A COUNTRYSIDE IN SORE NEED OF REFORM

by Peter Millar

The European, 26 August - 1 september 1994

These last few weeks of summer, wandering through golden fields, watching the completion of the early harvest and the start of the long, slow transition into autumn, make me fearful for the condition and future of European agriculture. For too many fields lie fallow.

Nothing succeeds like success, according to the maximum of business and showbiz alike. How come it is so signally untrue when it comes to agriculture ? In fact, the motto may as well be stood on its heads. The curse of Europe's countryside has become the success of its farmers, particularly those with substancial parcels of land under their control.

The problem is the policy of set-aside, which disrupts the flow of seasonal activity in the fields and lays waste vast tracts of land for years on end, based on the nonsensical concept of paying farmers not to do their job. The truth is, of course, that this is much more like industrial unemployment benefit than common sense would suggest. Farmers who receive annual grants for setting land out of production do so for the basic economic reason that the potential supply of their produce exceeds anticipated demand.

The common agricultural policy is, of course, the culprit. But it is worth remembering how it has come about. CAP was a child of European war. It was - and unfortunately substantially remains - based on the assumption that the continent would, from time to time, have difficulty in feeding itself and that farmers would regularly be forced to the edge of bankruptcy by fluctuating world prices.

CAP was a Franco-German insurance policy designed to keep small farmers in business and ensure the food supply. Its premise, like that of all insurance policies, was that the consumer would pay slightly over the odds in time of plenty for assurance of a continued supply at tolerable prices in times of need.

It has just not worked out that way. The overall complexion of agriculture within the European Union has changed dramatically: first with the accession of Britain - with big, mechanised farms resulting from primogeniture inheritance laws and enthusiasm for American methods - then with the arrival of the Mediterranean economies of Spain, Greece and Portugal. The medieval strip-farming Franco-German model is no longer the norm. At the same time the world market has changed, primarily through faster, more efficient means of transport.

The sed-aside policy is an ad hoc measure designed to make the old policy fit the current situation. To allow farmers to produce as much as they can either mean buying it all up at the guaranteed prices or abandoning the insurance policy completely.

Because of the continuing imbalance between the types of farming practised in various parts of the European Union, this would mean civil disobedience - if not outright civil war - in parts of France and Germany, a collapse of the internal market and a return to tariff controls for agricultural produce. Nor would efficient farmers benefit: producing more would only speed the price fall. Abandoning CAP without a new framework os not so much a panacea as a recipe for a return to rural poverty.

Nor is there any purpose in bleating the old illogical liberal line about Europe wasting land which could grow 30 million tonnes of food annually while half the world is starving.

We need to harden our hearts for a moment and look at the realities: which farmers are we going to designate as "charity growers" for the Third World, prepared to receive lower prices for their produce ? Or do we intendto compensate the farmers at normal European Union levels and then ship this food to Africa out of the goodness of our hearts, thereby creating a punitively expensive dependent economy in a region that needs nothing more urgently than lessons in self-sufficiency ?

This is not to say that CAP is not in dire need of radical reform. It is, rather, an admission that this column will not attempt to declare an immediate solution to a problem which has been the chief cause of wrangling between western European nations for nearly a quarter of a century. There are few solutions that are not glib or tailored to the advantages of one nation.

But that does not stop us doing something about sed-aside. The insanity of the present regulation is that grants are given only for land which is desinated as arable but deliberately not used as such. Let a farmer convert it to woodland, or meadows for wild flowers, and it automatically disappears from the subsidy sheets.

Yet Europe is drastically in need of reforestation, of land handed back to nature. Our affluent society is suffocating in cities. The ever-rising price of second homes for the only relatively rich is testimony to the value we place on our landscape. It is too often forgotten that the truly great original sin of capitalism was not what the industrial revolution did to our cities, but what the agricultural revolution did to our countryside. The enclosure movements killed off the concept of "commons".

Now that we have developed capitalism to the stage where most of us happily profit from it, it is time to do an audit of our countryside: to see how and where we may return to the common good land that is no longer needed on the production line.

Eventually a thoroughgoing reform of CAP must be married with plans for the preservation of our countryside. It must no longer be seen as a better deal for a farmer to sell off his or her land to a speculative builder willing to erect a few more "executive homes" on the edge of our ancient villages, rather than to let it return to communal use. And can we remember what commons are ? Not over-equipped playgrounds or tidy allotments, but free land available to be used as pasture or for pleasure as the local inhabitants wish.

Over the past few centuries we have subjugated, often brutally, our countryside to the needs of food production. Now that we have won that war, may we not enjoy the fruits of victory, be they only blackberries plucked from an overgrown hedgerow in the autumn ?