Let them eat cake

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: farmers to leave a tenth of their land fallow. It proposes to phase out milk quotas that limit production (though abolition must wait until 2015). It suggests ending remaining subsidies linked to production, in favour of payments for tending the landscape while choosing what to grow. Most of these ideas will get through in some form, albeit watered down (eg, governments will still be allowed to pay farmers to rear sheep and goats on pretty, if unprofitable, mountaintops).

More ominously, France and its allies have won a clause allowing CAP money to be spent on state-funded insurance for farmers hit by bad weather or disease. Senior officials say France wants to turn this into an American-style income insurance for farmers, in which the public purse pays out when prices dip;

Mr Barnier is cryptic, saying that if Americans offer such guarantees, “they must have their reasons”. The Americans are working on their own, ultra-generous farm bill.

Rising prices and incomes should mean that bigger cuts in the CAP (as in the farm bill) are possible when the EU comes to review its budget later this year. But the furious defence of the CAP sends a quite different signal. If, even when farming is profitable, ministers still want subsidies to boost production, it seems fair to guess they do not have cheap production in mind.

In fairness, there is public support in Europe for lots of costly regulations. It may be “perverse”, as one diplomat says, for countries to complain about high prices for pig feed while voting against cheaper, genetically modified grain. But most EU citizens reject GMOs as scary “Frankenfoods”. Europeans like pretty Alpine farms and fret about such things as animal welfare and pesticides. There are free-trading countries on both sides of the current pesticide row: Britain thinks the proposed ban is not backed by science, but Sweden and Denmark disagree.

Who will pay?