The European Commission has published its plans to divert up to a billion euros from CAP underspends to a new fund to help farmers in the developing world to increase productivity in the face of the world food crisis. Higher food prices have meant lower CAP expenditure on market measures such as intervention, storage and export refunds and the Commission has suggested redirecting parts of these savings to agricultural production in the third world. Commission President José Manuel Barroso, Development Commissioner Louis Michel and Farms Commissioner Mariann Fischer-Boel have all spoken enthusiastically about the idea, but there are growing rumblings of opposition, from both the Council and the Parliament, both of which will have to approve the plan if it is to become a reality. [...]

French farm leaders have asked President Sarkozy to organise a Special Summit of EU heads of government on ‘EU ambitions for the agriculture and agri-food sectors.’ Perhaps the word ‘EU’ should be replaced by ‘French’. [...]

A couple of week’s ago Berlaymole noted the mysterious disappearance of the online poll about EU biofuels policy from the website of the European Commission President José Manuel Barroso.

The poll had asked respondents the following question:

Should the E.U. stick to its target to reach 10% biofuels by 2020?
- Yes
- No

The results of the poll have never been published and no explanation has been given as to why the poll has been removed. Fear not. We have reinstated the poll on this website, you’ll find it on the sidebar to the left.

Moreover, I’ve written to Barroso’s spokeswoman Leonor Ribeiro Da Silva under the terms of the Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 regarding public access to documents.

Under the terms of this Regulation, Ms Ribeiro Da Silva or one of her colleagues is legally obliged to acknowledge my request and to respond to my request within 15 working days. Failure to do so would constitute maladminstration on the part of the Commission.

Let’s wait and see what happens.

Surging prices for agricultural commodities means that the EU spends much less on the traditional ‘market measures’ of the CAP such as intervention buying when prices fall below a target price, export subsidies and private storage aid for unsold surpluses. Last year the EU decided to allocate some of this underspend to the Galileo space programme. This year, the proposal is to channel the money to farmers in developing countries who currently suffer from very low productivity. [...]

Having previously run a highly visible campaign threatening to derail the imminent referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty on account of the EU’s negotiating position in the WTO, the Irish Farmers Association has fallen back into line with it’s longstanding position of support for Irish membership of the EU. As previously noted, Ireland does spectacularly well out of the CAP, and it looks as though the IFA has extracted a promise from the new Irish prime minister Brian Cowen that he was prepared to veto any WTO deal that was bad for Ireland. [...]

The Commission’s widely leaked proposals for the health check of the CAP are now available, together with various supporting documents and impact assessments. Analysis and reaction will follow on this site over the coming days. Watch the press conference live at 16.30 Brussels time on this AV link. [...]

The Republic of Ireland will hold a referendum on ratification of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty on 12 June 2008. The Irish Farmers Association is urging a No vote, on the grounds that the EU’s push towards more open world markets in agriculture could expose them to competition from overseas, notably from Latin America.

Ireland gets way more than it’s fair share of EU farm handouts. And this fact will not be lost to other member states if Ireland votes to derail the Lisbon Treaty. The EU is currently engaged in a fundamental, ‘once in generation’ review of its budget. The main target for cuts appears to be the agriculture budget, which accounts for around 45% of all EU spending.

Here are some facts that might be of interest: [...]

Dan Morgan of the Washington Post reports on the legislative passage of a 5-year US Farm Bill, with a sufficient majority in the House of Representatives (318:106) to override any Presidential veto. President Bush had previously threatened a veto unless the Farm Bill would set a new upper limit on the size of subsidy payments and avoid raising any new taxes. He looks to have been outmaneuvered. [...]

The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka Finance Minister) Alistair Darling wrote earlier this week to all his counterparts on the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) ahead of today’s meeting, setting out the case for a radical reform of the EU’s agriculture and trade policies. Specifically, he calls for the abolition of direct aids (some €34 billion a year) and the abolition of EU tariffs on agricultural imports. He also signals the growing concern in the UK about the EU’s headlong rush into food-for-fuel policies that are widely seen as contributing to the rapidly rising costs of food in Europe and elsewhere. [...]

Earlier in the year a collaboration between German TV station Bayerischer Rundfunk’s Report München, Greenpeace and farmsubsidy.org uncovered farm subsidies going to some unusual recipients: airlines and cruise ships. Recall that similar revelations about farm subsidies to golf courses, pony clubs and railway companies made headlines in the autumn of last year. Watch the report with English subtitles, after the jump. [...]

The French government has launched a new website as part of the run-up to a conference it will hold on 3 July, at the very beginning of France’s 6-month EU Presidency, to discuss the future of European and global agriculture. Entitled “Qui va nourrir le monde?” (Who will feed the world), the debate is being organised around six questions, divided into two groups. Find out more after the jump… [...]

