France and farming. The case for the defence

Date: 11/01/03

Free trade is the wrong answer, says Jacques Chirac's farm minister

HERE was a French farm minister in Britain spelling out - in English - the virtues of the European Union's protectionist common agricultural policy (CAP). But Herve Gaymard is not a man to risk his larynx for fun. His speech to an Oxford farming conference this week was part of a campaign as the world's rich and poor define their positions - the deadline is March 31st - for the Doha round of world trade negotiations. His message: France will protect its farmers from free trade.

How? It has, of course, to act through the EU. No problem. President Jacques Chirac, on the eve of an EU summit last October, made a private deal on farm spending with Germany's Gerhard Schröder that neatly blew away British dreams of full-scale reform of the CAP as the EU readies itself to take in another ten new, subsidy-hungry members.

Mr Gaymard had already, in September, corralled six other EU farm ministers - enough to block any contrary majority - into jointly denouncing the European Commission's plan to decouple subsidies from production. Then, last month, he and France's ministers for foreign trade and aid jointly rounded on the Australian trade minister, Mark Vaile, who, in line with his colleagues in the “Cairns group” of countries that do not subsidise their agricultural exports, had just accused the CAP of “strangling” the world's poor. Not true, says Mr Gaymard: the Cairns countries should concentrate on American subsidies, especially for its cotton, rice and groundnut oil - crops in direct competition with those of the poor in Africa and Asia.

But “we're all sinners” is not the essence of Mr Gaymard's message. Not at all: everyone, not least other EU countries, should start from the premise that “farm products are more than marketable goods”. Farming is part of a nation's culture, and literally rooted in the land: farmers, unlike manufacturers, cannot simply switch from one location to another.

Nor is the CAP to blame for all the EU's farming ills. Did it cause mad-cow disease? Non. It does not subsidise pigs or poultry, so don't blame it for the pollution caused by Brittany's pig farmers. Nor should consumers complain. Food is only 16% of an EU family's budget compared with over 50% when the CAP started some 40 years ago. So one may object that the CAP makes Europe's citizens pay twice, first as taxpayers and then as consumers, but does it really matter? Indeed, the CAP comes cheap: around 1% of EU public spending, he says, as against 1.5% in America.

Finally, says Mr Gaymard, it is shoddy thinking to link the CAP with the plight of third-world farmers. The EU now gives tariff-free and quota-free access to farm products (with phase-in periods for sugar, rice and bananas) from the world's 49 poorest countries. Australia's Mr Vaile may argue that this discriminates against less poor countries such as Brazil, but, replies Mr Gaymard, “Do we really need to show that the needs of Brazil, a great world industrial power, are not the same as those of Bangladesh or Mauritania?” Anyway, the EU takes 40% of Brazil's farm exports, compared with 15% taken by America.

The real trouble with third-world farming, says Mr Gaymard, is its reliance on exporting cash crops, such as coffee and cocoa, a policy that both undermines traditional farming and increases risk, as imports rise but export prices (look at coffee) may collapse. Rather than damn the CAP, poor countries should be imitating it.

Humph. But Mr Gaymard, in his Oxford speech, had a stronger point: other industrialised nations “are not ready to eliminate their support for agriculture. They have not committed themselves to doing so in international forums and do not believe that, as far as they are concerned, it would be to the developing countries' advantage. Therefore” - or so ran the conclusion he drew - “let us stop dreaming.”

Report of speech by France's Minister for Agriculture, Food, Fisheries and Rural Affairs, Hervé Gaymard, to the Oxford farming conference, January 2003.

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