gases emissions over 1990 levels by 2020, renewables to amount of 20% of energy, a 20% increase in energy efficiency. EU targets for education will be set in June while the decision on whether to include a figure for poverty reduction will be addressed again in June.

Several member states were reluctant to include poverty reduction and social inclusion, but the European Commission is pushing for it to be included, making the case that poverty is a massive drain on a country’s resources and something no country can afford to ignore.

The European Commission wanted to make the national targets as binding as possible on member states but there is little appetite for this among the leaders. However, they did agree that progress would be monitored annually and a report issued at roughly the same time as the economic reports on Stability and Convergence programmes. This is in an effort to point out the links between successful reforms in the targeted areas and a country’s economic status.