We all know that the legislators who write US farm policy are not the brightest bulbs in the box. Even so, Senator Chuck Grassley treated us to an unusual insight into his own very special, mixed-up world during a telephone press briefing last week, reported in the Des Moines Register. Asked about the contribution of the US Government’s massive food-to-fuel subsidies to rising world food prices and the resulting hunger, poverty and social unrest, Grassley denied there was any connection and suggested the responsibility lay with people in China eating too much meat. [...]

The WTO negotiations have become a live issue in Irish politics because Ireland is the only EU country which will hold a referendum to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, and the campaign provides an opportunity for interest groups to maximise their bargaining strength. For example, farm groups who are traditionally pro-EU in referendum votes have threatened to campaign against the Lisbon Treaty not because of the content of the Treaty but because of their dissatisfaction with the way they see Peter Mandelson as EU Trade Commissioner handling the WTO negotiations.

Padraig Walshe, President of the Irish Farmers’ Association, the largest of the Irish farm groups, gave a not-so-veiled warning recently when he noted that “it would be unrealistic to expect the farming community and rural people to vote for the Lisbon Treaty while Mandelson is planning the destruction of the Irish and European family farm structure.” [...]

Paris accueille son salon international de l’agriculture où 600,000 visiteurs sont attendus. Durant 9 jours, professionnels et particuliers vont admirer ou découvrir la richesse et la diversité des filières agricoles et agroalimentaires. Le défilé des politiques caressant maladroitement un agneau du Poitou-Charentes ou savourant du Roquefort va être quotidien. Jacques Chirac dont la popularité en milieu rural a toujours été notable est attendu dans les allées de la Porte de Versailles, non plus en tant que président -défendeur inconditionnel de la PAC -mais en ami fidèle. [...]

What a difference a change of ministerial portfolio makes! Back in 2006, Hilary Benn MP, Secretary of State for International Development, was strident in his criticisms of the CAP:

“Through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), two fifths of the EU budget goes on subsidies and support to Europe’s farmers who represent 5% of Europe’s population, and produce less than 2% of Europe’s output. Most is not spent in the poorer parts of Europe where it is needed. Most goes to the biggest farming companies and landowners, not small farmers.”

Times change, Prime Ministers come and go, and Hilary Benn is now Secretary of State at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. In this post he is spearheading the UK Government’s fight to ensure that massive CAP ‘income support’ payments continue to be paid to Europe’s biggest farming companies and landowners. [...]

Roger Waite is a long-standing member of the Brussels agricultural press pack and he will be giving a podcast round-up of the monthly Agriculture Council meetings, when farm ministers from all 27 EU member states met to decide the future of EU agriculture and rural development policy. In this month’s meeting, EU farm ministers debated the Commission’s ideas for the health check, the latest position of the WTO Doha Round negotiations and the impact of rising feed prices on European pig farmers.

As well as being the founding editor of the AgraFacts news subscription service, Roger is a Journalism Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

According to a background note from the Slovenian EU Presidency, the Agriculture Council will hold a policy debate on the Commission’s communication on the “health check” of the CAP at this month’s meeting in Brussels on Monday 18 February. [...]

I have recently been working with others on an edited collection to be brought out from the Centre for Policy Studies in Brussels which re-visits the Fischler reforms of the CAP. The discussions held in relation to the book, which involved some people who knew Fischler’s work well, confirmed my view that he was someone who combined strategic vision with a wily use of tactics and an understanding of which political buttons to push when. Now the former farm supremo has provided a rare interview to Agra Focus. One of the intresting points he makes that two much is made of the difference between the two pillars: ‘They are man-made and we should not make an icon of these structures.’ What is important is that the money goes to the right recipients. [...]

Top Commission officials have confirmed that in the face of opposition from four member states (Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia and the UK) as well as many farm unions, Mariann Fischer Boel has dropped plans to cut the very largest farm subsidy payments by 45 per cent. The plan, which would have affected an estimated 23,000 farms that receive in excess of €300,000 a year, a list which is dominated by Europe’s wealthiest landowners such as the Duke of Westminster, Prince Albert of Monaco and the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein. [...]

Showing soon at a screen near you….

Launched in September 2007 by Michel Barnier, the Assises de l’Agriculture aim to set up the French position during the CAP health and prepare a “new” policy beyond 2013. It involves all stakeholders from French administration, farm and agribusiness sector, environmental, consumers and land owners organizations. [...]

