Complaining that the farm ministers “have been plucking off my last feather”, she said that this would be the last time:

“There will be no possibility for any delegation to come and ask for more money now. And I say this as I see some other sectors of agriculture facing some problems.”

I hope some of this largesse will be funded from the 99 million euro in levies against member states that have exceeded their milk quota.

With only a few months left in office, this may well be a promise she’s able to keep, though who’s to say what goodies her successor will wish to serve up while settling into his or her new job. One thing is for certain, the farmers will still be there with their begging bowl. After all, Jackie Cahill, president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association welcomed Fischer Boel’s latest move as follows:

“It is a totally inadequate response with the income situation we have. It is not going anywhere near solving the crisis.”

No good deed goes unpunished.

Responses to the consultation on the future of the EU budget are overwhelmingly critical of the CAP, as was the Budget Commissioner Dalia Grybauskaite, before she stepped down from the Commission having been elected President of Lithuania.

Despite the chorus of disapproval, I have very serious doubts about the capacity of the CAP to refom itself from within. As well as being overseen by a DG that jeaously guards its prestige within the Commission (and its budget) the policy is ultimately decided by national Agriculture Ministers. And as former Commissioner Ralf Dahrendorf put it some twenty years ago,

“… [the CAP] is little more than an instrument for Ministers of Agriculture to get for their farmers in Brussels and in the name of Europe what they would not get at their national Cabinet tables.”

So why would any farms minister seek to reduce the flow of ‘free money’ from Brussels for his or her most important client group? For the rare farms minister who is interested in more than simply how much EU money he or she can bring home, former Portuguese farms minister and former MEP Arlindo Cunha puts his finger on the most important reason barrier to reform from within,

“the decision-making system of the CAP will never allow for such a thing as a radical reform because of the redistributive effects which it implies.”

Former French farms minister Jean Glavany, who was burned by his own attempts to reorient the CAP in the late 1990s in France, put it another way:

“The CAP is a heavy cruise ship that can’t make a U-turn like an inflatable dinghy… all it takes is for one country to oppose it, for the rules not to change.”

These are the reasons that I now think that the quickest route to a more rational and less expensive farms policy will come from greater national financial responsibility for its financing. I made the case in an article in last week’s Daily Telegraph. You can read it here.

Co-financing is the first step on the road to a reorgansation of European farm policy along the lines that I have set out and it’s interesting to see that this is being talked about more and more in Brussels, not to mention certain national capitals. The fact that Mrs Fischer Boel should feel the need to mount a defence against the idea of greater subsidiarity and national responsibility shows the direction in which the debate on the CAP his headed.

The health check was a ‘wasted opportunity’ that left ‘the grossly distorted system of subsidies virtually unchanged’. The Commissioner left environmental measures unfunded and gave up the environmental gains of the now abandoned set-aside system without introducing any countervailing measures.

On the positive side, she is praised for having supported greater transparency in farm subsidies and for improving rural development policies.

Interestingly, 47 per cent of those readers of this blog who have expressed an opinion, think that Fischer Boel should serve a second term as Agriculture Commissioner.

Link: Green 10: Off Target: European Commission 2004-09

The return of the subsidies has been widely criticised by agricultural exporting countries such as Australia. But concern has also been expressed within the EU itself. Germany is known to have been concerned that the subsidies are creating a damaging dumping effect in some developing countries.

Fischer Boel explained that in countries such as the Dominican Republic, the impact of subsidised EU exports is not to directly harm domestic produce. These markets are in fact a battleground between the EU and other developed world exporters, she argued.

Of course the EU is not directly competing on the liquid milk market in these countries. However, I recall reading studies by Oxfam and Cafod relating to the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Small local dairy farmers found that their market in local processing factories was driven out by skimmed milk powder from the EU.

The so-called Harvest Experience programme means that all agriculture staff will be sent to stay on farms from 2010. One goal is to encourage Commission officials to use simpler language.

It will be interesting to see where the farmer hosts are found from. I suspect that many of them will be drawn from farmer organisations and will have an axe to grind.

Historically, DG VI as it once was had a reputation of being particularly close to farmers. Its head official was always drawn from France and was usually close to large-scale French grain interests. Many of the officials were French and those Brits who worked there were usually Francophiles. One compensation was that it was said to have the best canteen in the Commission.

The Kinnock reforms ended the French domination at top level. Mind you, a lot of nonsense still comes out of DG Agri. A British academic was telling me about a talk given to students by one of its officials. He claimed that the livelihood of one person in five in Europe depended on the CAP. He worked this out by adding up those working in farming, those in food processing and those in input industries.

It was pointed out to him that it would be possible to have a healthy and competitive food sector in Europe without subsidy and protection.

The 66-year old Dane, who sports a trademark shock of snow white hair, has invoked the spirit of Hollywood actress Jennifer Aniston in the L’Oréal commercials, insisting the payout is entirely justifiable “because I’m worth it”. It’s just as well that the Commission scheme is so generous since Fischer Boel, who together with her husband owns several large livestock farms, is too old to qualify for the EU-funded early retirement scheme for farmers, which pays out a maximum of €18,000 a year to farmers who quit before turning 55. The typical ruse is for farmers approaching 55 to “retire” and apply for the early retirement money while passing the legal title of the farm on to a son or daughter who, in all likelihood, will qualify for an EU-funded young farmers startup grant worth up to €40,000. Both continue to work on the farm as before.

