French Farmers’ Complicated Relationship With E.U. Subsidies
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — Europeans like their food, their farms and their countryside, which explains why the European Union’s 52-year-old Common Agricultural Policy gets high marks, even in a time of heightened euro-skepticism. And yet despite a 77 percent approval rating in a Eurobarometer poll conducted last December in all 28 member countries, the Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP, barely gets a mention in the current campaign to elect a new European Parliament. That’s even true in France, Europe’s top agricultural producer, which will remain the largest single beneficiary of the CAP (about 14 percent of the total) even after a new set of policy changes kicks in next year. So why are so many French farmers tempted to vote for the National Front, the far-right party that is campaigning to take France out of the European Union, dump its currency, the euro, and “renationalize” its farm aid? It’s a paradox that troubles Sébastien Windsor, president of the Chamber of Agriculture in Seine-Maritime, a department of Normandy and home to some 5,000 farmers who, on average, get an astonishing 80 percent of their revenue from Europe. This high level of aid has remained remarkably constant, even after successive changes to the CAP. In 2009, when world food prices were dropping, Mr. Windsor — who raises pigs and grows crops on a 500-acre farm — received direct CAP payments equal to four times his other income. According to Mr. Windsor (whose very English name can be traced to a great-grandfather, and distant relative of the British royal family, who made his way across the Channel), the farmers in his region aren’t unhappy with the help they get from the European Union. They’re unhappy with the rules and regulations that come with it. “We have the impression of a CAP whose objectives are unclear and little understood by farmers, which add up to a lot of little measures adopted to please this or that country and which lack an overall ambition for agriculture in Europe,” he said in an interview here. The latest changes add a “greening” component to the CAP, linking aid to measures taken to protect the environment. The problem is that the rules often fail to take into account local conditions, which can lead to a loss of productivity, Mr. Windsor said. Another problem, he said, is rules that put European farmers at a disadvantage in the global market. He cited a two-year-old regulation that requires farmers to give chickens more leg room. “The farmers had to get rid of their chicken coops, so they sold them to countries outside Europe, which are now exporting their cheaper eggs here,” he said. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot.” Over the years, European farmers have adjusted to changes that did away with the infamous “mountains of butter,” long an object of mockery, particularly in Britain, and eliminated customs tariffs that had penalized foreign imports. Even after the enlargement of the European Union into Eastern Europe in 2004, which added another four million farmers and 94 million acres, the CAP’s share of the union’s annual budget has kept dropping, from a high of 87 percent in 1970 to 43 percent in 2013. The latest changes will bring farm aid down further, by an additional 12 percent by 2020. France’s share is scheduled to decrease only 3 percent — yet one more victory for French farmers. And yet, oddly, they seem in no mood to celebrate the largess of the European Union. According to a recent poll by Terre-net Bva, 43 percent of French farmers favor moving farm aid back to the national level — in other words, an end to the CAP. Speaking to a group of farm representatives in Paris last week, Gilles Lebreton, a member of the National Front, mocked the “legend” that France has benefited from European farm aid. “We’ve been financing other countries that are now in competition with us,” he said. “It’s time to rethink the whole thing.” That’s a conclusion that Mr. Windsor doesn’t understand. “It’s not by breaking up Europe that we are going to solve our problems,” he said. |