As Jack Thurston has well exposed in his recent entry, the “food security” argument seems to be the new rally call for those trying to justify continuation of untargetted payments to farmers, or even a return to production support (albeit disguised as “risk management”, “income insurance” and the like). At a recent debate I was struck by the fact that the “food security” threat, and hence the need to support further agriculture intensification was almost universally endorsed, including by “CAP reformers”. While Jack has given a powerful argument for refuting the neo-Malthusian scaremongering about looming food shortage, you don’t actually need to believe in a future of plenty to call the bluff on this line of reasoning. [...]

A new report commissioned by the Budget Committee of the European Parliament makes interesting reading. The report, written by Jorge Núñez Ferrer (a former Commission fonctionnaire) and Eleni A. Kaditi, both of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, aims to asses whether the CAP provides ‘added value’. Núñez Ferrer and Kaditi define this as whether “the benefits outweigh the costs, not only of implementing the policy, but also the costs created in other areas.” The authors don’t pull their punches, particularly when it comes to direct payments which, costing some €30 billion a year, are by far the biggest ticket item in the CAP. [...]

Earlier this week, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Churchill Confidential, a dramatisation of British cabinet meetings chaired by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, records of which have only recently been released into the public domain. In this week’s episode, looking at Churchill’s second term of office (1951-55), we get an overview of the pressing issues of state at that time: the impending conflict with Egypt over the Suez Canal, the development of the British atom bomb, balancing Britain’s relationships with its European neighbours and the United States of America, immigration and race relations, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the devaluation of the pound and, somewhat incongruously… a decision on whether to reduce the meat ration. Why is this relevant to the CAP? Find out after the jump… [...]

It should come as no surprise that the EU level farm union COPA-COGECA’s response to the Commission’s communication on the CAP health check is reminiscent of King Canute, trying to hold back the tide. What is very interesting, however, is that in important areas the response contains dissenting voices (or ‘reserves’) expressed by a handful of COPA-COGECA’s member groups. [...]

With the Slovenian Presidency of the EU barely a month old, the French government is already limbering up for its defense of the CAP during the Health Check and the budget review when France takes the helm of the EU in the second half of 2008. Farms minister Michel Barnier is here in Brussels all this week along with his ‘B-Team’: a 22-strong crack unit of Paris-based diplomats and civil servants on a mission to familiarize themselves with EU institutions, places and faces and to plot with old allies in the battle against reform such as those reactionary dinosaurs at COPA-COGECA and their more youthful offspring. [...]

With 27 member states the whole negotiating process in the Farm Council has become a lot more difficult, not that it was ever easy. Another complication is that fisheries matters are also dealt with in the Farm Council and this means that the December meeting is the scene for an inevitable battle between fisheries ministers over quotas. [...]

The European Parliament’s agriculture committee published a working paper on the CAP health check at the end of last year. Tamsin Cooper and Martin Farmer at IEEP have already argued that from an environmental perspective it lacks ambition and is internally inconsistent. I have looked in detail at the working paper’s proposals for ‘progressive modulation’ which is put forward as an alternative to both the Commission’s proposals on payment limits and increased compulsory modulation. [...]

A new survey of public opinion released today by the German Marshall Fund of the United States shows strong support for ‘consumer agenda’ in EU and US agriculture policies focused on food safety, the environment and the food supply. There was significantly less support for producer-oriented priorities like providing emergency financial relief to farmers, insuring farmers against unpredictable market conditions and preserving small family farms. [...]

Later today the European Commission will present its proposals for changes to the Common Agricultural Policy – for so long an emblem of bureaucracy, waste and injustice. This will be the first reform since details began to emerge from top secret government files about exactly who gets what from the €55 billion Europe spends each year on farm subsidies. After a landmark FOI case by The Guardian in 2005, revelations about farm subsidies paid to the Queen (£466,667 in 2005), the Duke of Westminster (£526,136) and Sir Richard Sutton (£917,650) hit the headlines across Europe. [...]

The debate over the future of the CAP will begin in earnest next week with the Commission’s proposals for the ‘health check’. Just in time comes an excellent new website that offers a view of the agricultural situation in each of the 27 EU member states. This is a much needed resource that combines official data and expert analysis in a readable and analytically comparative way. It is an excellent factual companion for anyone looking at the diversity of European agriculture and the different policy paradigms that prevail across the EU. [...]

Over on the excellent VoxEU site, Thomas Hertel, Roman Keeney and Alan Winters try to answer the question why agricultural policy is so difficult to reform, as illustrated by the way in which difficulties in getting agreement on reduced agricultural support and protection has been one of the factors preventing progress in the Doha Round. They take issue with one justification for preserving rich countries’ agricultural protection that it helps poor farmers in the North while the benefits of liberalisation would go only to rich farmers in the South. [...]

