Traditional view. Old-hands at this Europe game are well aware that the current wave of criticism of EU funding for agriculture and the cohesion policy is nothing new but has been around for donkeys' years. The generally recommended approach to regional affairs was to decentralise expenditure back to the member states. This line of thinking sees it as madness to try and manage from Brussels the allocation of aid for backward regions. Member states that are net contributors to the EU budget can provide funding, they argue, to their own disadvantaged regions without the money doing a detour via Brussels and without Brussels bureaucrats deciding which projects should be funded and in what way. The less economically developed member states should be given aid from the EU but would be responsible for managing it themselves. For both groups of countries, Brussels is seen as pointless and wasteful.
Cohesion has to be European. The Eurosceptic argument ignores various key facts. It is a good idea and improves efficiency if the EU institutions are involved in deciding which projects should be funded, monitoring how the EU funding is being used and examining the results. There has to be coherence in the projects run in the various countries - we know the limits of projects that stop at a country's borders. The pan-European transport networks are part of the European project, for example, and EU funding for them is allocated to the richer and poorer member states alike.
EU involvement does not in itself give any guarantee of success, of course. The cohesion policy has achieved excellent results alongside dismally disappointing failures. Some beneficiary regions have been able to catch up, while aid has been doled out to others for half a century or more yet they are lagging even further behind. It is local people and local authorities that ultimately decide whether a policy (that in theory offers equal opportunities to all) will actually bear fruit, but the EU side of things is effective here, being both helpful and reassuring.
The European Parliament's regional development committee came out in support of an EU-run cohesion policy on 3 November 2009, when debating the cohesion aspects of the Reforming the Budget, Changing Europe document being drawn up by the European Commission (see issue 10012). The committee's chair, Danuta Hübner, had already made her personal views clear, arguing that the draft policies set out in the document contradicted both the letter and the spirit of the Lisbon Treaty, which recommends a strengthening of territorial cohesion policy (see issue 10006). Her line has been backed by MEPs from central Europe, along with others. German Socialist Constanze Krehl urged the EP to make use of the new budgetary powers conferred upon it by the Lisbon Treaty to give more weight to its views. Several MEPs listed positive outcomes achieved by the cohesion policy. The policy should be improved but should not be dropped by the EU, which wants balance across the land and wants its underprivileged regions to catch up with the rest. EU Regional Policy Commissioner Pawe³ Samecki made a speech in Brussels on 4 November and Ghent on 5 November where he argued the opposite of what is mooted in the draft policy document (to be fine-tuned and made official by the new Barroso Commission next year). Things will become clearer as the document is knocked into shape.
Agriculture: ignorance and misunderstandings. The debate is even more radical when it comes to farming. Economists have long been recommending that much of the CAP's budget should be returned to the member states and much of the CAP should be totally scrapped. Using scholarly calculations and eloquent statistics, a group of professors and economists have demonstrated that the EU would be better off spending its money on technological progress and industrialisation, and opening up its borders to farm products from around the world. This argument encourages poor countries to rely on cash crops for export, leading to the collapse of traditional subsistence farming, bringing food dependency and shortages in its wake. If this line had been followed, it would have finished off Europe's food autonomy for good, destroying its traditions and landscapes and damaging territorial balance. This was an old idea that I hoped had been consigned to history - in fact, however, there is still plenty of sniping and pot shots being aimed at bureaucrats who fail to understand the importance of farming in and for Europe, and in and for the world. The bureaucrats make a useful contribution but the Commission still needs a broader overview.
(F.R./transl.fl)