Reining in the horse-traders

Date: 16/05/1996

IF EU farm ministers run true to form, next month's meeting of the Agriculture Council will see them haggling late into the night as they try to wrap up a package of measures dealing with a string of what, to the layman's eye, are unrelated issues.

What do the 1996-97 farm price proposals, the reform of the Union's fruit and vegetable sector, the standard rate of arable set-aside, quotas for flax producers and attempts to gain concessions for the Union's wine growers have in common?

On the face of it, nothing - except that all of them are matters for which EU agriculture ministers are responsible. Yet progress in these areas has, as always, been held up by the determination of individual ministers to use each as a bargaining chip in negotiations on the others.

Farm ministers have a long-established tradition of holding far longer meetings than any of their counterparts in other government departments, of allowing negotiations to drag on late into the night whenever anything remotely contentious is on the agenda, and of indulging in a degree of horse-trading unparalleled in any other area of EU decision-making.

So established is the practice of trading concessions in one area for gains in another that few question the systematic use of hostage-taking as a way of reaching decisions in the agricultural sector.

Farm ministers are responsible for a larger portion of the EU budget than any of their counterparts. Far from giving them an excuse for the horse-trading which determines how so much of those funds are spent, it gives them an even greater accountability to the EU's hard-pressed taxpayers to ensure that their money is spent wisely and well.

The needs of each sector of agriculture should be assessed on their merits, and decisions about the level of spending taken on the basis of those needs - and not on the success of individual member states in forcing concessions from other member states by threatening to block decisions in other key areas.

No one would pretend that an element of horse-trading does not creep into other areas of EU decision-making. But none exploit the leverage that individual ministers have to disrupt proceedings if they do not get their way so blatantly - and so frequently - as those responsible for farming.

Although the antics of the agriculture ministers are often viewed with wry amusement by Union insiders, so accustomed to their behaviour that they tend to shrug it off as if it were an unavoidable fact of life, it really is no laughing matter.

Eurosceptics everywhere are fond of arguing that one of the fundamental problems with the Union is that the need for agreement on often highly contentious issues results in too many backroom deals based on the lowest common denominator. Many, including some ardent Euro-enthusiasts, argue that the Common Agricultural Policy is too expensive, too complex and too far removed from the discipline of market forces.

While agriculture ministers persist in tying unrelated issues together in an attempt to hold their EU partners to ransom, they will be an easy target for the critics.