Guessing game time. Which EU program is “The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism”? Need a hint? It “uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa.”
It is, of course, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and those indelicate remarks about this bureaucratic mire were made four years ago by Charles Crawford, the then British Ambassador in Poland, in an e-mail to the Foreign Office. The mail was leaked to the Sunday Times and its publication may have had something to do with the fact that Mr Crawford is now working in the private sector.
If you are not already in receipt of CAP largesse for that non-existent olive grove in Greece or those phantom sheep in Ireland and you’d like to see who is raking it in with both hands, farmsubsidy.org may make the remainder of the day more enjoyable. And if the local MEP promises to allocate even more CAP loot to your country cousins come June, you can now find out exactly how much they’re already getting. And congratulations to Nils Mulvad, Jack Thurston and Brigitte Alfter for making the EU more transparent with farmsubsidy.org.
(10 votes, average: 3.20 out of 5)
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My brother-in-law is a dairy farmer who works 6.5 days a week 51 weeks of the year and make barely enough to support himself and his mother. Farming is dying in Ireland even as it is. Where are we going to get fresh milk from when it dies - Africa? The economics of transporting 97% water thousands of miles simply don’t make sense. Food is a strategic resource for all kinds reasons - quality control, freshness, disease control, security of supply, management of the landscape/environment. EU CAP expenditure has been declining steadily in any case, and with it European agriculture. At some point, when it is gone, we will realise what we have lost.
Frank - don’t fear. We’ll not go without our milk. If your brother-in-law quits farming what will happen is that a neighbouring farmer will buy his land and put cows on it and produce possibly more milk from it than your brother-in-law was doing. It’s called consolidation and is a fact of life and has been going on for the past two hundred years or more.
CAP expenditure is actually going up each year and will continue to rise until 2013, although it will take a slightly smaller share of the overall EU budget, because the budget is growing somewhat faster.
Joe - that’s exactly what’s not happening. Older farmers are retiring and there is no one to take their place. Younger people do not want to work 12 hrs/day, 6/7 days a week, 51 weeks of the year for low pay. Those skills and the culture which goes with it, once lost, will be lost forever. The number of people involved in Irish agriculture has halved in the last 10 years and only 28% of farms are viable.
Frank, I appreciate your concern for the small farmer, but if they’re not getting a decent CAP handout can you tell me where all the money is going? After all, the CAP represents 46.7 percent of the EU’s budget, €49.8 billion in 2006 (up from €48.5 billion in 2005). Or are we looking at a scam even bigger than the infamous Oil-For-Food racket that filled the pockets of corrupt UN officials and the crooked European allies of Saddam?
The numbers you quote seem very large but are spread over a huge population and the total EU Budget in fact represents less than 1% of EU GDP.
In other words the Agriculture proportion of the total budget is large only because the EU does very little other than support agriculture. The structural, regional and cohesion funds are total insufficient to even come close to equalising development, income or wealth throughout the EU.
Its hardly surprising that the EU budget expands as the EU expands, but there is no expansion as a proportion of GDP, and the agricultural component has been declining a % of the total.
Eamonn,
You write: “… those indelicate remarks about this bureaucratic mire were made four years ago by Charles Crawford, the then British Ambassador in Poland, in an e-mail to the Foreign Office. The mail was leaked to the Sunday Times and its publication may have had something to do with the fact that Mr Crawford is now working in the private sector.”
As it happens, my departure from the FCO had nothing to do with that email business. You’ll just have to trust me on that one!
Good to see that some of the text of it is still being used - a vivid read.
Regards,
Charles
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