France's responsibilities. France has always been the most vigorous proponent of the common agricultural policy (CAP), as everybody knows. It is far less well known that at the same time, France has a lot of the responsibility to bear for the CAP's shortcomings and the poor image the policy drags behind it in many of the Member States and in the world in general. Instead of putting forward the CAP as an essential instrument to safeguard the environment, territorial equilibrium, and the traditions and countryside of Europe, the French authorities often give the impression that their main concern is to defend the specific interests of their farmers; furthermore, instead of propagating the notion of single European agriculture based on solidarity, they often give the impression that there are only bothered about their national interests. Last June, in his attempts to sell the draft European Constitution to young French people, president Jacques Chirac put forward a miser's concept of the CAP, which was based solely on the bottom line, hammering home how many billion euros France took out of it. However, a corporatist attitude is understandable when it's being expressed by agricultural organisations, because farmers have every right to be defended by their representatives, just as any other social category has; but Europe's largest agricultural power could have shown a bit more farsightedness. Last July, in "Le Figaro", Sylvie Goulard wrote (our translation): "The President of the Republic has used an enormous amount of France's credit to maintain the CAP, without trying to redirect it more towards ecology or justice. It is very hard to ask our partners to continue to pay for a policy which mainly goes to the benefit of a small number of big producers, and which ends up drying the South West and polluting the groundwater in Brittany".
The weak spot. In fact, the various reforms of the CAP aimed to correct the very failings Ms Goudard writes about, and the Community institutions have taken many measures to this end, but with a certain amount of drifting (within the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament) and with one major inadequacy, which is that the funding continues to benefit the larger holdings in an almost scandalously excessive proportion compared to the small and medium-sized ones. If I was a member of the European Parliament, I would call on the Council to tell me, for starters: a) which Member States opposed the reimbursement of over-compensation paid out to large cereals producers, in 2002 (over a billion EUR in a single marketing year)? And b) which Member States opposed putting a ceiling on the level of subsidies under the CAP to an individual agricultural holding, as proposed by the Commission?
The imbalance in payments is the most negative aspect, for its economic effects to the detriment of smallholdings and for its impact on public opinion (subsidies to the Queen of England and other leading British families, or to large landowners in France, have been fully exploited by the media). It has been calculated that 78% of subsidies go to 22% of holdings.
New impetus. Overall, the reflection has gained new impetus in France, which was fed into by the now general rejection of empty, populist soundbites calling the very point of agricultural activity into question (see this column yesterday). A few major revisions are coming to light, and this is essential, because France is the single largest agricultural power in Europe and the main beneficiary from the CAP. Agriculture Minister Dominique Bussereau does not focus on the specific interests of farmers, or on the financial benefits of the CAP, but on more fundamental ideas: protection of the environment, the fact that funding is conditional upon certain ecological conditions, good agricultural practice (including animal welfare), taking account of what cultivated land has to contribute to the fight against the greenhouse effect and its potential to help resolve the eternal energy problem. He concludes that "agriculture is not an activity of the past, but an investment for our children, the CAP works for the greatest benefit of the whole of the European population, for our health and our independence".
At the same time, there is a proliferation of suggestions and initiatives such as: reaffirming the Community preference; recognising the importance of Europe's food autonomy; striking a better balance between subsidies and production in decoupling; simplifying bureaucratic checks, a firm commitment to removing aid to export. Of all of these studies, I'll be quoting most of all from the one by the Institut Montaigne (Paris), which was drawn up by a working group chaired by Joachim Bitterlich and whose rapporteur was Amélie Castera. I will return to this shortly.
(F.R.)