Too much unnecessary trade. A large part of trade in agricultural products in the world is unnecessary, harmful even. A policy aimed at intensifying it without taking account of the real priorities has to be rejected (see this section in yesterday's EUROPE). But if a new concept of agriculture, more in tune with ecological demands and the fight against famine and malnutrition should affirm itself at world level, the EU should in turn review that that, in its agricultural policy (CAP), does not go along the same lines. As long as European farmers will be subjected to unfair world competition and to a permanent and obsessive demand for productivity, it will be impossible to ask them to change their methods of production and their quantitative objectives. But if everyone moves forward in the right direction, the necessary revisions should be imposed, whatever the opposition.
American cars running on European wine. The ideas of Sicco Mansholt were betrayed from the time when certain farmers began to produce not for the market, or in other words for consumers, but for intervention, that means for the withdrawal and destruction of the products. Since this section first appeared in 1995 we have been fighting simultaneously: in favour of European farming and its multiple and irreplaceable assets, and against the abuses and errors of the CAP, denouncing some inadmissible scandals. For example, "the butter cycle": milk produced by cows (wise and not yet mad) to feed their calves was all processed into butter to benefit from the intervention price; excess butter was stored by hundreds of millions of tonnes, and when EU shops were full, the Commission rented some from the outside, carrying the stocks throughout Europe with the ensuing enormous costs and energy waste. After 24 months, the butter had become unfit for human consumption and, in the end, it was processed into low price fodder for calves. The milk thus returned to its initial use, but after two years of passing through the processing industry, refrigerated trucks and shops, with losses amounting to millions of ecus (that were not lost to everyone). Just as absurd is the "preventive distillation" of wine, operation by which wine is destroyed and turned into alcohol before being placed up for sale. The operation is very costly and polluting, and the alcohol to result from it is totally unusable. After multiple attempts to get rid of it, its only destination was to mix it with oil to manufacture, in the Caribbean, petrol intended for the American market. Thus, American cars were running on what remained of surplus EU wine…
Continuing the reversal. We're no longer at that stage, and the reform of the CAP has already progressed well. Mr. Fischler was able to declare in Berlin last month: "Most of the surplus mountains and lakes have all but disappeared, farmers are again responding to market signals and fertiliser and pesticide use has fallen dramatically. Also pig and poultry feeding has become more natural again. While in the 80s feed grain consumption in the EU fell by 1 to 2 million tonnes per year and cereals were increasingly replaced by industrial waste and substitutes from overseas, today, following the reform, about 25 million tonnes more cereals per year are being used than in 1992".
That good, but efforts must continue. The ravages of cattle farming by animal feed are well known to all. Intensive pig breeding has, in certain regions, caused disastrous water pollution and an accumulation of waste. The concentration of farming on certain variety of high yield vegetables has reduced bio-diversity. In some places, land-yield, draining, the disappearance of hedges and clusters of trees have contributed to catastrophic foods. Efforts at farming "in harmony with nature", sustainable farming, must continue, and farmers must participate in this rather than oppose it. Product quality and safety must prime over quantity, farmers must produce for the market, responding to demand, and not for intervention (which has to become what Mansholt intended: a safety net and not a normal outlet). The time when the Agriculture Council was a direct emanation of the farming interests is of the past. Today, certain agriculture ministers, and not the lesser (Germany, Italy) are politically "Green". When imports are brought under control and submitted to "non-commercial requirements", nothing will warrant the corporatist attitude of certain farming unions, and changes to the CAP will have to be imposed for the good of Europe, its nature, its countryside and its citizens.
(F.R.)