Charlemagne: The farmers’ friend

European agriculture is feeling beleaguered

WHAT is it about Europeans and agriculture? Farmers account for only 2% of Europe's workforce. Yet in 1992, the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, almost scuppered the Uruguay round of world trade talks rather than cut farm spending. He accused his own negotiators of exceeding their mandate, and said "I'm not going to be an accomplice to the depopulation of the land." Now it is happening again. President Jacques Chirac of France is accusing the trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, of exceeding his mandate and says he may veto the Doha trade round rather than accept more changes to the common agricultural policy (CAP). The Irish prime minister chimes in that there has been quite enough CAP reform already.

There is more at stake here than self-interest. French farmers are, admittedly, the largest beneficiaries from the CAP. And French leaders seem peculiarly susceptible just now to infantile anti-market posturing. But the dispute about farming and world trade is about more than grandstanding or the protection of a special interest. In Europe, agriculture is not just any business. Agriculture is important everywhere, of course: that is why it is the most protected commercial activity in the world. But Europeans make a fetish of it. From the Eclogues of Virgil - a town dweller's paean to country life - to the Corn Laws in Britain, which this newspaper was founded in 1843 to battle against, to the Treaty of Rome, which singled out farmers for special help, agriculture has always been special in Europe. It is morally good, and support for it is a mark of civilisation.

This being Europe, one cannot leave things to the vagaries of individual taste, either; one must also rally the forces of the state. There must be bundles of cash (some 40% of the European Union budget goes on farming). There must be national or European standards for making bread, wine or cheese. One can even claim (as France did recently) that a yogurt-maker is a national champion. Yet there was always something odd about this. Why shouldn't coal miners get special treatment too? Why should governments fret about food security, and not supplies of medicines? For years, farming's "civilisational" appeal trumped such concerns. But recently, several things have eroded Europeans' distinctive attitudes to farming. The result is both a greater willingness to accept change and a prickly defensiveness on the part of those whose attitudes have changed the least.

The 1940s and 1950s were a time of food shortages in Europe. Understandably, the people who created what became the EU were concerned about rural poverty and food security. Now, a well-fed generation has grown up that is at least as concerned about poverty worldwide. Young people are more likely to believe that rich-country farm support imposes huge costs on the developing world (as it does). They are also more likely to agree that the CAP has not been successful in reducing rural poverty: 80% of farm support goes to the richest 20% of farmers.

Moreover, whatever justification may have existed for spending most of the European budget on agriculture in the 1960s, when the club had six members, it will not wash now that the EU has 25 members and a broader remit. The arrival of ten new countries from central Europe meant that the CAP had to be rethought. Without further change, it may be impossible to agree an EU budget for the next seven years. In 2000, EU leaders said they wanted to have the most competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world. Spending such a big chunk of the EU budget on a pre-industrial activity will not help to achieve that goal.

Such pressures persuaded Europeans to accept reforms which, by their standards at least, are fairly substantial. In 2003, the EU agreed to replace a blizzard of farm-support payments with a single payment scheme, which subsidises farmers' incomes directly, rather than by paying higher prices for their crops and livestock. This should remove the worst trade-distorting aspects of the CAP. Farmers now get paid an average of only one-third above world market prices, compared with 80% in the mid-1980s. Overall subsidies are down: from over two-fifths of farm receipts in the 1980s to one-third and falling in 2004.

The trouble is that the 2003 changes were a classic case of only partial reform, as everyone knew at the time. They were too little both for Europeans and for Europe's trading partners. They did not affect tariff levels, which are now the main subject of dispute between the EU and the rest of the world. Nor did the 2003 reforms do enough to resolve looming budget problems. Even so, they went too far for many farmers, who now see themselves as an endangered species.

A rural nostalgia

This defensiveness has been reinforced by the loss of influence of agriculture's best friend and beneficiary, France, after its people did the unthinkable and chose to vote against the EU constitution last May. Farming was once central to what the EU did, a Frenchman was director-general for agriculture as of right and France moulded the European Commission in its image. Now farming has gone from being an object of celebration to one of contention, and the French tend to think of the entire European Commission as an Anglo-Saxon plot. Clamouring about farmers satisfies the French government's desire to make a noise in the councils of Europe.

That does not necessarily mean that the French will carry out their threat to veto the Doha trade round. To do so would bring down on their heads not only the wrath of other countries - and of French consumers. It would also damage, perhaps irretrievably, one of the EU's central institutional claims to global influence, that it negotiates on behalf of the world's largest trading block. But whatever happens to the Doha round, the arguments over the place of farming in the EU will continue - and with them, the questioning of Europeans' own sense of themselves as people with deep connections to the land.

Commentary features asks and explains why 'agriculture' seems to be such an important issue in Europe.