The politics of EU food
Commissioner Ciolos wants to boost long-term productivity, but his proposals would reduce EU farm production.
Investment in research and innovation is to increase. But Europe will still shun the genetic modification which has boosted the rest of the world’s world agricultural production.
Brussels wants to cut the income support it pays to all farmers who get more than €150,000 per year. But it has already made this proposal four times since 1992, and has made only minor headway with it.
Such are the inevitable contradictions of politically motivated plans designed for 27 different countries.
And the outcome depends more than anything else on the same 27 countries agreeing a way out of the eurozone’s economic mess.
That’s why it’s “fingers crossed” for the Irish agrifood sector, one of the few parts of the economy which is expanding and creating wealth in the midst of recession.
Some disruption of the sector seems inevitable — but it depends so heavily on the €418 billion spending over seven years proposed by agriculture commissioner Dacian Ciolos that we just have to hope for the best.
Over the next year and a half, there will be many twists and turns in the negotiations. Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney’s advice to farmers not to prejudge the situation, and not to rush into decisions they may later regret, is wise, because the outcome is so hard to predict.
Alongside the CAP talks will be negotiations on the EU budget for the same 2014-2020 period, which will determine funding for agriculture. The budget negotiations are equally unpredictable, due to Europe’s financial woes.
For the first time, the European Parliament has a full say in both sets of negotiations — adding 736 more politicians to the mix, which includes 27 national parliaments and governments.
Within each of the 27 EU countries, different camps have different demands for changes in the 1,000 pages of proposals for CAP legislation issued by the European Commission.
Within farming, few sets of proposals have done so much to set different categories against each other. In Ireland, cattle farmers typically depend on single farm payments of between €350 and €600 per hectare. Dairy farmers say they depend on the payments for one third of their income. Farmers fear these payments could be reduced as much as 50% in the proposed move from the historic payment system to a regional flat-rate system — although it would reduce Ireland’s ceiling for direct payments only marginally, from €1.255bn at present to €1.236bn in 2017 and subsequently.
The proposal to make 2014 a reference year could cause a land grab, playing havoc with the land rental market over the next few years. A complete free-for-all was threatened until proposals were apparently re-drafted at the last moment to confine new payment entitlements allocated in 2014 to active farmers who used at least one payment entitlement in 2011. There is some disagreement here also over recoupling EU payments on suckler cows and breeding ewes.
As for disagreement between EU member states, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain will lead the fight against proposed capping of subsidies for the best paid farmers who get over €150,000 per year; they have successfully opposed it since 1992.
It is proposed to even out EU subsidies to farmers across the EU, which means cutting as much as 7% on average in the Netherlands and France, so more money can be channelled to Central and Eastern European states like Latvia, where the per hectare payment could go from €87 in 2013 to €140 in 2020. Many will be pointing at how favourable the proposals from Commissioner Ciolos are for farmers in his own country, Romania.
Nevertheless, he has done well to get France and Germany largely onside, with their agriculture ministers basically agreeing with his plan. Not so the British, largely unhappy with the proposals; or the Spanish minister, who has rejected them.
As for the lobbies, while European farmers cried foul at the obligation to rotate crops and linking almost one third of payments to green measures, conservationists said they did not go far enough.
Any farmer who can make sense of how all the EU farm and food and environment and politics stakeholders will come to agreement shouldn’t be farming. He should be making millions out of predicting the future.
