Farmer Franz is hard to decouple from his agenda
The former director of a provincial Austrian farmers’ association, Franz Fischler now seems to like nothing better than an international political fight.
He has entered the fray time and time again, since he took charge of the purse strings of almost half of the EU’s 95 billion budget.
This is his second try at reforming the Common Agricultural Policy. His proposals in 1999 brought angry farmers to the streets of Brussels. They were eventually adopted, as the Agenda 2000 agreement, only after French President Jacques Chirac watered down some of the main elements.
Already this year, he weathered gales of angry resistance from fishermen over his plans to cut the EU’s fleet to save endangered fish stocks.
Fischler qualified for the job by negotiating the key terms of Austria’s 1995 accession to the EU as agriculture minister in Vienna. No sooner was he in Brussels than he was plunged into controversy.
When Britain’s mad cow crisis escalated in March 1996, he banned British beef exports, infuriating Prime Minister John Major who responded by systematically hampering EU diplomatic business in an unsuccessful effort to overturn the embargo. The ban was finally lifted some three and a half years later but Britain’s beef industry was left in ruins.
Undeterred, Fischler has plunged into conflict again, with France now his main adversary, over the proposal to sever the CAP subsidy link between production and aid.
If his CAP reforms are approved, Fischler can assume hero status in the realm of EU politics, and go onto greater things by taking the moral high ground in the international trade negotiations, where he defends Europe’s agricultural model against sustained and bitter attack from the US.
Born the eldest of six on September 23, 1946, on a small farm in Absam, Fischler attended school near Innsbruck.
He studied agriculture and economics in Vienna, rounding off his studies with a doctorate.
He returned to Tyrol where, apart from farming, he joined the provincial farmers’ association, first as adviser on the environment and ending up in 1985 as its director, before being appointed Austrian agriculture minister in 1989.
Known for his love of fine food and wine, the burly, bearded, 56-year-old still returns to his native Tyrol on weekends. The father of four jets between Brussels and his Alpine home village of Absam, where his wife has remained.
At home, there is stiff opposition to his latest CAP proposals.
But Fischler has shown himself politically capable in handling the cold shoulder.
When Austria was virtually ostracised after Joerg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party joined the conservative-led coalition government in 2000, Fischler successfully distanced himself from events in Vienna, without cutting his ties to Austrian politics.
Political commentators noted how he said just the right things to preserve his political viability both in Brussels and in conservative circles in Vienna.
He will need all his toughness and negotiating skills to get CAP reforms agreed in what is, perhaps, his last chance to leave his mark as a major reformer. He has attempted to disarm opposition by proposing that all farmers start with the same level of subsidy they got under the old system, but that the amount paid to the biggest farms should be capped and then progressively reduced. With this tack, he also seeks to improve the image of the CAP in the eyes of consumers and taxpayers, unhappy to see super rich grain barons prospering at their expense, as 80% of subsidies go to 20% of the EU’s largest farms.
Exempting products like wine and olive oil from the proposed abolition of production subsidies is seen as a wily move to win support from Mediterranean member states.
