EU farm policy - A chance to grow or moan

NEARLY all the conflicting aspects of our relationship with the European Union can be found one way or another in the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP).

It is one of almost unimaginable complexity, dependency and some considerable confusion about objectives, implementation and value, economic or social. And it has a profound impact on the lives of tens of thousands of Irish people — everyone working in the farm and food sectors.

Farmers depend on it to make ends meet and help them cope with the dispiriting paradox of falling farm incomes despite high prices and growing world demand. This contradiction is made possible by farmers’ feeble bargaining power and a decreasing number of huge, international retailers. Just as we have seen in the financial markets that monopoly, that take-it-or-leave-it power, is self-perpetuating and almost untouchable.

Some of us fret about the vast sums involved — roughly 37% of the EU budget and over €60 billion a year in subsidies — imagining that is little more than a method of rewarding land owners for owning land.

Still more regard it as an engine of environmental destruction, turning nearly all of our countryside into a food factory, a catalyst for intensive, chemically led food production where farm animals are, at best, treated indifferently. Others, especially farmers in the EU’s newer member states see it as a path out of poverty, a path away from the kind of horse-drawn farming their grandfathers would recognise to something approaching today’s industrial, air conditioned methods. They see it as a way of catching up with today’s world and making their children’s lives very different to their own.

Nevertheless, and no matter how you view it, we all depend on the food it enables European farmers to produce and the extra food they will have to produce to meet what the United Nations estimates will be a 70% increase in food demand by 2050.

Speaking earlier this week, as the latest CAP review was announced, farm commissioner Dacian Ciolos reiterated EU policy. He said that farmers will need help to cope with ever-more volatile world food prices and that the EU has plans to sustain current subsidies over the next decade. It is certain that Britain will oppose whatever proposals are made and that France will fight to preserve CAP, but the parameters of the debate are changing. A relatively new but worrying factor has emerged.

Europe’s food security is no longer guaranteed. This has not been an issue since the aftermath of the Second World War when shortages led to the creation of CAP. Now our self-sufficiency is undermined by the world’s economic crisis, the growing demands of increasingly affluent Asian consumers and population growth.

Though farm organisations have criticised this week’s proposals suggesting that the proposed income and rural funding cuts are unsustainable, surely all of these challenges come together in a way that screams potential for our farm and food sector. Maybe it just needs a change of mind set, from being a supplicant to being a leader in the months of tough CAP negotiations that lie ahead.