The best sentence to pass Jacques Chirac's lips during the national referendum campaign was almost certainly this one, aimed at the French farmers: "for you, voting against the Constitution is like shooting yourself through the foot". But the farmers didn't listen, choosing instead the anti-globalist rhetoric of José Bové (which would mean the end of all farming in Europe). Mr Chirac then made the grave mistake of stressing the budgetary aspect alone, i.e. the 9 or 10 billion EUR France receives every year under the CAP, but this wasn't the heart of the matter (as a "net contributor" country, France could claw this money back, via a general reduction of the community budget). The main thing is an open market with guaranteed prices, which allows France (and all the other Member States which export agricultural products) to sell its agricultural products at European prices rather than at world prices (if they Community preference is maintained or re-established as it should be). But this is where the populist untruths and dishonest soundbites of Tony Blair and his ministers start. Examples?
1. Europe spends 10 times more on agriculture than it does on research. The comparison is an absurd one, because the lion' s share of investment in research is made at national level, whereas the cost of agriculture is European, which means that national budgets are correspondingly lightened. Europe as a whole spends some 2% of its gross income on research these days, and has set itself the objective of 3%, this even though the overall budget for the EU has never exceeded 1% and would have reached 1.06% with the Juncker draft. In this budget, the agricultural policy represents not 40% (another lie from Tony Blair) but around 30%, because the rest goes to the Rural Development Fund, which will pay for activities other than agricultural production in rural areas, and for the protection of nature. The cost of the CAP is thus less than one third of the EU budget, which corresponds to around 0.3% of overall community revenue (compared to 2%, and soon to be 3%, for research).
2. Europe spends 2 euros a day on each of its cows, whilst a billion human beings have less than half of that to live on. This is an "emotive" slogan, which has done a lot of damage to Europe (even Pascal Lamy said this when it was his job to defend the CAPD on the half of the EU). However, these two euros a day obviously don't go to the cow, but to the farmers who look after her, and their families. If you believe that farmers are Europeans like any others, who have the right (when they work well and honestly) to the same standard of living as the average, who have rights to Social Security, education for their children and, if possible, paid holidays, and that animals must be looked after properly, then comparisons with the poorest people of other continents are pure populism. Otherwise, we would have to make sure that farmers in Europe had the same standards of living is farmers from Bangladesh, or give up any form of husbandry in Europe. Tony Blair ought to understand that the Aberdeen Angus in his country subsists solely thanks to support from the CAP. It is also true that for almost all of Europe's agricultural activity, expert calculations showed that dispassionately applying WTO trade rules to agriculture would mean that some 80% of all farms in the EU would simply go out of business.
3. The EU spends 40% of its budget on an activity in decline, which concerns just 5% of its population and 2% of its wealth. Quite apart from the error in the percentage, this reasoning neglects the result of years of European-level reflections and debates, which led to the formula of the multifunctionality of agriculture. I know that it's an ill-chosen term that sounds so bureaucratic that it's just about incomprehensible to the public, but multifunctionality means no more than that the role of agricultural activity goes far beyond just producing food. This activity has many, and irreplaceable, functions, which this column has often gone into, so I'll just quickly point out the following: a) maintaining a reasonable level of food self-sufficiency, without which, the world being as it is, no genuine political autonomy would be possible; b) maintaining the territorial equilibrium, without which Europe will be made up of huge derelict areas occasionally interspersed by enormous cities full to bursting, with worsening societal fringes, devastated by social exclusion, crime, degradation; c) safeguarding the countryside and traditions which have made European civilisation what it is, and which represents an essential part of it.
It could be that British traditions are not quite the same, because under the Commonwealth, territorial equilibrium was conceived differently. But for continental Europe, the situation seems to me to be quite clear: the end of agriculture would mean the end of European civilisation. (F.R.)