Will we in Europe soon be watching TV commercials like this one that is currently airing in the United States?

An excellent briefing document on the likely direction of the CAP Health Check – and the political forces at play – has been published by the Institute for European Environment Policy (IEEP). To my mind it is the best overview available at this time and I’m delighted that IEEP experts Tamsin Cooper and Martin Farmer have recently joined the CAP Health Check blog. Read it here (PDF). There is also a short update following the leak of a DG Agriculture draft of the proposals due in November 2007.

Leaks from Brussels suggest that capping Single Farm Payments is on the agenda for the forthcoming Health Check. This was mooted at the time of the last reform and defeated by opposition from Britain and Germany who would have lost out the most. [...]

The CAP Health Check has been promoted by the Commission as an exercise focused on tidying up the loose ends of the 2003 Mid Term Review and adapting the CAP to an evolving set of circumstances for the period 2008 – 2013. However, this is only half the equation. The Budget Review is set to open up a much more fundamental debate on the rationale for European expenditure on agriculture, and in doing so will delve into the very heart of the CAP. [...]

Experts on agricultural policy are often asked why the ‘farm lobby’ has been so successful although, of course, at EU level its influence has declined over time. In part this has been because it has been losing the debate and has often shown insufficient flexibility in responding to new framings of issues. [...]

President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso yesterday launched the Commission’s long-awaited review of the EU budget and looks to be squaring up for a fight with his Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. [...]

Hyperactive French President Nicolas Sarkozy this week made a fundamental break with his predecessors, endorsing ‘radical reform’ of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy, according to a report by Agence France Presse. [...]

It is far from clear how agricultural issues will be dealt with under co-decision once the reform treaty is enacted. Under current rules, most CAP dossiers are decided under the ‘consultation’ procedure, where the Council must wait for an EP opinion, but has no obligation to incorporate EP amendments into the final text. [...]

On the other side of the Atlantic the five-yearly federal farm bill debate is reaching its climax. A bill approved unanimously by the powerful House agriculture committee has been roundly attacked by reformers who wanted to see less in the way of multi-million dollar payouts to large agribusinesses and more resources for conservation programmes and economic development assistance for rural areas. [...]

The fruit and vegetable reform agreement is another step on the road to a more market oriented CAP. Yet in some ways it is more significant in terms of how it was secured and what it reveals about decision-making in an EU with 27 member states. [...]

John Gummer MP, the former UK Agriculture Minister who is currently advising Conservative Party leader David Cameron on farm policy, has taken a swipe those in his party who call for a repatriation of the EU’s common agricultural policy:

“There is no doubt at all that unless we get a kind of common deal in the EU farmers will get no money at all. No British government of any kind is prepared to foot the bill. Anybody who dares to talk about repatriation doesn’t care about farming because you won’t have it.”

[...]

The surprise parliamentary election defeat last Sunday of Alain Juppé, a leading member of newly-appointed French cabinet has forced President Nicolas Sarkozy into an unplanned cabinet reshuffle. Newly appointed Agriculture Minister Christine Lagarde has been promoted to the post of Finance Minister. The resulting gap at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing has been filled by Michel Barnier, who until 2005 served as European Commissioner for regional policy. [...]

Casual explanations of the persistence of the CAP put it down to the strength of the ‘farm lobby’. At a national level, there is some truth in this and the positions of member states in the Farm Council often reflect pressure from their domestic farmers’ organisations. After all, upsetting them is likely to lead to a lot of trouble and very few plaudits. [...]

The hard line being taken by France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, on the future of the CAP could have a paradoxical outcome: further re-nationalisation of the policy once seen as the cornerstone of the European Union. [...]

In a classic example of how not to win friends and influence people, Peter Kendall, President of the UK National Famers’ Union, has described shoppers who buy organic food as having ‘more money than sense’. In the cover feature of last Saturday’s Financial Times weekend magazine, Kendall takes a swipe at the organic movement and in doing so break the cardinal law of sales: the customer is always right. [...]

After Nicholas Sarkozy appeared to indicate that it was ‘business as usual’ in French agricultural policy, the appointment of Christine Lagarde as farm minister gives a ray of hope. Named as the 30th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2006, she was formerly trade minister. [...]

A report by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee of the UK Parliament has called for the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy to be replaced by a new “Rural Policy for the EU”. While the committee of MPs, whose job is to shadow the work of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), described the objectives of the CAP as ‘an anachronism’, it reserved its strongest criticism for the UK government itself, which is described as naive and impatient. [...]

In an uncharacteristically pro-CAP intervention for a British politician, Liberal Democrat economics spokesman Chris Huhne has attacked his Tory opposite number George Osborne’s recent description of the CAP as ‘unreformed’. [...]