Farm policy denounced as mean

Date: 27/02/1997

By Elizabeth Wise

THE EU may be the world's number one giver of development aid, but it has a selfish streak when it comes to farming, say critics.

“The Commission has brave words,” said a non-EU diplomat based in Brussels. “It tells Mercosur, Mexico, South Africa and others: 'We are going to open up trade.' But agriculture is excluded.”

More than a few foreign diplomats remember their surprise at “a huge fight with Argentina over a tiny quota of lemons” after Austria, Sweden and Finland joined the Union; or “the time Poland wanted an extra truckload of raspberry jam” in its export allowance to the Union and was not given it.

EU governments want to ensure that farm trade concessions to any nation will not hurt the Union's Common Agriculture Policy. And they want to avoid having to renegotiate the CAP before the arrival of central and eastern European countries (CEECs) in the Union.

Bonn, normally a champion of the CEECs, was one of three EU governments which in 1995 rejected a Commission proposal to increase quotas and reduce the tariffs that curb CEEC exports to the Union.

In late 1995 and early 1996, when poor countries trembled on the edge of famine because of a global grain shortage, the EU set such high export tariffs on European produce that it effectively prevented any grain from reaching needier populations.

As an explanation for such behaviour, some blame the history of the Common Agricultural Policy. “When the CAP was first developed [in 1957], World War II was still fresh in European minds and Europe had to provide its own food,” recalled one official.

That is no longer the case, however, and non-Europeans do not buy that argument.

“We would understand if it were Poland, Egypt, Ghana or Bolivia saying that, but it is hard to tolerate from France,” said a diplomat.

When the EU made clear last year that it would exclude 39&percent; of South Africa's farm goods from its offer of free trade with Pretoria, a South African diplomat complained: “France and Germany see us as an employment threat. They seem to have forgotten which country is the developing one and which are developed.”

The Union is an open market to produce from the 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) nations linked to it through the development pact known as the Lomé Convention.

But Lomé's future is uncertain - EU institutions are reconsidering whether to renew the pact and the WTO will eventually rule it illegal.