Western agricultural policies need intensive review

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: The conjunction of the debate in Britain over genetically modified food and the European Union's timid yet contentious revision of its agricultural policies demonstrates all too clearly the gulf between popular hopes and official attitudes.

Awareness of the links between the quality of food, the quality of the countryside and the quality of life grows apace. European opinion, it can be argued, is ready for a new start in agricultural policy which would bring a decisive shift toward more natural farming, yet institutional Europe moves slowly and capriciously.

This is a matter not only of food on your plate that will increase rather than decrease your life span, but also of the precious cultural freight represented by the European farming tradition, distorted as it may have become. Victor Hanson, the Californian classicist, himself a farmer, has written eloquently of that tradition as one anchoring our civilization in both a humility towards nature and a toughness in coping with it.

Yet, as he has written, both America and Europe are heading towards "an agrarian Armageddon". It is "the penultimate stage of the death of agrarianism, the idea that farmland of a roughly like size and nature should be worked by individual families".

Family farms in America have been disappearing at a rapid rate while, if the rate of loss is not as high in Europe, the marginalization of those that remain is equally serious. That is why thousands of farmers were out last week in Brussels before the razor-wire barricades outside European Commission buildings. Those demonstrating were not the big farmers or the agro- businesses, which will lose some subsidy under proposed changes, but the small farmers the Commission insists will continue to be helped to the full, albeit in different ways.

In spite of these assurances, small farmers sense they are on the way out. Authors of their own misfortunes, in that they have become grossly dependent on the cheques they get under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), their fears are nevertheless understandable. The CAP started with the interests of small farmers foremost. As the century ends, small farmers have become, if not its victims, then its insecure pensioners.

Meanwhile, large-scale agriculture has had 40 years of public aid with which to capitalize itself and to perfect the rural factories which Graham Harvey described in his book on the British countryside.

The engine of all this was the drive for productivity which the CAP intensified, and which led farmers to depend more and more on yield-increasing chemicals. As Harvey says, it is incredible that the ravaging of the countryside, the destruction of wildlife, the loss of diversity and the decline in food quality were all paid for with public money.

It is even more incredible when the work being done on the respective efficiency of industrial and more natural farming is consulted. If no final judgment is possible, at the least it has to be said that industrialized chemical agriculture has high hidden costs, while natural farming brings benefits for the whole society.

The social injury done by "advanced" agriculture has been great. One does not have to embrace Hanson's theory that without a class of genuine independent farmers democracy itself may be impossible. But European societies stand to lose a great deal at the point at which rural society becomes either a branch of industry or a branch of suburbia, a thought which ought to concern, but does not, a British government happily contemplating another surge of unnecessary "home" building in the countryside. It is not only that rural society is damaged, but that urban society is gravely diminished by the loss of the rural.

Europeans, as citizens, are converging on the idea that a quadruple reformation, or restoration, of farming, rural society, the food industry and health is desirable. As usual they are moving at different speeds: for instance, there has been no equivalent in other European countries to Britain's intense debate over genetically modified foods. Yet they are undoubtedly all going in the same direction. But what reform means to ordinary people and what it means in European politics are two different things.

In Brussels, reform comes down to a tortuous fiddling with categories and sub-categories. Under the provisions now being argued over, the direct support of production, which has done so much to devastate the European countryside, will be gradually reduced. Most of the money saved would go to the rest of the union budget. A little will dribble across to what is called rural development, including help for low chemical input and organic farming.

There is more green rhetoric about, particularly from the Germans, but the shift, while welcome, is, as David Baldock of the Institute for European Environmental Policy says, "very, very modest".

It does not help that the reform of agricultural policy as such is not the main objective. The work in Brussels is driven by the need to prevent East European farmers getting their hands on the aid which West European farmers received. That would greatly increase the budget a few years ahead and this prospect would sharply influence the struggle over national contributions.

It is useless to argue that the European Union needs as much or more money spent on rural restoration, at least for a while, as it now spends on production subsidies. It will not get it. The Brussels maneuvers also reflect the forward strategy of European agro-business, which thinks in terms of future global operations and exports, and knows that the subsidies regime has got to be amended because others, notably the Americans, will not wear it for much longer.

If the health of European agriculture is not the main consideration, still less is that of agriculture in the developing world. The likely changes will still keep out their exports while, if the amount of discount-priced grain sent out by Europe does diminish, countries that import it will have to pay more. For them, it will be a case of gaining nothing on the swings and still losing on the roundabouts.

While there are governments, like those of Denmark and Austria, which are pursuing better bio-technology policies, no member of the union comes out of this well. In a more sensible Europe, the necessity for a real reform of agriculture would take precedence over the untested claims of the bio-technology moguls and over the hope of triumphing over other countries in the budget struggle. In the 1910 election, socialists and radicals in Britain campaigned on the slogan "God Gave the Land for the People". It is a sentiment worth recalling today.

-- Guardian News Service