Speaking in 2005, Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel explained how she sees cross compliance in relation nearly 40 billion euros of public expenditure on payments to farmers:

“I would emphasise that decoupled payments are not “money for nothing”. To get the cheque in the post, a farmer has to respect a demanding range of standards related to the environment and animal welfare. We call this system “cross-compliance”.”

Today’s report by the Court shows that such a view is at best wishful thinking and at worst deliberately deceitful. Cross compliance does not represent a ‘demanding range of standards’ at all.

It should be stressed that this study is the biggest and most comprehensive to date. The Court says that it “carried out an audit in 2008 of the cross-compliance policy at the Commission and in seven Member States representing the diversity of agriculture across Europe”.

The top line conclusion pulls no punches:

“the objectives of this policy have not been defined in a specific, measurable, relevant, and realistic way, and that at farm level many obligations are still only for form’s sake and therefore have little chance of leading to the expected changes, whether reducing the size of payments or modifying farming practices.”

Senior officials at the Court are reported to be fuming at the suppression of the report until after the CAP health check was concluded. They should rest assured that their work has not been in vain: this report will play a big part in the discussions of the future of the CAP as part of the EU budget review.

Read the press release and the full report (60+ pages).

“Your position, Commissioner, on compulsory modulation, is right. Your position on decoupling is right. For once we have a Commission that seriously wants to reform the CAP but faces a Parliament that always fails to deliver on this issue and believes that the challenges that we face can be solved by sticking to the old, discredited system. Hang tough, Commissioner, you are right and sadly, I suspect, this chamber will be wrong.”

It might interest some to see the Commissioner’s short speech.

Amid all the debate over the current ‘global food crisis’ one thing that analysts agree on is that the best chance for increasing world food production is to tackle the low productivity of many developing country farm sectors through investment in irrigation, micro-credit, provision of fertlisers, agronomic advice and research into new strains of crops resistant to drought, flooding and other climatic challenges.

Funding this second ‘green revolution’ is difficult at a time when the world’s biggest economies are close to recession, tax revenues are down and organisations like the UN World Food Programme and other aid agencies are having a hard time just standing still and meet the growing needs of the world’s hungry, as food prices continue to rise.

The figures involved are significant. Of the 53 billion euros spent on the CAP each year, and a ‘development fund’ of around 500 million to 1 billion euros is conceivable, according to Commissioner Fischer Boel. The prospect of the CAP’s ‘spare change’ being devoted to this noble cause has been widely welcomed, and is proving a bit of a PR coup for the beleaguered Commission which has been on the back foot over the Irish No vote on the Lisbon treaty and is reaping the hurricane of its unduly enthusiastic support for biofuels.

The proposal is not guaranteed success as many EU farm ministers would rather like to keep the money for their own farmers. Last week Ministers from the CEEC countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 wrote asking Commissioner Fischer Boel to use the money for their farmers instead (direct payments in the CEEC countries are less than in the EU-15, although they are ramping up to parity by 2013). French farms miniser Michel Barnier has suggested using the money to help EU farmers become energy efficient. Quite how that squares with President Sarkozy’s call for an EU-wide cut on VAT on fuel is not immediately apparent. One must assume that like Walt Whitman, the French government is broad enough to contradict itself.

At the informal Agriculture Council meeting in Maribor, Slovenia, last month, we witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of EU farm ministers arguing that giving farmers more money is not the solution. Of course, when EU farmers are in trouble, the solution according to farm ministers is always to give them more money. When the question is how to help developing country farmers, according to the very same ministers, the solutions are not to be found in handouts, but in ‘capacity building’ and the like. The hypocrisy of these clowns is breathtaking.

So far, Fischer Boel has roundly rebuffed such calls, and appears committed to the development fund idea. This is one to watch with interest.

In a cool put-down of the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling and his recent proposals for dismantling the income support and market intervention measures that still form the core of the CAP, the Commissioner aired a suspicion that member state finance ministers might be genetically modified organisms,

“When I saw my Darling, my new Darling’s advice for the CAP, it reminded me quite a lot of something I had seen before. I don’t know if it’s a special gene in finance ministers that they want to cut all payments as low as possible. It’s a nice paper, a really nice statement, but it’s completely politically impossible to achieve this.”

Separately, The Scotsman reports that the Commissioner proposed a new way of evaluating the €53 billion that the EU spends on the CAP each year:

“Regardless of what protection we offer to farmers, it is paramount to me that the measures act like a safety net and not a comfortable chair.”

Henceforth this shall be known as the Fischer Boel Comfortable Chair Doctrine. Unlike her predecessors Ray MacSharry and Franz Fischler, Mariann Fischer Boel may never give her name to a round of CAP reforms, but the Comfortable Chair Doctrine will surely live on.