Finnish fury as pig farmer switches side

Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, a Dane, has one of the heaviest portfolios; it is stuffed full of food. As even the neophytes in Brussels know, anything to do with food is a political minefield.

Here on terra firma every bumpkin tilling the soil has a fellow-feeling with all the other bumpkins. They are all misunderstood because the cattish EU refuses to pay anything like enough to subsidise them. Indeed there are threats to cut the money very severely.

European farmers live in a parallel economic universe in which the laws of supply and demand have been gloriously suspended, and in part reversed. Herself a pig-farmer, Fischer Boel switched sides and, now grazing in the more sweet-smelling corridors of power in Brussels, has become the worst kind of heretic.

She believes not just that agricultural subsidies are excessive, but ought to be stopped altogether. This, and her insight that no amount of public money will ever satisfy farmers, have done little to make her popular among her old straw-chewing friends, and even less to win support for ‘Europe’.

She does not care and has lately been fearlessly targeting the peasants of southern Finland, up till now living serenely in an enclave of wealth and happiness. At the time Finland joined the EU in 1995, the government cunningly negotiated a temporary exemption from the rules about funnelling money from the public purse to (in this case) bigwig farmers.

The transition period is now over, the heartless Fischer Boel told the Finnish Farmers Union, which had been under the distinct impression that ‘transition’ was a technical EU term for "don’t worry about a thing, fellows, the nasty men will soon go away and forget all about you".

Alas not. But the commissioner apparently did not reckon with the Finnish peasantry’s talent for revenge, nor with the Finnish tabloid press, which has been assiduously wooed by the farmers. There is now a UK-style wave of farmer-driven anti-Europeanism in Finland. Even worse from the commissioner’s point of view, saucy stories have been spread about her love affairs and business interests, including the three farms she co-owns with her husband.

By an odd coincidence, Sirkka-Liisa Anttila, the Finnish minister of agriculture, is also a pig farmer, a career to which she may be forced to return if the Finnish agristocracy are driven to distraction by the non-arrival of their cheques from Helsinki and being forced to adjust to 2+2=4 (global food prices).

Angry women often find it hard to speak calmly of things that unite rather than divide them, but the two princesses of the barnyard may manage a brief chat in pig Latin over the dunghill of taxpayers’ euros which is modern European farming.

Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, a Dane, has one of the heaviest portfolios; it is stuffed full of food. As even the neophytes in Brussels know, anything to do with food is a political minefield.